CRAZYPEACETRAIN

From nine, nine, nine to nein, nein, nein for the Cain Train

Although there have been a series of troubling and questionable police actions in recent months, I have to wonder how people making blanket statements about “the police” respond to others making blanket statements about a whole race or ethnicity.

A Logical Tax. A Logarithmic Tax.

As an alternative to both regressive flat taxes and bracket-driven progressive taxes, I propose a tax structure based on a logarithmic curve.

Here is the current proposed equation (after incorporating some feedback):

Where…

The equation to calculate the tax on a given dollar of income would take the form…

Therefore, a total tax bill would take the form of:

The integrated function would take involve a logarithmic curve, but it is easier to comprehend how the mechanics work in this form.

In English, it means that the most that any person would pay is the top marginal tax rate, because as x gets larger, the number you’re subtracting from the initial number gets smaller. You can also set where the curve starts — which presumably is the level where society defines “poverty” by agreeing on the variable “P.”

There’s also a mechanism in the form of the “Constant of Acceleration” to control how slowly or quickly the curve climbs. (In my mind, this would be set by agreeing how much a median income earner should pay in total taxes, and then solving backwards from there to make sure the curve passes through the right point.)

Like the current progressive tax, the curve reflects what you pay on each incremental dollar earned. To determine your tax bill, you add up the y values on the curve for each dollar x earned. (This requires some basic integral calculus.) The summation would start wherever x=P & y=0, so my apologies to any unemployed folks hoping to pay -∞ in taxes. Yes, you could move the x-intercept and amplify the curve — but it would still fundamentally hold this form as a continuous curve.

I like a continuous natural logarithmic curve for three reasons:

• As a picture for the public, it’s every bit as easy to draw and explain in a graph as a flat tax - and I think the math can be satisfactorily explained visually. (If the largest hurdle in persuasion is that the general public will need to develop a better grasp of the fundamentals of calculus, then that will be a wonderful and generally beneficial hurdle to overcome!)
• It greatly limits maneuvers where people try to do otherwise unadvisable things just to get into a lower tax bracket.
• The curve can be adjusted with coefficients and constants to deal with changing economic circumstances — but the fundamental structure doesn’t need to change. The basic contours of fiscal policy will be more accessible since people can talk about “the coefficient changing” and that affects EVERYONE.

It allows those the poor to not have to lose money that would otherwise be spent on food and shelter, and it’s continuous — the line is literally unbroken, making it more equitable as you move up the income spectrum.

I submit the idea for your collective consideration.

A question about Washington lobbying

Are there any political interests that AREN’T “special interests”?

#OccupyWallStreet has been going for three weeks now. When does #OccupyKStreet start in DC?