A lesson on Regressive taxation brought to you by several anonymous contributors at Wikipedia (see whole article here), the world’s leading collaborative encyclopedia:
“A regressive tax is a tax imposed in such a manner that the effective tax rate decreases as the amount subject to taxation increases.[1][2][3][4] In simple terms, it imposes a greater burden (relative to resources) on the poor than on the rich. “Regressive” describes a distribution effect on income or expenditure, refering to the way the rate progresses from high to low. It can be applied to individual taxes or to a tax system as a whole; a year, multi-year, or lifetime. Regressive taxes attempt to reduce the tax incidence of people with higher ability-to-pay, as they shift the incidence disproportionately to those with lower ability-to-pay.
A simplified illustration of a regressive tax on income (proportional on consumption) is as follows: If Jane has $10 and John has $5, a tax of $1 on a purchase would result in a different percentage of total income applied to taxation, 20% for John and 10% for Jane. Thus, a tax that is fixed to the value of the good/service (as with sales tax)(without exemptions or rebates) would likely, in effect, result in a higher burden of taxation to people with less money (depending on consumption level and timeline examined – year or lifetime).
The opposite of a regressive tax is a progressive tax, where the tax rate increases as the amount subject to taxation increases.[5][6][7][8] In between is a proportional tax, where the tax rate is fixed as the amount subject to taxation increases.
The term is frequently applied in reference to fixed taxes, where every person has to pay the same amount of money. The regressivity of a particular tax often depends on the propensity of the tax payers to engage in the taxed activity relative to their income. In other words, if the activity being taxed is more likely to be carried out by the poor and less likely to be carried out by the rich, then the tax may be considered regressive. To determine whether a tax is regressive, the income-elasticity of the good being taxed as well as the income-substitution effect must be considered.
A simplified illustration of a regressive tax on income (proportional on consumption) is as follows: If Jane has $10 and John has $5, a tax of $1 on a purchase would result in a different percentage of total income applied to taxation, 20% for John and 10% for Jane. Thus, a tax that is fixed to the value of the good/service (as with sales tax)(without exemptions or rebates) would likely, in effect, result in a higher burden of taxation to people with less money (depending on consumption level and timeline examined – year or lifetime).
A regressive tax system does not mean and likely would not result in low income earners paying more taxes than the wealthy, only that the effective tax rate relative to income or consumption would be a larger tax burden to low income earners.”
…While not part of the Savings and Loan Crisis, many other banks failed. Between 1980 and 1994 more than 1,600 banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) were closed or received FDIC financial assistance. [13]
During the Savings and Loan Crisis, from 1986 to 1995, the number of US federally insured savings and loans in the United States declined from 3,234 to 1,645. [14] This was primarily, but not exclusively, due to unsound real estate lending.[15]
The market share of S&Ls for single family mortgage loans went from 53% in 1975 to 30% in 1990.[16]
U.S. General Accounting Office estimated cost of the crisis to around USD $160.1 billion, about $124.6 billion of which was directly paid for by the U.S. government from 1986 to 1996.
(/h2>[17] That figure does not include thrift insurance funds used before 1986 or after 1996. It also does not include state run thrift insurance funds or state bailouts.
The concomitant slowdown in the finance industry and the real estate market may have been a contributing cause of the 1990-1991 economic recession. Between 1986 and 1991, the number of new homes constructed dropped from 1.8 to 1 million, the lowest rate since World War II. [18]
A taxpayer funded government bailout related to mortgages during the Savings and Loan crisis may have created a moral hazard and acted as encouragement to lenders to make similar higher risk loans during the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis. [19]
Uncle Sam may be coming after the buyout kings. If the tax collector gets his way, Henry R. Kravis, Stephen A. Schwarzman, David Bonderman, David M. Rubenstein and the rest of the leveraged-buyout crowd could soon be forced to add some zeros to the taxable income line on their federal forms… Read on.
History is pretty clear on this one: Whenever the finance industry discovers a path to quick investment riches for a select few—S&Ls, junk bonds, Long-Term Capital Management, Enron, the list goes on—a massive reckoning can’t be far behind. Today’s implosion in the making? Private equity… Read on.
MORE than a year ago, Victor Fleischer, an untenured professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, finished a draft of a paper about the tax treatment of private equity. At the time, he was just hoping to get the paper published. Taxes are an unglamorous topic, and… Read on.
Talk about an inside job. It’s little wonder that CEO pay continues to soar when the consulting firms many corporations hire to determine executive pay levels also earn millions of dollars for handling other consulting work for the same company. After all, why tick off… Read on.
The deals are just the start. The original ‘barbarians at the gate’ now command a $107 billion global empire. Here’s how the buyout giant fires up its companies with a profit-or-perish creed. It’s a great time to be Henry Kravis, as he’s quick to remind people… Read on.
