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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JBTFD who wrote (33917)	11/9/2012 11:48:41 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 85487

The zero sum gain is in the dividing the pie into quintiles. That much is true. You will always have a top x% including the top 20%/top quintile, and the same goes for the bottom. Focusing over much on distribution is focusing on a zero sum game. I care about the welfare of the poor, but not so much about their relative wealth. 100% of the tax paid will have had to have been paid What gets paid isn't an invariable amount. It can, and has, and will continue to go up and down (more up then down most of the time, but it could reasonably go down over time as a portion of the economy, and as a portion of the incomes of those paying the tax, if not so much in nominal or even real dollars). Since the lowest quintile has been disenfranchised to the point of being below taxable income I don't think your using the word disenfranchised correctly. In any case its not that they have dropped below some taxable amount. Their income over the long run has gone up (to the extent they are even a "they", really its different people over time). They don't pay income taxes, partially because of tax rate cuts, and even more because of an increase in refundable credits.