[teal]

Cute story, but I don't even know where to begin pointing out inacuracies in the analogy.

First off, the story only deals with a progressive income tax. Sales tax, excise taxes (e.g. gasoline taxes), property taxes, payroll taxes, etc. are all completely ignored and yet extremely important to the tax system. Telling only part of the story is not a good way to understand the tax system.

So I feel that when discussing taxes we should discuss the total effect of all taxes on an indivual. Presumably Narrew disagrees, discussing as he does only the progressive income tax in his story. I see no reason why one should not include the effect of these other taxes, considering that they are just as much a part of the tax system as the income taxes. Please Narrew, make a case for why we should only be focusing on income tax here.

Another important question is how should we measure a fair amount of taxes to be paid (putting aside the important question of how much taxes should be paid to a later date, only anarchists believe that NO taxes whatsoever should be paid to the state). There are two basic approaches here, an absolute measure, promoted by Rush Limbaugh and others, which decides to measure the absolute amount of dollars that someone gives to the tax system and a relative measure which measures the percentage of a persons income which they pay in taxes.

Say we have two people, one who makes $200 a year and one who makes $20,000 a year. Now the $200 a year person pays $20 in taxes while the $20,000 a year person pays $2,000 a year in taxes. Now Rush Limbaugh comes along and screams, "holy cow, this is totally unfair, let me show you a graph, the richest person is paying 90.9% of the total taxes!!!! My god that is so wrong, rich people are over taxed and should definately be paying less in taxes." This is very very wrong analysis. Both person A and person B were paying 10% of their income in taxes, which is a perfectly reasonable starting point and quite fair. But if you listened to Rush you would never hear about this. That is why whenever you hear someone talking about abo****e tax numbers in terms of whoever pays absolute amounts (like Rush's little pie graph earlier) little bells should be going off in your head saying, "distortion alert, distortion alert, someone is probably trying to trick me, I should be extra careful here." Talking about absolute numbers in tax terms is almost never a fair thing to do and anyone who willfully does it after being shown quite clearly that this is a bad thing to do is either an ignoramus and very bad at math, or else deliberately deceptive. In Rush's case I know where I am putting my money, but you can decide for yourself.