“Redistribution” requires both take (tax) and give (spend)

I like that explanation and I use that in my class as a justification for what sometimes we call income redistribution. And basically the idea is this, can take something away from, I’m going to keep picking on tim cook today, i can take 100 away from tim cook and he doesn't hardly even notice and i can give it to somebody who's a starving student and they are just thrilled to have that extra hundred dollars and so Tim cook's not any sadder and the other person is much happier and collectively in society then we are happier overall. So and i think it's a good i think it's a good i think it's reasonable it certainly has limits but it's a reasonable way to think about the world. So you said you use that to explain income redistribution what's the difference what's the connection between income redistribution and progressivity? Well one connection is this so what you were talking about was just one side of the equation which is the government taking the income. The other side of the equation is…you have to you have to make the evil voice taking the income yeah okay so the government's gonna take your income and by the way um it took my income uh well i filed my taxes jeff was saying he filed his on saturday night i'm doing them saturday filed them today like half an hour ago okay so i i'm almost worse than you i started on saturday night i could not bear to finish i finished on sunday night fearing that something would come up that i would have to resolve on monday it turned out it was fine so i did file on late sunday night electronically. So the the government took all my money but they're not going to just take that money and burn it they're going to take that money and do something with it including possibly directly giving it to someone who doesn't have very much money and so that's where the redistribution part of it comes in. The government doesn't literally take only take from rich people they give, sometimes, to poor people. I would say they're pretty i mean as long as when you said it literally you said as long as they don't burn it as long as they don't burn it and as long as they're not taking rich people to just like shuffle things around and give back to rich people then they're the same thing, progressive, yeah.