Progressive Tax

• Progressive taxes

• Iras Under Progressive Tax Regimes and Income Growth

This article investigates the choice between a traditional IRA and a Roth IRA in the presence of a progressive tax regime, income growth, and exogenous retirement income. These factors affect the tax rate that applies to deductible IRA contributions and taxable distributions and can therefore influence the optimal choice. Assuming constant income tax rates or exogenously determined tax rates for working years and retirement years, which has been popular in the literature, may lead to misleading conclusions. For aggressive savers enjoying high rates of return or high levels of other retirement income, the Roth IRA can be a better choice than a traditional IRA.

• Financial Services Review
• Vol. 18 Nbr. 3, October 2009

• Taxation, American style: the U.S. tax code is more progressive and European than you think.

AMERICANS OFTEN tout the contrast between the bloated, tax-funded welfare states of the Old World and our leaner, cheaper government. But the data rev...

• Reason
• Vol. 44 Nbr. 1, May 2012

• Truly Progressive Tax Is Way to Go?

THE so-called flat tax is all the rage among Republican presidential hopefuls. Herman Cain was the first. Now, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich have come up with their own proposals. The flat tax is a fraud. It raises taxes on the poor and lowers them on the rich. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that Cain's plan would lower the after-tax incomes of households with incomes below $30,000 by 16 percent to 20 percent. Meanwhile, 95 percent of households with more than $1 million of income would get an average tax cut of $487,300. And, capital gains would be tax-free.

• New Haven Register
• October 31, 2011

• Hynes Proposes Progressive Tax

CHICAGO - Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes formally announced his campaign for governor Wednesday by saying he would try to raise state income taxes on the wealthy as a way to address the state's budget crisis. The three-term Democratic comptroller described a new progressive tax - which taxes higher-income earners at higher rates - as the cornerstone of his plan to put the state's financial house in order. He said his plan would spare 97 percent of Illinois residents from paying more.

• Telegraph - Herald (Dubuque)
• September 03, 2009

• 'Progressive' Tax Isn't; Set Up a Wealth Tax?

A progressive consumptive tax, as described in Morton Kondracke's Forum column, is essentially a sales tax. It would hit the middle class much more than the wealthy, who are able to save much more. Thus, it is not a progressive tax, but regressive, just like Social Security taxes, property taxes and existing sales taxes. I suggest an alternative to it and to a value-added tax: a wealth tax. If you take all the various taxes we now pay -- income, payroll, property, sales, excise -- a struggling middle-class family can easily pay four times the taxes of a millionaire couple living off investments.

• New Haven Register
• April 20, 2010

• Tax Inequity ; Counterproductive System Punishes Success but Claims to Be Progressive

So you have just finished preparing your income taxes, but did you understand the tax code? If you said yes, you do not know what you do not know. The U.S. tax code has become so long, complex, contradictory and devoid of common sense that no one can fully understand it - and this includes tax professionals and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) personnel. Can honorable persons of good conscience harass, fine and even imprison their fellow citizens for an alleged violation of laws and regulations they themselves do not completely know? But that is a topic for another column. Tax economists have long argued that the U.S. income tax causes an enormous - and largely unnecessary - dead-weight loss to the economic system. The sheer cost and time burden of businesses and individuals trying to com...

• The Washington Times
• April 12, 2011

• The USA Tax: A Progressive Consumption Tax.

Review by Lawrence S. Seidman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Pp. 176. $20.000. 1. Introduction Lawrence S. Seidman is an advocate of consumption...

• Southern Economic Journal
• Vol. 65 Nbr. 2, October 1998

• A Progressive Amt Fix Without Higher Tax Rates

Suggestions for Revenue-Neutral AMT Relief include: 1. raising the AMT exemptions to $300,000 for singles and $450,000 for couples and index them for inflation, 2. dropping the 10 percent rate to 8.5 percent, 3. dropping the 15 percent rate to 13.5 percent and dropping the 25 percent rate to 24 percent, 4. repealing the deduction for state and local income taxes, 5. repeal the deduction for state and local sales taxes, 6. repealing the deduction for real estate taxes, and 7. repeal the exemption for municipal bond interest. Instead of raising rates on income that were already taxing, we should start taxing income that is currently tax-free. With this approach, we can spare the middle class the burden of the AMT and at the same time lower their other tax rates, all the while collecting t...

• Special Report - Tax Foundation
• August 19, 2009

• Tax System Stands As a Tough Repair -- Progressive? Flat? Debate Underscores Difficulty of Reform

WASHINGTON - Of the roughly 2 million Tennesseans with adjusted gross incomes under $50,000 who filed tax returns for 2008, only 195,076 owed Uncle Sam anything on April 15 last year, and more than 1.7 million got refunds. In Mississippi, 805,713 in the same income bracket, and 743,005 in Arkansas, had overpaid and got refunds.

• The Commercial Appeal (2007-Current)
• December 20, 2010

• This Year, Hoping for Honest Budget Talk: ; Politicians Don't Talk Straight About Americans' Money

HAPPY Fiscal New Year, Americans. In 2012, your pay stub will feature an increasingly progressive income-tax structure and a temporary two-month partial payroll-tax holiday. If there is no pay stub in your mailbox, you may enjoy an (also temporary) extension of unemployment insurance and perhaps an earned- income tax credit, if your spouse works.

• Charleston Daily Mail
• January 04, 2012