The Internal Revenue Service has begun an inquiry into suspected tax abuses at hedge funds and private- equity firms after determining many firm partners don’t file returns and may have improperly characterized transactions. The tax-collection agency is studying whether funds… Read on.
For mysterious reasons, people can suddenly become indignant about government policies they have accepted for years as a matter of course. Such a seismic shift seems to be happening in public attitudes toward taxation of America’s super-rich financiers. The three leading Democratic candidates… Read on.
As a central villain in the famous book “Barbarians At the Gate,” Henry Kravis has become one of the world’s richest mavens of private equity — the Wall Street sector that buys up companies, breaks them apart and sells their assets. In 2006, Kravis made $450 million, or more per hour ($51,000) than the average American makes in a year… Read on.
Not long after the Blackstone Group bought Travelport Ltd. last August, workers at the company’s office campus here began feeling the squeeze. Two months after the deal closed, scores of employees were lugging boxes of personal belongings to their cars, having lost their jobs. Under Blackstone’s ownership, the travel-reservations conglomerate has laid off 841 people, about 10% of its work force… Read on.
“Everything about America is threatened today … this is an epic struggle for the future of America,” Edwards told the cheering crowd. “Corporate greed and the very powerful use their money to control Washington and this corrupting influence is destroying the middle class.” While all of the presidential campaigns… Read on.
Today we are living under the control of that military-industrial complex. In 1975, there was a great movie called Rollerball starring James Caan. In a nutshell, it was about a futuristic society (2018) where corporations controlled everything. Not individual corporations mind you, but giant worldwide conglomerates… Read on.
Private equity funds are complicated entities. Essentially, they are unregulated pools of private capital raised and controlled by investment managers, otherwise known as “general partners.” Typically, managers buy up undervalued companies, de-list them from public exchanges… Read on.
Florida’s tomato growers have long faced pressure to reduce operating costs; one way to do that is to keep migrant wages as low as possible. Although some of the pressure has come from increased competition with Mexican growers, most of it has been forcefully applied by… Read on.
Henry R. Kravis, the billionaire founder of the corporate buyout movement, was working the hallways of Capitol Hill, hoping to kill legislation that would raise his taxes and those of other investment fund executives. While known to powerful people in Washington through longstanding personal.. Read on.
Topping each other’s deals — $31.4 billion! $39 billion! $45 billion! K.K.R.’s Henry Kravis and the Blackstone Group’s Stephen Schwarzman are locked in combat at the top of the private-equity heap. The rivalry has only sharpened since Blackstone’s I.P.O. sparked public outrage.. Read on.
On the eve of the 1986 leveraged buy-out of Safeway Stores Inc., the board of directors sat down to a last supper. Peter Magowan, the boyish-looking chairman and cheif executive of the world’s largest supermarket chain, rose to offer a toast to the deal that had fended… Read on.
Hundreds of migrant farmworkers marched through Miami this past Friday to protest a Florida tomato grower maneuver that will cut some tomato picker wages by 40 percent. The growers are refusing to honor deals the state’s top farmworker group has cut with McDonald’s and Taco Bell… Read on.
Last Friday, Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI) introduced a bill to remedy a long-standing tax inequity that allows private equity fund managers the right to claim performance fee income as capital gains rather than ordinary income. This tax break, based on the misnomer “carried interest,”… Read on.
Soon after Rep. Eric Cantor called a meeting of lobbyists two weeks ago, his aides had to find a larger room. Instead of the couple dozen they had expected, 75 showed up. Cantor, a Virginia Republican, convened the gathering to discuss how to defeat a set of fast-moving proposals that would vastly increase taxes on private-equity firms and hedge.. Read on.
This week, Senators Max Baucus and Charles Grassley, the chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate Finance Committee, have been holding “informal meetings” to consider whether the stratospheric incomes of private-equity partners ought to be treated as compensation rather than as capital gains, for tax purposes. Way back in the 1970s, newly-minted MBAs… Read on.
A leading private equity executive on Friday broke ranks with his industry by arguing it does not pay enough tax and warning that the government’s capital gains tax reforms, designed principally to tackle perceived abuses in the sector, would not be sufficient to silence critics. The intervention by Jon Moulton… Read on.
“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” So said fictional character Gordon Gekko, the embodiment of a 1980s corporate raider in the movie Wall Street. Yet, sadly, just as the Gekko character was based… Read on.
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Jeff Faux
Jeff Faux is the principal founder of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) of Washington, D.C. He was President of EPI from 1985 until August 2002, when he became the Institute’s first Distinguished Fellow in order to devote more time to his research and writing. He is also the author of The Global Class War. Read full bio.
*Based on Henry Kravis’s 2006 income of $450 million as reported in Forbes magazine. Calculated at a tax savings of 21.45% (35% income tax + 1.45% Medicare Tax 15% carried interest paid), Henry Kravis saved approximately $96 million in taxes in the year 2006.
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