Saturday, April 13, 2013

WILL THE TOP 1% EVEN NOTICE A TAX INCREASE?

Perhaps a better question is "will the top 0.1%" notice because that group has so much control over capital markets.  In either case, the law of diminishing marginal utility implies that they won't notice much of a difference because 1$ for a person making $1000 is generally less valued than 1$ for a person making $10.  This is illustrated by this chart:

When increasing amounts of money are plotted on a logarithmic scale,as you can  see by comparing the arithmetic chart on the left with the logarithmic one in the right, then and only then do we have a pretty much linear relationship.
Even Forbes Magazine (which used to advertise itself as a "capitalist tool" admits that the law of diminished returns holds:
Now look a little closer at the graphic. At the bottom, each notch denotes a doubling of per-capita GDP, not a steady increase. What this means is that every increase in income isn’t as valuable as the one before it. As the researchers explained, “going from $1,000 to $2,000 raises satisfaction by twice as much as going from $2,000 to $3,000 and by the same amount as going from $10,000 to $20,000.”

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