Talk:Progressive tax

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 19 January 2021 and 7 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Ddougl11.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 07:16, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

History

Copied from WP:RDH#History of progressive income tax EllenCT (talk) 01:40, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Recently Progressive tax was edited in a way that I find difficult to integrate because I lack access to dusty historical stuff that if someone has summarized online already, I apparently lack the time to find. Can anyone verify, "The first peace time graduated income tax was actually in Prussia in 1891."? EllenCT (talk) 16:22, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

According to this source, on page 108, Prussia introduced its first graduated income tax in 1851, not 1891. Marco polo (talk) 17:57, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

I have found online an article titled The Prussian Income Tax from an 1892 issue of The Quarterly Journal of Economics. I am no expert on the history of taxation so there is a lot there that goes over my head. However, it does seem to provide a detailed examination of the evolution of income tax in Prussia to the 1891 tax - see page 223. This states that the 1851 income tax was not progressive, an 1873 reform brought in something "practically" (but not exactly) a progressive income tax, and finally in 1891 a progressive income tax. Whether it was the first ever, anywhere, may be harder to prove. But the reference should at least be helpful in updating the article to include Prussia. - Eron^Talk 18:34, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

"A Big Safety Net and Strong Job Market Can Coexist"

"Some of the highest employment rates in the advanced world are in places with the highest taxes and most generous welfare systems, namely Scandinavian countries. The United States and many other nations with relatively low taxes and a smaller social safety net actually have substantially lower rates of employment."

-- Irwin, Neil (December 17, 2014). "A Big Safety Net and Strong Job Market Can Coexist. Just Ask Scandinavia". New York Times. Retrieved 26 December 2014.

Please see the correlograms in that article, showing employment rate against effective tax rate and child care subsidies. While it doesn't discuss progressivity directly, it does focus on Scandinavia, which has the most progressive taxes in the world, and discusses transfer payments to the poor, which, depending on their magnitude, are mathematically equivalent to progressive tax under nominally regressive taxes. EllenCT (talk) 23:41, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Bottom US tax bracket

@Lawrencekhoo: regarding , would it be more accurate for an international encyclopedia to characterize the personal exemption as the bottom bracket? Would something like "seven brackets above an untaxed level formed by personal and usually additional exemptions" work better? EllenCT (talk) 21:44, 1 January 2015 (UTC)

Your suggestion sounds fine to me. Morphh ^(talk) 15:07, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Done, with a little more detail. EllenCT (talk) 02:10, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Progressive tax dispute

The Wikipedia:WikiProject Economics states that there is some dispute concerning whether more progressive tax require less total tax, all else being equal.

I'd like to solve that dispute, but the wording of such dispute is confusing. Can someone explain what the dispute is about?

Dryfee (talk) 16:23, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Total taxation revenue to be repayment in full plus inflation

I would like to see the total tax revenue during one year to be the full repayment to governments of what was actually paid by the governments during the previous year, plus an amount to cover the estimated inflation during the current year. How that total taxation, plus any borrowing, is to be collected should be entirely a political matter. 70.27.152.243 (talk) 17:48, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

(tax paid ÷ personal income)

I removed this from the lead as it as I thought it unnecessary and inaccurate as part of the base definition. I'd be ok restoring it if it included "e.g." to indicate it as an example, but a more accurate formula would be (tax paid ÷ tax base), but that's already somewhat clear from the definition. So it's all sort of redundant. Morphh ^(talk) 21:43, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

'Early examples' Section—Source for Dahsala System and Grammar Rework?

The 'Early examples' section describes the Indian Dahsala taxation system but provides no references or cross links. The description of how the system works is also not well related to the article topic, and the last sentence seems to be examples of the different land fertility classes but is clearly poorly formed and ought to be incorporated into the previous sentence (if it remains). Early examples of non-Western taxation systems are particularly of interest since there is relatively less information on them! 130.102.10.114 (talk) 23:57, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

"Tax the rich" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Tax the rich and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 March 6#Tax the rich until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Happy Editing--IAmChaos 04:30, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

Proposed addition: Continuous-rate alternatives subsection

COI: I wrote the SSRN Working Paper and am not willing to try to add this myself here. Would someone please review and add it?

Proposing addition of sourced subsection citing Saez (2010) AEJ:EP and Briskin (2013) Journal of Income Distribution. Full markup below.

==== Continuous-rate alternatives ====

A structural criticism of stepped bracket systems is that discrete marginal rate increases at legislatively defined income thresholds create rational behavioral incentives for taxpayers to manage reported income to remain below bracket boundaries — a phenomenon documented as income "bunching" at kink points. Because the marginal rate facing a taxpayer is discontinuous at each bracket boundary, taxpayers — particularly self-employed filers with flexibility to time income — have an incentive to defer income, accelerate deductions, or restructure compensation to avoid threshold crossings.

A proposed structural alternative is logarithmic tax scaling, in which the marginal rate rises continuously as a function of the natural logarithm of taxable income, eliminating bracket discontinuities by design. The proposed formula takes the form T = k × ti × ln(1 + ti/c), where ti is taxable income above a household floor, and k and c are parameters controlling the overall revenue level and the steepness of progression respectively. The mathematical properties of logarithmic tax schedules, including their constant elasticity of progression, were formalized by Briskin (2013). Under a continuous-rate schedule, every dollar of income above the floor is taxed at a marginally higher rate than the preceding dollar, removing the rational incentive for threshold management that characterizes stepped systems. TheProponent (talk) 19:00, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

 Not done. Ditto the other request, but after actually looking at this, all I see is a site that will host anything from anyone, making this not a reliable source. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 20:55, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

References