[ppereira]

Incorrect. "Regressive" does not just mean "bad" according to some arbitrary definition of bad. If the poor pay more of a tax than the rich as a percentage of their income or wealth, then the tax is regressive. Otherwise, it is progressive. The word regressive is used to describe the incidence of a tax on a population.

A property tax is generally progressive because the poor do not own real property. The rich pay more property tax as a percentage of their income/wealth than the poor.

A sales tax is the prototypical example of a regressive tax because the rich consume less (as a percentage of their income) than the poor. Therefore, the rich pay of a lower percentage of their total income to sales taxes than the poor.

An income tax with higher marginal tax rates for higher incomes is the classic example of a progressive tax. Since Reagan, income taxes approximate a flat tax more than a progressive one.

[pash]

> If the poor pay more of a tax than the rich as a percentage of their income or wealth, then the tax is regressive. Otherwise, it is progressive. The word regressive is used to describe the incidence of a tax on a population.

Although this is effectively the definition of progressive and regressive taxation today—because that's how the terms are almost always used by the large number of people who have only the most casual understanding of tax policy—it is a perversion of the original and long-standing textbook definition, and of the way in which the terms are still used by some economists.

By the original definition, a progressive tax is simply one whose rate of assessment increases ("progresses") with the value subject to taxation [0]. Thus an import duty on bananas is progressive if it taxes them at a rate of 1% ad valorem for the first $1MM's worth, and then at a rate of 2% of their value above $1MM.

Note that the original definition and the popular corruption coincide when the thing being taxed is a person's income. (Together with the mistaken association with "progressive" politics, this seems to be the source of the perversion of meaning.) But the two definitions often differ, and the term "progressive" in the context of taxation originally had nothing to do with how the burden of taxation is distributed across society.

0. This is also the definition given in the Wikipedia article, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax (and given by several of the cited sources), although much of the article anyway discusses the burden-of-taxation interpretation.

[ppereira]

This is an interesting generalization of my use of progressive/regressive. However, I would not go so far as to say that my definition is a "popular corruption". My restricted definition is frequently applied in the tax law, tax policy, and tax economics literature.

According to the OED, the earliest noted use of "regressive" in the context of taxation is from Richard T. Ely's writings on political economy in 1891. He was the leader of the progressive movement. His use of the terms progressive/regressive would certainly have meant reform/acting in a backward direction.

Do you have an earlier citation for your definition? I wonder if it is in fact a mathematical generalization of a progressive/populist definition.

[pash]

Yes, I recognize that the definition you gave is far and away the most common one, even among policy wonks. The original definition seems still to have currency mostly among economists.

But the definition I gave is indeed the original one, and it is not a generalization. A tax may be progressive in your sense but not in the original sense: a luxury tax on yachts, for instance, is progressive in your sense, but not in the original sense if it is assessed at a fixed rate [0].

The OED's first noted usage is way off, by the way; it is easy to verify that the term progressive in the context of taxation pre-dates the Progressive Era by at least a century. For instance, Thomas Paine proposed progressive taxes on estates (using the term numerous times) in his Rights of Man (1791). (He even drew up tables of suggested taxes, the rates of which rose with the value of the estate.) There are more commonplace examples from the first half of the nineteenth century that you can find on Google Books, including several that disambiguate the two senses in favor of the original definition I provided [1].

A great many of the early mentions of progressive taxes, including of those before the Progressive Era, do come in the course of discussing how to make taxation fairer (in the author's view) or how to disperse inherited wealth. Since the rich own more wealth, buy more goods, and have greater incomes than the poor, progressive rates of taxation—in the original sense—tend to result in progressive taxes—in the other sense. I suppose the shift in meaning was to be expected.

0. Unless perhaps yacht is defined as an expensive boat. But the point stands: so long as there exist goods that the rich spend a higher proportion of their income on than do the poor, then a tax assessed at a fixed rate on those goods is progressive in your sense but not in the other.

1. There are also some examples, mostly in tables of import duties, where the terms progressive and not progressive are used in a sense that appears to distinguish duties that are assessed ad valorem versus those that are assessed as a flat fee; so it seems that progressive sometimes also meant merely that the amount of tax collected increased with the value subject to taxation, which is further distinct from our debate over progressive rates.

[zeroonetwothree]

Taxes on housing are very likely regressive. Even if you rent you are still paying the property tax implicitly via higher rents. And given that your need for housing is independent of your income, it's likely that low earners spend a much higher % of their income on housing (and hence on property tax).

[prostoalex]

> Even if you rent you are still paying the property tax implicitly via higher rents.

There's a conundrum here where higher property tax rate decreases the rental's attractiveness to potential landlords purely by biting into the cashflow, which then creates a negative impact on the property price and the base it's taxed at.

US states with higher property tax rates (typically those with low or no income tax rates) do not generally have higher rents, and countries with higher property taxes (Germany) do not typically have significantly higher rents than their counterparts https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/why-your-rent-is-so-high-a...

[kasey_junk]

It is controversial whether property taxes are regressive or progressive. Your view is common but an alternate view is that property taxes are taxes on housing consumption and are thus regressive.

[tcbawo]

A national property tax might be "progressive" at the city level. I'm not sure if this is desirable or not, but it might create an incentive for development in other cheaper/value locales.

[splat]

> A property tax is generally progressive because the poor do not own real property.

Won't those taxes still be passed to the poor as higher rent?

[ProAm]

How does rent control come into play here?