Progressive taxation as price discimination

That’s a request from the comments, sometimes the customer is king after all.

The point of price discrimination is to sell more goods and services while taking in more profit; the low demanders can pay a lower price, yet the company still sells for a higher price to the high demanders.  If output goes up, social welfare usually does too. 

So ideally we might levy higher taxes on those people who especially enjoy working, or people who especially enjoy living in the country.  Current tax rates are conditioned mostly on income plus a blizzard of confusing factors listed in the tax code, such as depreciation allowances and legislated tax breaks.  Why not — either directly or indirectly — condition tax payments on proxies for enjoying one’s job and country?  After all, those are the people least likely to leave or least likely to stop working.

Tax flags, guns, churches, and other correlates with patriotism.

Tax fun jobs.  Like being a professor.

Next idea?

More generally, I’m not always keen on taxing inelastic factors, if only because it leads to excess revenue collection, a’la Brennan and Buchanan.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed