Abstract
A recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece alleged that the Congressional Budget Office had demonstrated that the most affluent Americans "pay too much" in federal taxes. This short paper uses that opinion piece as a foil to explain some of the concepts behind Congressional Budget Office analyses, to review the contributions of different fiscal developments to the shift in relative tax burdens from 2007 to 2009, and to argue that the "progressivity" of a tax system is fundamentally an inquiry into relative rather than absolute norms.
Disciplines
Banking and Finance | Law | Law and Economics | Politics | Taxation-Federal Income | Tax Law
Date of this Version
8-8-2012
Recommended Citation
Edward D. Kleinbard, "Tax Fairness and Fairness in Tax Data Reporting" (August 2012). University of Southern California Law and Economics Working Paper Series. Working Paper 152.
http://law.bepress.com/usclwps-lewps/152
Included in
Banking and Finance Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Politics Commons, Taxation-Federal Income Commons, Tax Law Commons