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Read it all the way to the end. Again, from the article: "Should the US system be even more progressive than it already is, bearing in mind the skewness of the

Read it all the way to the end. Again, from the article: "Should the US system be even more progressive than it already is, bearing in mind the skewness of the pre-tax distribution, especially at the very top? Maybe it should--but a steeper tax-band schedule is a dumb way to improve fairness and raise more revenue." A progressive tax system is progressive in effect, not just in form. The author is saying that people who focus on the tax rate bands are barking up the wrong tree, because the US system already looks like one of the most progressive, even though it may actually not be.

rayiner 8y ago
From your quote: "Should the US system be even more progressive than it already is..." The only way to read that is as acknowledging that the system already is progressive. Indeed, according to the title of the article, it is "unusually progressive." The part about tax-band schedules is not an assertion that the system is not progressive "in effect." (That theory cannot be reconciled with the data presented in the article, which looks at taxes paid, not tax bands.) Instead the author is saying that if we want to make the system "even more progressive than it already is"--which he does not concede we should, he leaves that as a "maybe"--then we should be looking deeper than tax bands. (And he points out that the possibility of loopholes and preferential treatment does not indicate that the U.S. system is not progressive, because other countries do that too.)