From: utzoo!decvax!cca!hplabs!hplabsb!soreff
Newsgroups: net.politics
Title: progressive tax
Article-I.D.: hplabsb.1174
Posted: Fri Dec  3 10:55:08 1982
Received: Sat Dec  4 11:46:54 1982

    From the tone of the last two articles on this subject, Bruce Parker's
and Rabbit!Morley's, it would seem to be time to start net.politics.flame.
Does this seem appropriate to other subscribers?
    Might it make sense to have explicit voting on how much redistribution
takes place via the tax system? If one had a parameterized tax law, with the
parameter(s) set by referendum, then one would have direct, popular control
of how progressive the tax law is. Certainly the functions in the tax law
would have to be reasonably simple for this to work.  Perhaps incremental
tax rate cold be a piecewise linear function of income with a flat
minimum and maximum and linear interpolation in between. Does anyone have
any comments on this?
    It seems to me that there are approximately three economic things that
are intrinsically political issues even in a perfectly tuned economy
without unemployment or inflation:
1) the amount of redistribution of income
2) the fraction of production going into public goods
3) the balance between long term and short term activities in the economy
   (admittedly this one is pretty hazy, but there must be some decent
   measure for the time frame of "the average economic decision")

Does this seem like a reasonable set of things to be handled politically?
Can anyone out there think of some mechanisms for getting public involvement
in setting these parameters?          -Jeffrey Soreff