Fordham Law School FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History Faculty Scholarship 2014 Payroll Taxes, Mythology and Fairness Linda Sugin Fordham University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Tax Law Commons Recommended Citation Linda Sugin, Payroll Taxes, Mythology and Fairness, 51 Harv. J. on Legis 113 (2014) Available at: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/faculty_scholarship/508 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by FLASH: The orF dham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of FLASH: The orF dham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. \\jciprod01\productn\H\HLL\51-1\HLL104.txt unknown Seq: 1 30-JAN-14 8:28 SYMPOSIUM: CLASS IN AMERICA PAYROLL TAXES, MYTHOLOGY, AND FAIRNESS LINDA SUGIN* As the 2012 fiscal cliff approached, Congress and President Obama bick- ered over the top marginal income tax rate that would apply to a tiny sliver of the population, while allowing payroll taxes to quietly rise for all working Amer- icans. Though most Americans pay more payroll tax than income tax, academic and public debates rarely mention it. The combined effect of the payroll tax and the income tax produce dramatically heavier tax liabilities on labor compared to capital, producing substantial horizontal and vertical inequity in the tax system. This article argues that a fair tax system demands just overall burdens, and that the current combination of income taxes and payroll taxes imposes too heavy a relative burden on wage earners.