□ Dear Mr. Buckley:
Anent Robert Cook’s analysis showing that lowering taxes on businesses reduces the proportion of taxes paid by the poor, several observations: 1) His analysis is a reflection of two factors. First, that the poor have adjustments to gross income greater in percentage than the rich. This is because some of the adjustments (and the personal exemption) are fixed-dollar amounts. Second, that the marginal propensity to consume is greater for the poor than for the rich. 2) Nevertheless, the assumption that business taxes are collected entirely from consumers and the analysis predicated on that basis is counterfactual. At first glance, one might suppose that business taxes are collected from employees,
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