IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wri/journl/v16y1993i2p75-97.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Fallacy of Social Security as a Regressive Tax

Author

Listed:
  • George E. Rejda
  • Kyung Lee
  • James R. Schmidt

Abstract

The Social Security payroll tax is commonly viewed as a regressive tax that falls heavily on low income groups. The primary purpose of this paper is to determine if social insurance taxes, primarily the Social Security payroll tax, are regressive, and whether such regressivity, if any, has increased over time. The major conclusion is that based on certain realistic assumptions and tax burden ratios, the Social Security payroll tax is actually a progressive tax over the vast majority of family incomes and is regressive only over the highest incomes received by a small proportion of upper-income families. The public policy implications of this finding are analyzed in the study.

Suggested Citation

  • George E. Rejda & Kyung Lee & James R. Schmidt, 1993. "The Fallacy of Social Security as a Regressive Tax," Journal of Insurance Issues, Western Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 16(2), pages 75-97.
    • Handle: RePEc:wri:journl:v:16:y:1993:i:2:p:75-97
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.insuranceissues.org/PDFs/X.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wri:journl:v:16:y:1993:i:2:p:75-97. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: James Barrese (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.