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A common assumption in the optimal taxation literature is that the social planner maximizes a welfarist social welfare function with weights decreasing with income. However, high transfer withdrawal rates in many countries imply very low weights for the working poor in practice. We reconcile this puzzle by extending the optimal taxation framework by Saez (2002) to allow for alternatives to welfarism. In an exercise of positive optimal taxation, we calculate weights of a social planner's function as implied by the German tax and transfer system based on the concepts of welfarism and alternative principles, where the social planner minimizes the weighted sum of increasing functions of absolute or relative tax burdens. This reflects the idea that the total tax liabilities of specific groups matter for the design of the tax system and very high tax liabilities should be avoided per se. While this point is often made in public debates, it does not follow from welfarist considerations. We find that the absolute tax burden principle is in line with social weights that decline with net income. Moreover, we illustrate how the model can be used with survey data using a novel question from the German Socio-Economic Panel on perceived just net income.
