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Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

This article fails to account for exemptions and deductions. This post[1] by the Tax Foundation explains it:

> However, despite these high marginal rates, the top 1 percent of taxpayers in the 1950s only paid about 42 percent of their income in taxes.

Today the 1% pay a little over 36% of their income to taxes.

1. https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/

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This article is looking at even smaller/higher percentiles than the article that you're referencing. I believe this explains the difference.

Yes, there is no explanation of exactly how that number (400) was chosen.

Given that the US is widely acknowledged to be one of the most progressive tax systems in the world, the burden of proof required here is far higher than the article attempts.

Widely known by whom? I'm not sure how that could be true even in theory; there is no universally agreed on definition of "progressive".

> there is no universally agreed on definition of "progressive"

"Progressive" is being used here as a technical term with a specific, greed-upon definition[1], not as a description for the leftist political movement that shares the term.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax

Yes, there is. If you are suggesting that literally no-one has ever thought: I will compare tax systems between countries...then yes...they have done that.

And yes there are lots of objective measures of progressivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax#Measuring_prog...

A good, brief, summary is - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/05/ameri... - and there is also this in the Economist which explains the issues around spending in more detail - https://www.economist.com/united-states/2017/11/23/american-...

> And yes there are lots of objective measures of progressivity

Exactly. The US can certainly be considered particularly progressive on some measures, but not all of them. For example, see the linked article.

Probably comes from the Forbes 400 list, which has been published since 1982. Currently you need ~$2 billion in wealth to make that list.

https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/#123491f27e2f

I am not sure about that. Also, the Forbes list is mostly fictional. There are people who are worth vastly more than $2bn who are not on the list. There are people who probably don't have a positive net worth who are on the list.

Yes, it still sounds arbitrary and suspicious. Whiff of p-hackery.

Annoyingly there is no source for the data in the article because the book that it is advertising doesn’t come out until next week. My guess is that the wealthiest 400 households don’t have much income to tax. Most of their wealth would be in investments, which if they hold on to long enough become taxed as long term capital gains (20% for the rich).

Do you think the wealthiest 400 households have had a significant change in wealth/income makeup in the last 70 years? The article is highlighting that something has changed, and they are suggesting its tax policy not investment decisions.

The difference is still substantial, it's a 13% drop in the effective rate. This is compounded because the top 1% have doubled their share of income since the 50s [1].

1. http://cepr.net/publications/graphic-economics/income-share-...

Both the OP's article and yours have Zucman and Saez as a primary source for the data, so I doubt they'd contradict each other. It's 2 different arguments, one about the legal tax rate and one about the effective tax rate. In both cases the 50s were higher.

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