In “Lucky Duckies Redux,” Paul Krugman advances some interesting ideas.

The thing to bear in mind is that overall, the US tax system isn’t actually that progressive: the payroll tax is regressive, as are most state and local taxes, which largely offsets the progressivity of the income tax.

One would would think that “isn’t actually that progressive” would suggest some kind of comparative context, i.e., isn’t actually that progressive relative to other OECD countries. What we know is that the U.S. has the most progressive system of household taxes in the OECD, even when we factor in that pesky payroll tax.

But a new study on inequality by researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris reveals that when it comes to household taxes (income taxes and employee social security contributions) the U.S. “has the most progressive tax system and collects the largest share of taxes from the richest 10% of the population.” As Column 1 in the table below shows, the U.S. tax system is far more progressive—meaning pro-poor—than similar systems in countries most Americans identify with high taxes, such as France and Sweden. Even after accounting for the fact that the top 10 percent of households in the U.S. have one of the highest shares of market income among OECD nations, our tax system is second only to Ireland in terms of its progressivity for households.

To be sure, this analysis is from 2008. My understanding is that the various tax credits passed under President Obama, including the Making Work Pay tax credit, have made the tax code more progressive rather than less, and that new taxes under the ACA will continue that trend.

And there’s another important caveat. Krugman cites regressive state and local taxes. And the OECD analysis didn’t factor them in. It also didn’t factor in the VATs that prevail in every other OECD country.

Of course, these measures do not include the litany of other taxes households pay in each country, such as Value Added Taxes, corporate income taxes and excise taxes, but they do give a good indication that our system places a heavier tax burden on high-income households than other industrialized countries.

Note that VATs and excise taxes tend to have a regressive impact. It could certainly be true that the cumulative impact of state and local taxes makes our tax system more regressive than countries with VATs in excess of 15 percent. I would like to see the numbers. Indeed, Peter Lindert’s argument in Growing Public is that northern European welfare states have succeeded to the extent that regressive consumption taxes finance public services.

It is true that the U.S. tax and benefit system is does far less than other OECD welfare states to change the Gini coefficient after taxes-and-transfers. Before taxes-and-transfers, as Tom Schaller usefully explains, the U.S. Gini coefficient is 0.46, just above the OECD average of 0.45. Italy, Germany, and France are more unequal than the U.S. before taxes and transfers.

But after taxes-and-transfers, the U.S. is tied for most unequal with Portugal at 0.38. So surely taxes and transfers are an important part of the “Lucky Duckies” question that Krugman raises. Schaller is right to take net transfers into account. So why doesn’t Krugman?

Let me advance a simple proposition: most Americans pay taxes and receive benefits. If you receive more in benefits than you pay in taxes, I’d say you’re getting a pretty good deal. If you’re paying more in taxes than you’re receiving in benefits, well, that’s less true. Now, it might make sense to pay more than you receive in benefits if you’re very wealthy and you capture various intangible benefits, e.g., one could argue that the wealthy benefit more from efforts to protect private property than the non-wealthy. And then there is the entirely plausible argument that we all benefit from a decent social minimum that helps mitigate various social maladies: it’s only natural that those most able to pay should pay more than those least able to pay.

But when the 60 percent of Americans are net recipients of federal benefits, is it at least possible that some are not desperately poor? Could some live in relatively low-cost metropolitan areas, where they might prefer more discretion over their income than seeing their tax take rise in exchange for benefits they might not want or need? Is it legitimate to ask whether we’ve struck the right balance, given the fact that we live in a very diverse country where the cost of living varies dramatically from Little Rock to Santa Monica?

Paul Krugman writes:

So the right is now apparently outraged at the fact that many Americans pay no income taxes — a true observation that is elided into the utterly untrue assertion that many Americans pay no taxes. (Almost everyone pays payroll taxes, everyone pays state and local sales taxes, etc.)

But wouldn’t it be useful to actually decompose those numbers, and consider them in the context of a balance sheet that factors in benefits? That’s what Scott Hodge of the Tax Foundation tried to do in this analysis, and you’d think that taking a careful look at net transfers might yield a somewhat more useful intervention than sloppy accusations. If I buy an ice cream cone for $2.50 (the going rate here in lower Manhattan) and the ice cream truck immediately hands me a rebate of $3.00, have I paid for my ice cream cone? I mean, yes, in some sense. But surely the rebate should count for something.

When we view our long-term fiscal challenges through the lens of lifetime net tax rates, one thing becomes clear, as Daniel Shaviro has argued: present generations are getting a much better deal than future generations. So in truth, the real “Lucky Duckies” are all of us working and paying taxes right now: thanks to excessive spending commitments and unfunded tax cuts, we are shifting the tax burden from today to tomorrow.