5 ms·

Who cares if a tax is progressive? There's no reason to care if a tax is progressive. The thing to care about is whether the government is redistributing weal

Who cares if a tax is progressive? There's no reason to care if a tax is progressive. The thing to care about is whether the government is redistributing wealth in a desired way. Progressive taxes are one way to redistribute wealth to the less wealthy. Payments are another. If you want a more progressive system in a LVT world, double the tax rate and then send people checks.

marcosdumay 5y ago
Regressive taxes coupled with payments are a very powerful way to squeeze the lower ranks of the middle class, while preserving the rich and the higher middle class.
- caturopath 5y ago
  You can just structure the payments however you like to prevent that.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    You can structure the rates however you like to place the squeeze at any place you want. If you structure it to completely get rid of the squeeze point you have just created a proportional or progressive tax.
    - caturopath 5y ago
      You've created a progressive transfer system. Whether those transfer payments are via taxes, payments, or services is not essential for the goal. If you encode it in tax rates, you are subsidizing behavior that you are trying to deincentivize via taxes, which is unfortunate. The idea of LVT or other taxes on externalities is to tax behavior you want to prevent. That's why we should tax the capture of land, the pollution of the environment, adding traffic to a transportation system, etc. That's why it's unfortunate to tax things like "making your house nicer" or "converting a parking lot to a veterinarian office" or "hiring another employee". You wouldn't sent checks to someone because they let their house decay or they fired someone, so why would you give them a tax break? The point of the transfer system is to help people who need help, right? Not to discourage things we want to happen.
dan-robertson 5y ago
Whether a tax is progressive or regressive tends to be quite a fundamental question economists ask. Lots of proponents of a land value tax claim the tax is progressive. So either they think that is a good argument in favour of it (in which case shouldn’t their argument be weakened if the tax is not progressive? Surely one should care about that?) or they think it is immaterial, but then why mention it at all?

marcosdumay 5y ago

Regressive taxes coupled with payments are a very powerful way to squeeze the lower ranks of the middle class, while preserving the rich and the higher middle class.

caturopath 5y ago
You can just structure the payments however you like to prevent that.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  You can structure the rates however you like to place the squeeze at any place you want. If you structure it to completely get rid of the squeeze point you have just created a proportional or progressive tax.
  - caturopath 5y ago
    You've created a progressive transfer system. Whether those transfer payments are via taxes, payments, or services is not essential for the goal. If you encode it in tax rates, you are subsidizing behavior that you are trying to deincentivize via taxes, which is unfortunate. The idea of LVT or other taxes on externalities is to tax behavior you want to prevent. That's why we should tax the capture of land, the pollution of the environment, adding traffic to a transportation system, etc. That's why it's unfortunate to tax things like "making your house nicer" or "converting a parking lot to a veterinarian office" or "hiring another employee". You wouldn't sent checks to someone because they let their house decay or they fired someone, so why would you give them a tax break? The point of the transfer system is to help people who need help, right? Not to discourage things we want to happen.

dan-robertson 5y ago

Whether a tax is progressive or regressive tends to be quite a fundamental question economists ask. Lots of proponents of a land value tax claim the tax is progressive. So either they think that is a good argument in favour of it (in which case shouldn’t their argument be weakened if the tax is not progressive? Surely one should care about that?) or they think it is immaterial, but then why mention it at all?