There are serious and intellectually honest disagreements about how to actually measure wealth and taxation. And I don't want to accuse the author of outright b

There are serious and intellectually honest disagreements about how to actually measure wealth and taxation. And I don't want to accuse the author of outright bad faith. But in my view this segment - the core of the argument - plays fast-and-loose with the facts in a way that is reckless at best: "According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the lowest-income 20% of households have an average federal tax rate of about 2%. Those in the middle 20% pay 14% of their income in federal taxes. Higher-income households face higher rates. The top 20% pay a 27% federal rate. And the federal tax rate for the top 1% is 33%. These data are for 2016, the most recent year available. This is half of the story. When assessing the progressivity of the U.S. federal system, it makes sense to look at both taxes and the means-tested transfer payments — Medicaid, food stamps and Supplemental Security Income — that those taxes fund." It is in fact one third of the story. It appears the author is conflating federal income taxes with overall federal taxes - specifically, the truly regressive payroll tax is ignored, yet the payments from this tax are counted in the opposite direction. This is just plain bad accounting, and a common enough bit of misunderstanding that Strain should have directly addressed it. Partisan anti-tax activists don't mention the payroll tax, but for the very wealthy it is a pittance, versus a serious burden for the working poor. I think the income cap for payroll taxes is something like $150k: all income beyond that is completely untaxed. For people with 7-figure incomes, it is downright regressive. As someone trying to present a more intellectually serious case than Grover Norquist, Strain should do better, and not let readers like myself wonder if he's lying to them. And I thought this "question" deserved a lot more than one line, considering the issue of untaxed capital gains is the primary reason why left-liberals (correctly) assert the US has a regressive tax system: "How to account for unrealized capital gains when determining income?" In fact, phrasing this as a "gee whiz, what a difficult but ultimately technical question" makes me wonder about the author's intentions. This is the same author who, in 2008 while doing research for the Fed, wrote a shameless and factually ungrounded article supporting the payday loan industry: https://www.responsiblelending.org/sites/default/files/nodes/files/research-publication/crl-morgan-critique-12-10.pdf https://www.responsiblelending.org/sites/default/files/nodes... It is worth noting that this is not a "he got the facts wrong" problem so much as "there is no excuse for getting these facts wrong." He has been a New Right Intellectual for quite some time and I am not very impressed. I am guessing there is a lot of motivated reasoning in here versus outright dishonesty. But either way this Bloomberg article is bad, insulting to the reader, and the ways that they are bad are easily predictable from this author's career.