If so, so should tall men, argues a new study by Greg Mankiw and Matthew Weinzierl.
No, they’re not being facetious. The abstract of the paper states:
Should the income tax system include a tax credit for short taxpayers and a tax surcharge for tall ones? This paper shows that the standard utilitarian framework for tax policy analysis answers this question in the affirmative. This result has two possible interpretations. One interpretation is that individual attributes correlated with wages, such as height, should be considered more widely for determining tax liabilities.
Alternatively, if policies such as a tax on height are rejected, then the standard utilitarian framework must in some way fail to capture our intuitive notions of distributive justice.
You can download the paper here (pdf link).
(NY Times link via email from Ravi Venkatesh.)