Optimal Height Tax

Here's an earlier version of an NBER working paper written by Greg Mankiw and Matthew Weinzierl. The abstract:

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. Moreover, based on the empirical distribution of height and wages, the optimal heighttax is substantial: a tall person earning $50,000 should pay about $4,500 more in taxes than a short person earning the same income. 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.

Tall people would undoubtebly object to such a possible. But if height is positively related to utility in other ways, then they can at least be comforted knowing that their absolute utility is higher even if marginal utility is equalized. Assuming persons are completely identical in all other ways of course.