Deductio ad absurdum. Want a government subsidy of $225,000 a year? Buy a mansion - includes related article

Washington Monthly, Feb, 1990 by Peter Dreier, John Atlas

"Supply-side" economics advertised tax cuts, but, in fact, the tax burden as a whole has not changed over the eighties. What has changed is that the proportion of revenue coming from progressive income taxes has declined, while the payroll tax, which reaches only the lower part of earnings and doesn't touch investment income at all, has soared by about 25 percent. As a result, as Brookings Institution economist Joseph Pechan, the longtime dean of experts, wrote shortly before his death last year, the tax system actually makes the U.S. income distribution less rather than more equal.

This, Pechman observed, is even more troubling because the distribution of income in the United States, already far more unequal than that of our leading competitors, has become substantially more so in the last 10 years. History shows that nations that allow their wealth to become concentrated in the hands of the few prosper in neither social nor economic ways.