Two Deceptive Arguments (revised)

I've been hearing the following two conservative arguments quite a bit recently. I’d like to show that, while the factual assertions involved are true, they simply do not support the proposition they purport to.

Argument 1: The Rich Already Pay More Than Their Fair Share in Taxes (here and here)

Both articles purport to establish that our country's tax burden is already distributed progressively enough – indeed, perhaps excessively so. Both use an argument that goes something like:

“The top X% of income earners are responsible for over Y% of total Federal income tax receipts, while the bottom Z% are responsible for only 0.0003% (or some such low number).”

These facts, by themselves, do not say anything meaningful about the progressivity of the U.S. tax system. They do not reflect the distribution of any of the other taxes Americans pay, many of which are highly to moderately regressive (e.g., payroll taxes, sales taxes, gasoline taxes, tolls, property taxes, utilities taxes, vice taxes, service fees, etc.). Federal income tax receipts constitute only 45% of Federal revenues, while Federal taxes historically constitute about 2/3 (roughly 18% out of roughly 27%) of tax revenues collected at all levels of American government. That means that Federal income tax revenues constitute only about 30% of the country's total tax revenues, and the Federal income tax is one of the very few major progressive tax regimes (the Federal corporate tax, estate and gift tax, and state income taxes being the others).

In fact, 2/3 of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income tax. Social security taxes are assessed only on labor income and constitute a flat 6.2% on all income up to $102,000 (in 2008), while all capital income and wage income beyond that threshold amount are not subject to the tax. The Medicare tax is imposed on 1.45% of the full amount of a taxpayer's wage income. Once all taxes are properly included into the analysis and tax burden is represented in terms of a percentage of income instead of total dollar amount, this is what the U.S. tax distribution looks like.

This should be sufficient to establish that these numbers do not demonstrate anything meaningful about the U.S. tax system. But let’s go one step further, because there is another important flaw in this analysis. Even if we were to ignore all other taxes besides the Federal income tax, the figures would still prove nothing. Here’s why. Consider a "fictitious" society called the Reagan Republic comprised of A, B, C, D, and E. This society is characterized by enormous concentration of wealth and an explicitly regressive tax burden:

A makes $2 million a year and is taxed at 15%; A will pay $300,000
B makes $200,000 a year and is taxed at 20%; B will pay $40,000
C makes $75,000 a year and is taxed at 25%; C will pay $18,750
D makes $45,000 a year and is taxed at 30%; D will pay $13,500
E makes $20,000 a year and is taxed at 35%; E will pay $7,000

This society will pay a total of $379,250 in taxes. Despite the fact that the tax code is explicitly regressive, the following statements are true:

The top 20% provide 79.1% of government revenues
The top 40% provide 89.7% of government revenues
The bottom 60% provide 10.3% of government revenues
The bottom 40% provide 5.4% of government revenues
The bottom 20% provide 1.8% of government revenues

So even under a regressive tax code, the well-off can pay the vast majority of tax revenues. But as you can see, this is not because the rich bear a higher proportionate burden, but simply because their incomes are so much higher. So this argument essentially allows conservatives to leverage a major failure of the economic policies they support – the extreme economic inequality they have helped create (see Figures 1-8D)
– to support the proposition that the U.S. tax system is already progressive enough. This is ironic to say the least.

And while the numbers in my example were cherry-picked to prove my point, perhaps my assumed numbers are not so far off (see this and this and this and this).

Argument 2: The U.S. Economy Displays an Amount of Social Mobility Consistent with the Idea That It Is A “Meritocracy” (also see this)

The WSJ editorial relies on the findings of a Treasury Department study to try to show that “social mobility is alive and well” in the United States. The study used the following method:

“[It] examined a huge sample of 96,700 income tax returns from 1996 and 2005 for Americans over the age of 25. The study tracks what happened to these tax filers over this 10-year period. One of the notable, and reassuring, findings is that nearly 58% of filers who were in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into a higher income category by 2005. Nearly 25% jumped into the middle or upper-middle income groups, and 5.3% made it all the way to the highest quintile.”

These findings are not particularly robust to begin with. But they're even less useful than they appear.

First, look at the way the study was conducted. Consider a college educated business major still making $28,000 at 26 at a company in Champaign IL, but who later gets an MBA and makes $200,000 at 45 as a VP of Marketing in Chicago. Or a 28 year old who works at Starbucks before figuring out that what they want to do is to get a masters in education and teach in a North Jersey school district (where they may start at >$50,000, and can go up to as high as $100,000). Or a son of privilege who does not work between 25 and 35, but rather lives off of the support of his parents or a trust (both of which would be counted as gifts and therefore not included in income) but later gets a gig as a token board of directors member on his father’s company’s board and earns dividends and capital gains off of inherited financial assets. Or a law student who has an adjusted gross income of $14,000 at the age of 27 but whose income will increase substantially once he starts working next fall (i.e., me). All of these people could very plausibly be counted in the lowest quintile during their low income years, and in the highest quintile during their later higher income years. But this isn’t “social mobility” at all. It merely reflects individuals' earnings life-cycles. All of the hypothetical people given above may be, and most likely are, the children of middle class (or higher) families.

Consequently, it is more appropriate to gauge the level of social mobility by comparing a group of people’s socio-economic status to that of their parents. Studies (1, 2, 3) that use this method consistently show that the United States exhibits a low level of social mobility relative to its first-world peers, countries which invariably have stronger welfare states and more "socialist" policies. Thus, conservative “meritocrats” must somehow account for the strong empirical implication that social democracy is more conducive to social mobility than free market capitalism.

A few more points should be made. The study only counted tax filers. Many very low income people (including the domestic chronically poor and immigrant laborers) do not file income tax returns (Table 3). These people are not counted at all, so the study totally ignores some people at the very bottom – people for whom we know the prospect of social mobility is the most far-fetched (p. 27). This feature will also bump down people whose income may not seem extremely low (like the hypothetical people I mention above) into the “lowest quintile” group, the group whose subsequent earnings form the crux of the study’s supposed implications. Furthermore, the statement that “the after-inflation median income of all tax filers increased by an impressive 24% over the same period,” paints a very misleading picture of reality. Overall median income growth has stagnated over the last 40 years (an average annual growth rate of about 0.54% from 1967-2008) despite significant increases in total family hours worked (an average annual growth rate of a little less than 0.75% from 1979-2002). Moreover, mobility may not necessarily represent the workings of a meritocracy. Indeed, some annual earnings variation may in fact reflect an undesirable degree of volatility in people’s incomes that it is attributable not to meritorious behavior (or the lack thereof), but instead to unforeseen financial disruptions. See Jacob Hacker’s The Great Risk Shift.

Perhaps it is fruitless to point out these (somewhat distressingly obvious) errors in reasoning of the WSJ editorial writers, but I do encounter these arguments frequently, and it will be handy for me to have this post on hand to counter them.