Journal article: We empirically assess the limits to redistribution due to asymmetric information between a tax authority and tax payers in an optimal taxation model with both direct (income) and indirect (consumption) taxes. Using data from the French consumer expenditure survey “Budget de Famille” released in 2011, we find that the tax system favors middle class households from the 6-th decile in the distribution of consumption expenditures. The innovation of our paper is to identify the incentive constraint where top income earners are ready to relax labor effort to mimic the favored middle classhouseholds as being the only ones that put limits to the redistribution toward themiddle class