The Other Taxes: Who Pays Them? | Hacker News Reader

The Other Taxes: Who Pays Them?

economix.blogs.nytimes.com

5 pointsfun2have3 comments

Other factors have to be considered as well. The wealthy or super-wealthy (individuals or companies) are usually more mobile. A middle-class, working individual, with a mortgage, is pinned down to a greater degree. It also depends on the mobility of capital goods. If you have big, hard-to-move infrastructure, you are pinned down. "Patriotic" millionaires notwithstanding, turning the screw on the rich and mobile may just mean more capital flight. Screwing the heavy industries would just discourage investment in that sector (i.e. Detroit).

Oh. I thought this article was going to be about the price of food, transportation, and many goods industries are driven up because of regulation. EX, why shipping by train is so disastrously expensive that it cancels out the efficiencies, due to regulation. Or why you can't get a decent meal for less than $5, where natural equilibrium prices should settle in at $1, and how this really hurts the poor.

Instead, it's just about how taxes aren't progressive enough to suit this guy. What a shame.

Right. He's basically complaining that certain individual taxes (like sales tax) serve to mitigate the progressive nature of income tax, making the net result still progressive but not as steep as he wants. That is a fair position to argue, but not really a new contribution to the discussion (this makes it off-topic for HN.)

An analysis of corporate taxes and regulations, and how they are passed on to consumers, would be a genuinely new contribution. This would be especially interesting if feedback effects were included -- paying sales tax on something with an inflated price due to other taxes, for example. We have a government that specializes in taxes (and fees and regulatory costs) that are hidden from the consumer; it would be a great contribution to show which subset of consumers actually ends up paying those.

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