One of the debates that’s been raging in the US, and that I haven’t had time to mention here has arisen from the claim by the Wall Street Journal that the poor and working class are ‘lucky duckies’, who don’t pay their share of the tax burden (some ambiguity has arisen over whether the WSJ actually wants the poor to pay more taxes, or merely to exclude them from tax cuts until the WSJ constituency has had its tax burden driven as close to zero as possible). Among others, CalPundit has done a good job of demolishing this nonsense, which relies on an exclusive focus on Federal income taxes, excluding not only indirect taxes and state and local taxes, but even payroll taxes.

The only point I want to add is that all of this has long been known to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of tax policy. Looking at my not-so-best-seller Taxing Times, from 1998, for example, I find on p21

In Australia, and most other OECD countries, the tax system as a whole is roughly proportional. The progressivity of income taxes is offset by the regressivity of most other taxes, and by the fact that high-income earners have more extensive opportunities for tax avoidance than low-income earners.
The redistributive effect of taxation and expenditure in Australia arises from the fact that, while taxation payments are roughly proportional to income, the benefits of public expenditure are about the same for all members of the community.

. I am not, of course, claiming any originality for this observation – it’s so well-known that I didn’t even bother to source it.

All of this underlines the point that the WSJ and those who have supported them on this issue are either incompetent or dishonest. No-one qualified to write on tax policy could be unaware of the facts in this question.