You’ll get no argument from me that payroll taxes (FICA) are regressive — they most certainly are. Particularly Social Security, which is capped at a certain amount per year per person.

But those are not the same thing as an income tax, which was the topic of discussion here. Income taxes, in and of themselves, are most certainly progressive, with (as you suggest) some flattening as you get to the extreme high-end of the spectrum. But you never any income tax bashers complaining about that end of the spectrum, do you? Typically, they argue that the wealthy, despite the advantages you mention, still pay too much.

I often hear numbers thrown around with things like the top 1% of taxpayers pay a third of all income taxes. But what you never hear is what their share of all the income is, which is needed to determine the value of the previous statistic.

I didn’t think so.

If you compare minimum-wage workers to middle-class AND LOOK ONLY AT INCOME TAX, it is progressive. However, social security takes a huge bite out of the paycheck of even the lowest-paid (the true bite is twice what is reported on your W2 as “FICA”), it is definitely regressive, and because the middle class lives longer, over a lifetime it works out on the average to an income transfer from the working poor to the middle class, as well as often being a transfer from young people who can barely feed their kids to oldsters with comfortable private pensions. Add social security tax to income tax, and it’s regressive.

I’ll have to dig it up, but a while back Kevin linked a study showing that Tennessee’s tax system was one of the most regressive (if not the most regressive) in the country!

You could make the argument that a sales tax isn’t regressive if you do thinks like exempting food, clothing and shelter (i.e., the necessities) from the tax. The other two states that I’ve lived in (which both also had state income taxes) at least exempted groceries from the sales tax.

I would actually prefer to have a state income tax (for deductibility reasons, fairness reasons, and a host of other reasons), but would not accept one in Tennessee without a guaranteed reduction in sales tax of at least 3.5 percent. Make our sales tax lower than Mississippi’s, and tell De Soto County to go f–k themselves.

Anyway, that single mom making $6 doesn’t pay any income tax. On the other hand, she pays a disproportional amount in sales tax, energy tax, inflation on basic needs (the hidden tax) and other costs shifted to her and the poor and the middle class and state and local governments by Bush’s tax cuts.