>Regarding our discussion recently regarding the impact a change in tax rates has, I found this very interesting article: Reality over Appearance by Bruce Bartlett. There is a link to the spreadsheet released by the IRS in the article.

Hmmm a very weak article that hammers on percentages rather than on actual numbers. It highlights an artifact of the effect off tax cuts or doubling, but really does not say anything about how it affects the netto budget one has left to spend. It even fails to explain why this happens. I could only guess, as there probably are a lot of factors involved. some possible factors are:

1. The gap between rich and poor has progressed enourmously over time. This automatically means that the rich earn a greater percentage of all income in a country (the peak gets narrower and higher). The effect is that because of the higher income of the rich also more taxes has to be paid.

2. If there is a cut-off line (and/or thresshold) under which you don't have to pay any taxes anymore (such as exists in holland), you can imagine that lowering the tax would have an effect that less poor pay taxes when you lower the taxes, shifting the tax balance to the right of the income graph.

3. Decreasing and increasing taxes has economical effects that are not easy to see for non-economists (such as myself), the rich get much richer because there is much more money to spend and therefore the whole incomebalance shifts to the right of the graph again, leading to the artifact that you can conclude that the rich pay the most taxes, which in itself is true, but does not say what you think it says.

Again this article stares at numbers that in itself does not say much about the distribution of wealth. All people in the end are interested in, is what they can spend, not in the fact of taxes. Something this article misserable fails to mention. The rich have all benefits of lowering taxes because in aboslute numbers (who cares about relative numbers anyways), they have the most to gain.

Again I conclude that your society is fixed and oversensitive to the word 'tax' and heavily debates taxes, but fails to realize that taxes are just a vehicle to define your netto income, distribution of wealth, and providing funds for your government to provide public services. And of course the rich don't want to educate you how it really works. Again I think you're beeing mislead by your government and esspecially by papers like this.

Walter,