The income gap between the rich and poor in the United States has reached its highest levels since the Great Depression. Given past evidence that a wider rich-poor gap can be harmful to a population's health, tax policies that widen or narrow this gap may influence the overall health of a society. In a new study published in Preventive Medicine, Daniel Kim, MD, DrPH, examined actual and recently proposed tax policies and projected how these policies could affect the total number of deaths in the United States. He determined that only policies that considerably raise top federal income tax rates and that redistribute tax revenue to lower-income households are likely to bring large reductions in the total number of Americans that die annually.
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