I hope we can use this forum to come to some agreement on what is an appropriate description of the APT tax plan. The first area of disagreement appears to concern the issue of whether the APT tax is progressive or regressive. The article cited in my version of the text contains empirical evidence based on the federal reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances that demonstrates that the most wealthy deciles undertake a disproportionate volume (in dollar terms) of transactions. Progressiveness is introduced not via the rate structure (which is indeed flat) but uniquely through the tax base since the wealthy undertake a disproportionate share of financial transactions (eg stocks, bonds and derivatives) You appear to disregard this evidence and make the following argument: "However, it is unlikely that the number of transactions per dollar spent is indeed proportional to income." What is relevant here is that the paper demonstrates that the dollar volume of transactions per dollar of income or per dollar of wealth does indeed increase with the level of income and wealth. See Figures 2 and 3 in the cited text. You go on to give the example: "For example, regardless if an earner makes $20,000 or $2,000,000 per year through wages or dividends, the tax rate paid by the earner would be the same, since the number of financial transactions occurring does not depend on the amount earned." Of course, the tax rate is a fixed flat rate, but the tax burden on the $2,000,000 earner will be much higher because that earner undoubtedly holds and trades a volume of stocks, bonds and other assets and whenever these are exchanged, purchased or sold, they must pay the APT tax whereas the $20,000 earner probably has few if any assets to trade. I look forward to your response and if we can agree, perhaps we can address some of the other issues on which we seem to strongly disagree. Kgelfman (talk) 18:54, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
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