They do, but it&#x27;s mostly not via the mechanism, &quot;hey we want more complex taxes to shove out the little guy&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s more like this: workers and employers benefit greatly when the workers can get paid in a way that doesn&#x27;t count as income for them, but does count as a expense for the company.<p>So there&#x27;s an incentive to find ways to buy workers stuff they&#x27;d pay for anyway and claim it&#x27;s an expense; the strength of this incentive increases with the tax rate.  So you might have situations where employers buy &quot;office supplies&quot; and let employees walk away with them.  That $1 pen gives $1 of consumption to the worker, when $1 of salary would only have bought say $0.65 worth of pens.<p>Then if it becomes a big thing, the tax authority has to squash it with a rule that says &quot;hey, you can&#x27;t deduct more than $X per employee for pens, where a pen is defined as ... zzz ...&quot;.<p>(A more common example is business travel and expense accounts, in which you&#x27;re relabeling consumptive behavior as a cost of doing business that can&#x27;t be used for consumption.)<p>Most of the debate about tax rates is framed in terms of &quot;gosh, how much do you <i>really need</i>&quot;, and completely bypasses the question of &quot;how much are we incentivizing intelligent people to wastefully characterize consumption as expenses?&quot;