Bruce Bartlett offers this sobering table that illustrates what a mess the current tax code is:

Furthermore, even within income classes of people with roughly similar incomes there is now a crazy quilt of effective rates that vary enormously depending on things like whether one owns a house or rents, whether one has children, how much of one’s income is derived from wages or capital, and various other factors. As one can see in the table below, for those in the middle quintile (20%) of income, 25% had no tax liability or a negative liability while the rest paid between 3.2% and 9% of their income in federal income taxes. Even among the ultra-wealthy, the top 1% of tax filers, effective tax rates vary 10-fold between 2.6% and 26.9%.

I think a fair amount of variation in effective tax rates based on the number of dependent children you have around makes sense. Realistically if John’s a single guy making $65,000 a year and Mary’s trying to raise two kids on $80,000 a year, there’s no reason to think distributive justice that requires Mary to pay a higher tax rate. But for the rest this is very dubious. In particular, the wide array of deductions & credits for people who do this or that, each with their own phase-out points (or not) and different levels of refundability (or not) is a mess.

Earthquake hits Chile. This one is much more powerful than the Haitian earthquake—1000 times more powerful, I’m hearing—but fortunately looks like it will be much less devastating thanks toa Chile’s vastly superior infrastructure, government capacity, and general level of wealth.

Given my last name, I’ve long been concerned about the last socially accepted form of systematic institutionalized arbitrary discrimination in the United States: Alphabetism. Nobody ever made Matt Yglesias and Rachel Zabarkes sit in the back of the bus, but we sure as hell did have to stand at the end of the line at snack time in school (worse, later she got married and changed her name to Rachel Zabarkes Friedman and briefly worked at National Review). By the time they handed me my diploma at college graduation, practically everyone and their families has already scattered elsewhere. And of course if I co-author anything with anyone, my name goes last.

So I want to heartily endorse David Lake’s proposals for reform. Personally as a matter of principle I try to list people in reverse alphabetical order, but often find myself overruled in formal contexts.