How the income tax system has become markedly more regressive over the years.
I’m pretty sure that it has you know.
Time was when only the rich paid income tax. Then the middle….now people working part time on minimum wage.
For the personal allowance is only ever raised in line with retail inflation (and sometimes is not raised at all). While wages of course grow, over time, faster than retail inflation.
So, over the decades, the income tax system has been reaching further and further down the income scale. So we’ve been taxing poorer and poorer people as time goes on.
So, is there a paper out there which explores this?
7 responses so far ↓
1 MatGB // Mar 13, 2010 at 6:13 pm
100% certain that Tim Leunig wrote some very good stuff on this that was incorporated into the Lib Dem tax commission report.
Buggered if I can find it online though, and everyone I can ask is at conference. I’ve definitely read stuff on this.
2 john miller // Mar 13, 2010 at 8:08 pm
And, of course, the higher rate threshold and some of the other taxes – stamp duty, IHT. Not capital gains tax of course, what with so many MPs selling their second homes…
3 Kay Tie // Mar 13, 2010 at 9:42 pm
Who would fund such research in this era of policy based evidence?
4 Dennis the Peasant // Mar 13, 2010 at 10:09 pm
Ritchie?
5 diogenes_1960 // Mar 13, 2010 at 10:39 pm
wgce
6 Kay Tie // Mar 14, 2010 at 9:51 am
“Ritchie?”
Eh? He sucks hard at the tax-payer’s teat, not dispensing it.
7 Charlieman // Mar 14, 2010 at 8:23 pm
Tim, I presume that you are talking about pay roll tax and income tax, which are (you know better than me) 200 years old.
But taxing the poor — by confiscating agricultural products or imposing serfdom — is much older.
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