Whoops. Geez, you aren’t supposed to let juicy numbers like that leak out in your intra-libertarian squabbles. Imagine what progressivity lovers would say if they heard how similar those numbers were. I mean, I am one, and trust me I’d say some really annoying stuff.

However, what’s different from last year is that I went ahead and came up with the number you’re looking for. That is, we measured what is essentially the Tax Freedom Day of various income groups, including all federal, state and local taxes.

You can find it for 2004 in the top row of Table 14 here (http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/wp1.pdf).

Bottom line: in 2004 we reported Tax Freedom Day to be 29.69 percent of the nation’s income (http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxfreedomday/). The Tax Freedom Day — that is, the total tax burden as a percentage of income — for the middle one-fifth in that year was 28.25 percent.

In other words, Tax Freedom Day only overstates the total effective tax burden of the middle one-fifth of incomes by about 1.4 percentage points.

The reason why it’s so close is simple. While the federal personal income tax system is sharply progressive, most state and local taxes are markedly regressive. On balance, the mean and median tax burden are far closer for total taxes than for federal alone.

Kind makes all this fuss seem rediculous, doesn’t it?

This is like going to a UFC match and instead of guys beating the shit out of eachother, they start doing The Moor’s Pavane God damn you, Julian. I guess i need to go somewhere else for my anti government quackery…bummer

Even unscrupulous pragmatists might want to let their pragmatism rein in their deviousness: even today, computer-searchable archived text seems fundamentally not to be the best medium for winning influence by, um, cageyness. My guess is that Google-of-2007 technology is far from the last word in that, and my hope is that this and various other kinds of deviousness will become progressively more painful, perhaps even unbearably so. But meanwhile, it remains widespread, and here’s hoping your bit of trying to hold one’s allies to objective standards might help a bit.

Chris also has a point, and it makes me wonder about the pragmatic cleverness of spending one’s credibility on spinning fundamentally well-known numbers. Mightn’t the effort be better spent on harder-to-measure but expected-to-be-large numbers like tax incidence and deadweight loss?

Of course, the whole idea is a little absurd — the burden of government is far more than the individual tax bill. just ask: When would tax freedom day in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe lie (even if you personally didn’t file taxes)?