Am I correct that the figures you used are only those of the federal tax? If
that is the case, the overall US tax structure is even flatter, since state and
local taxes tend to be regressive.

I believe that the work of the late Joseph Pechman at Brookings in the '80's
lead to the conclusion that there was very little progressivity in the US tax
system taken as a whole. I don't know whether this work has been updated.

Posted by Stuart Levine on Dec. 30, 2009 at 10:43 PM