
Opinion – The Economics of Soaking the Rich - colinprince
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/opinion/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-tax-policy-dance.html
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nabla9
Recall the difference between marginal tax rate and tax rate. 90% marginal
income tax rate is not the same as 90% income tax rate.

It seems that the failure to recognize the difference creates lots of
unnecessary confusion in the social media comments. Especially among the first
comments.

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sharemywin
Sorry, I couldn't help my self.

Technically around $2B the difference between a tax rate of 90% and a marginal
tax rate of 90% becomes a rounding error. Assuming the last tier is $10M.

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nabla9
Good data point. Although there are no individuals with $2B yearly income, It
would be good idea to put same the upper limit for the __effective__ marginal
tax rate in every income bracket.

Poor people can have very high effective marginal tax rates.

> To put it another way, the effective marginal tax rate when a person moves
> from the bottom to the middle quintile is 1 - (15.4-12.9)/(12.6-2.2), or 76
> percent.

[http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2018/06/an-effective-
marginal...](http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2018/06/an-effective-marginal-tax-
rate.html)

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cascom
Paul Krugman is just so tiresome - he’s as partisan an ideologue as they come
planting a patent falsehood every third sentence

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nabla9
Reflexive ad hominem-arguments (lies actually) against Krugman from people who
don't read his articles.

He is partisan, but his economic arguments are good.

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cascom
His economic arguments are only good to the extent that you agree with the
economic goals which any economic policy is trying to achieve. For example the
Diamond Saez paper he references is optimizing for "Social Welfare" which is
in turn defined as more equal distribution of resources. So yes if your goal
is redistribution of wealth perhaps the 73% number is the right number. What
that does not mean is that 73% marginal tax rate is the objectively optimal
tax rate under all scenarios or policy objectives!

Not sure how you arrive at reflexive or lies

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nabla9
You should have started with that argument. Instead you started with single
sentence ad-hominenm.

