The Mathematics Behind Progressive, Regressive, and Proportional Taxes
Source: Council for Economic Education (EconEdLink) | Type: Lesson
Students take a quiz that involves earning income and paying a tax. Through this activity, they generate data that they use to create a table, a graph, and to build equations that represent relationships between quantities. Students scale and label axes as they create graphs of relationships between income and tax. Tables and graphs of data are then used by the students to construct equations representing examples of relationships between income, tax, and average tax ratio. Students explore the graphs to draw conclusions about the impact of different tax structures on families with different incomes. Note: students should have prior knowledge of graphing linear functions for this lesson.
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