Voting over selfishly optimal nonlinear income tax schedules with a minimum-utility constraint

Pairwise majority voting over alternative nonlinear income tax schedules is considered when there is a continuum of individuals who differ in their labor productivities, which is private information, but share the same quasilinear-in-consumption preferences for labor and consumption. Voting is restricted to those schedules that are selfishly optimal for some individual. The analysis extends that of Brett and Weymark (2016) by adding a minimum-utility constraint to their incentive-compatibility and government budget constraints. It also extends the analysis of Röell (2012) and Bohn and Stuart (2013) by providing a complete characterization of the selfishly optimal tax schedules. It is shown that individuals have single-peaked preferences over the set of selfishly optimal tax schedules, and so the schedule proposed by the median skill type is a Condorcet winner.