A headline in today’s Breibart–“Sweden slashes income tax further to boost jobs“:
Since coming to power in late 2006, the government has launched a series of measures aimed at inciting Swedes to return to the job market instead of living off of state subsidies.
John Hinderaker observes:
It’s an interesting comparison: Sweden experimented with the nanny state, learned that it was devastating to the economic and moral health of its people, and is moving back toward individualism. Here in the U.S., we had the world’s most dynamic economy, and the lesson we took away from that–some of us, anyway–was that we were doing something wrong and needed to socialize everything. Curious.
John had previously observed that the U.S., even before the Obama administration, already had the most progressive income tax system in the world, collecting “more household tax revenue [income plus social security taxes] from the top 10 percent of households than any other country and extracting the most from that income group relative to their share of the nation’s income”. According to data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Internal Revenue Service, as reported on Sept. 15, 2008:
The top 1 percent of income earners now pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes, which is almost double their share of the national income. The top 10 percent pay 71 percent of federal income taxes, though they earn just 39 percent of the nation’s pretax income….Meanwhile, the lowest 40 percent of income earners as a group actually receive net payments from the federal income tax system.