Taxes, Bankruptcy, and the Talmud

This discussion continues and augments ideas from Consortium 95, Fall/Winter 2008, pp. 3-7. It also reviews concepts from that article in order to be self-contained.

What is a fair way for a democracy to tax its citizens? It might seem at first glance that the mathematics associated with this question is merely a matter of constructing charts and tables to display the arithmetic of different tax rates that could be chosen. Rather surprisingly, this complex political question provides an interesting glimpse at how mathematics grows and evolves, and how mathematics created for one situation can often be exported in a profitable way to get dramatic insights into other domains.