Two moderate earners can pay more tax than one high earner
Evidence
After law school, I spent a couple of years working on Wall Street as an investment banker. My income was around $75,000âroughly equivalent to my parentsâ combined incomesâbut when I compared our tax payments, I always came away thinking they were paying too much. It didnât make sense; what I had been taught about our progressive tax rate system was that the more money you make, the higher the tax rate that applies to your income. It is based on a concept called âability to payâ: If you have more, you should pay more. Each of my parents made half of what I did, so I should be paying much higher taxes than my parents. The numbers did not add up, and in my mind numbers never lied. â Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 21
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- DEFINE: Explains the âability to payâ principle underpinning progressive taxation â a definitional anchor for the readerâs argument.
Related
- Equal total income across a household produces unequal tax burdens (similarity 0.87)
- Single-earner white families get lower taxes than equal-earning black families under progressive rates (similarity 0.80)
- The 1913 progressive income tax replaced regressive tariffs that burdened the poor most (similarity 0.80)