The rich and the rest of us

The statistics quoted in a recent Bangor Daily News column by an economics instructor at Husson College are misleading and meaningless. One cannot conclude that the wealthiest 5 percent of taxpayers are paying more than their share of taxes solely from the fact that their percentage of total tax payments has increased. Such an increase, if actual, could just as well be due to an increase in income, itself, regardless of any change in rates in either direction.

Likewise, any decrease in the percentage of tax collections from the lower end of the scale may be because their share of the total income has gone down and not because of any preferential tax breaks. Other economists have presented statistics showing that just such a widening of the difference between the rich and the rest of us did take place during the Reagan years.

It seems that in the field of economics one has to calculate an average among subjective viewpoints in order to arrive at what passes for objective truth. Merle E. Tyrrell Houlton