Taxation, Tampering, and Deming principles

[Kromkowski@aol.com]

Caveat.  In addition to admiring the work of Deming, I also am a fan of Henry 
George.

Although sadly we apparently won't hear from Nader in the presidential 
debates (Cf. We cheer when the Serbians take over the Parliament, but here 
nobody seems to be at all outraged that the Debate Commission refuses to let 
Nader even into the audience when he has a ticket), he has publicly talked 
about having an Aim of taxation be taxing what we don't like (e.g., 
speculation, pollution, etc., urban sprawl) instead of taxing what we do like 
(e.g. the fruit of labor --wages).  This is really right out of the Georgist 
movement, which calls for shifting all taxes onto land value rather than on 
labor or capital, based in part on the fact that taxation discourage what is 
taxed where the supply is variable.  See Progress and Poverty, (1879).

George W. Bush calls for cutting taxes across the board.  He offers the 
principles that the surplus is the people's money and that everyone should 
get a break with the lowest paid getting the highest proportional break, 
i.e., below 35K 100% break, at 50K a 50% break, at 75K a 25% break, etc.

Al Gore suggests that cutting taxes is a form of spending and that he prefers 
a series of targeted breaks designed to promote or reward putatively 
salubrious behavior.  If you do this or that, then you get break.

1.  Is Gore's plan analogous to tampering, i.e., using the tax code as a 
controller?  What about Bush's or Nader's or Buchanan's, etc.

2.  How would Deming go about improving the Tax Code and/or reducing taxes?

3.  In addition to strongly favoring a principled shift of taxes off of labor 
and capital and onto land value, I also tend to favor taxing what we don't 
like for example, a tax in proportion to the amount of injury and damage that 
a product causes (for example on ammunition, guns, autos, kerosene heaters, 
etc.) and taxing vehicles in proportion to their gas consumption, or taxing 
corporations depending on whether the distribution of pay to the lowest and 
highest paid employees is within control limits.  Would this later form of 
taxation "of bads" be tampering?

4.  Is the distribution of income and wealth a statistically stable system as 
determined by control charting?  Is it an appropriate aim to reduce the 
variation between rich and poor and to shift the process away from poverty or 
are the discrepancies between rich and poor a necessary loss needed to 
optimize the whole?  What are the common causes of this variation, what are 
the special causes?  Should a company that follows Deming's principle use a 
control chart on the wages paid to employees? And what should they do if they 
find out that CEO pay is outside the upper limits or that the lowest paid 
employees fall outside the lower limits?

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<A HREF="http://members.aol.com/Kromkowski/Simon.html">
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John David Kromkowski
Kromkowski@aol.com