Shame on Whom?

I had hoped to enter the fray on a more positive note . . . but Armen's post on stats from the right finally caught me.

I don't believe the comparison in question, "Top 1% of tax earners pay 33% of aggregate revenue to IRS," is bad statistics. Reasonable people may disagree about the normative assumptions underlying the claim that the top percentile of tax earners paying 1/3 of income tax revenue is unfair. But the interpretative statistics are not necessarily wrong.

One comparison relevant to income taxation fairness is the one Armen described -- a comparison between income earned (as a percentage of national income) and taxes paid (as a percentage of aggregate revenues). And this comparison is made by folks all across the spectrum.

Another comparison might look at the share of taxes paid per person. For example, in a country with 100 people, it might be relevant to fairness to consider whether one person (perhaps the top earner) pays for 1/3 of the country's services. This is the comparison the conservatives were interested in. They drew attention to the top 1% only as a means to identify a group that pays more than its 1/N share of taxes (N is the size of the subgroup).

It is not surprising that some conservatives might have a different normative approach to taxation. And it is worth noting that looking at taxes paid per person is a veiled reference to a poll tax -- a pure poll tax on the whole population would create an equal tax burden of 1/n for every member of the population (where n is the whole population) -- the most conservative approach to taxation.