Seattle City Council repeals head tax amid pressure from big businesses

seattletimes.com

7 points·fluxic··3 comments

Whomever thought taxing employment was a good idea needs to check their logic.

If Seattle politicians wanted to fix homelessness they would loosen zoning regulations and pass measures to combat NIMBYism.

It's a much deeper error than Seattle's latest genius idea. Every income tax is doing the same thing. You don't avoid the effects by sucking it out of the employer instead of the worker; tax incidence doesn't work like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence

Tax bads, not goods (like mutually beneficial exchanges).

Eh, I'm not sure you're right. While I hate income tax more than most, I think there's a big difference between taxing employment and taxing income.

Personally, I think income tax is probably one of the least bad kinds of taxes. A couple of taxes worse than income tax, as an example:

- corporate tax (double taxing)

- sales tax (regressive)

Property tax is pretty close and maybe even better, as it isn't regressive and requires arguably less resources to track.

The least bad tax system would probably be a combination of pure income tax (mathematical progressive model with no deductions or exemptions, maybe with a negative income tax thrown in there) combined with property tax.

But yeah, if you tax income or property, you'll probably get less of it, but those quantities are probably less responsive to influence than others.

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