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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (92677)	10/31/2008 12:38:21 PM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541518

Where's the actual study? The only link from that page was to an unattributed spreadsheet (not something I download from an unknown source) on a remapped site so we can't see the original. I did have a look on the OECD site, always preferable when dealing with unattributed analysis. There's this, which might support the conclusion since the US (federally) has lower indirect taxes which tend to be the most regressive: oecd.org But presumably the document you refer to is this, which says the US is among the most inequal countries in the OECD, with only Turkey and Mexico worse, and it has grown more so recently (doesn't sound as though everyone's benefiting there, does it?): oecd.org OECD’s Growing Unequal? finds that the economic growth of recent decades has benefitted the rich more than the poor. In some countries, such as Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway and the United States, the gap also increased between the rich and the middle-class. Countries with a wide distribution of income tend to have more widespread income poverty. Also, social mobility is lower in countries with high inequality, such as Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, and higher in the Nordic countries where income is distributed more evenly. Detail at oecd.org Now interestingly the most recent tax abstract says this: Denmark had the highest tax-to-GDP ratio in 2007, at 48.9%, while Sweden came in second at 48.2%. In 2006, both countries had tax-to-GDP ratios of 49.1%. In 2005, Denmark had a tax-to-GDP ratio of 50.7%, against Sweden’s 49.5%. # At the other end of the scale, Turkey collected taxes equivalent to 23.7% of GDP in 2007, against 24.5% in 2006 and 24.3% in 2005, while Mexico’s tax-to-GDP ratio was estimated at 20.5%, against 20.6% in 2006 and 19.9% in 2005. oecd.org Lowest tax countries are the most inequal? May be coincidence. But it confirms that the ones to gain most from lower taxes are the rich, which ought not to be a surprise. Overall, though, I'd suggest there's one very simple reason for the rather counter-intuitive conclusion. The rich pay proportionately more of the taxes in the US because they're so very much richer than the median.