Tax Traitement De Stock Options Australie

...... . 50 Forum juridique de l'énergie 30. . . EY. . : 380 44 490 30 00 () EY EY. L'impôt sur les salaires, les impôts sur les successions et sur les dons Qui assume le fardeau des taxes sur l'essence et le tabac Si le Congrès devait augmenter ce taux d'imposition , Ou moins que la déduction fiscale, qui gagnerait et qui perdrait Les résultats des batailles politiques sur les changements dans le système fiscal dépendent souvent sur les réponses à ces questions. Pour démontrer qui paie les impôts courants ou qui seraient les gagnants et les perdants d'une modification fiscale, le Comité mixte sur la fiscalité du Congrès (JCT) produit des quotburden tablesquot montrant combien d'argent tout le monde envoie, ou enverrait, au Trésor. Les gagnants et les perdants sont regroupés selon leur catégorie de revenu brut ajusté et les effets de distribution d'une taxe ou d'une modification d'impôt sont affichés. Des tables de charges sont également préparées à l'occasion par le Trésor et le Bureau du budget du Congrès, ainsi que par des groupes de recherche privés, en utilisant parfois des hypothèses et des méthodes d'affichage parfois semblables, parfois différentes (comme par quintile quinquennal). Les tableaux des charges sont censés éclairer le système fiscal ou l'effet d'une nouvelle proposition fiscale, mais ils font souvent plus d'obscurcir que d'éclairer les faits. La véritable mesure du fardeau d'une taxe est le changement de situation économique des personnes en raison de la taxe. Les changements devraient être mesurés comme les effets sur tous les revenus nets de la taxe après tous les ajustements économiques ont suivi leurs cours. La mesure de la charge devrait inclure non seulement les changements dans les revenus de la population après impôt dans une seule année, mais les conséquences à vie de la modification fiscale ainsi. Malheureusement, les décideurs politiques ne sont pas présentés avec ce type d'informations complètes sur la charge réelle de la fiscalité et doivent faire des jugements politiques fondées sur des statistiques incomplètes et trompeuses. On ne peut pas dire le fardeau réel d'une taxe juste en regardant où ou sur qui il est initialement imposé, ou à ce qu'il est appelé. Les impôts affectent le comportement des contribuables, ce qui provoque des changements économiques qui déplacent régulièrement certains ou même tout le fardeau économique d'une taxe pour d'autres parties et modifient la production et les revenus totaux. Les taxes réduisent et faussent le mélange de ce que les gens sont prêts à produire dans leurs rôles de travailleurs, d'épargnants et d'investisseurs. Les taxes augmentent ce que ces producteurs cherchent à facturer pour leurs services ou produits. Les changements dans les prix et les quantités de la production affectent à leur tour les gens dans leur rôle de consommateurs lorsqu'ils essaient de dépenser leurs revenus. La perte de production et les autres conséquences de la fiscalité imposent des coûts supplémentaires aux contribuables qui ne se reflètent pas dans les simples montants en dollars des recettes fiscales. Le Trésor a bien résolu ces problèmes dans son étude de 1991 portant sur la suppression de la double imposition des revenus des sociétés, écrivant ceci: Le fardeau économique d'une taxe ne relève souvent pas de la personne ou de l'entreprise qui a la responsabilité légale de payer la taxe le gouvernement. Cette charge, ou incidence, d'une taxe se réfère à la variation des revenus réels qui résulte de l'imposition d'un changement d'impôt1. Ces effets ultimes et ces charges fiscales sont explorés dans un coin de la littérature économique, mais ils ne sont nulle part Que l'on trouve dans les tableaux des quotburden qui sont préparés par les organismes gouvernementaux et scrutés dans les débats fiscaux. Au lieu de cela, les tables de charge sont construites en utilisant des hypothèses grossières et des règles empiriques simplifiées pour attribuer diverses taxes aux fournisseurs de main-d'oeuvre ou de capital, ou aux consommateurs. Ces hypothèses et ces règles sont souvent adoptées plus pour la facilité de calcul que pour l'exactitude économique. En fait, aucune table de fardeau jamais publiée n'a été fondée sur la façon dont les impôts affectent réellement les revenus. Quel prix payons-nous pour ne pas glisser sur le fardeau économique réel d'une taxe? Le fait de ne pas comprendre et de tenir compte des conséquences économiques de la fiscalité conduit à une fausse déclaration de la répartition de la charge fiscale. Cela a abouti à un système fiscal qui, tout en prétendant promouvoir la justice sociale, est effectivement nuisible aux travailleurs à faible revenu et aux épargnants, tout en nuisant à la population dans son ensemble. Une meilleure compréhension des conséquences économiques et des charges réelles de la fiscalité est indispensable pour parvenir à un système fiscal optimal qui minimise les dommages économiques et sociaux associés au financement des dépenses publiques. Une meilleure compréhension des conséquences économiques de la fiscalité serait également bénéfique pour le Trésor et le Congrès, car ils planifient le budget fédéral et envisager des changements dans le système fiscal. Il devrait permettre une prévision plus précise des recettes. Il pourrait également encourager l'adoption de factures fiscales qui visent davantage à accroître le revenu national et individuel et moins à redistribuer le niveau actuel du produit national. Cet article traitera des conséquences économiques de la fiscalité et des facteurs qui influent sur la réalité du fardeau des diverses taxes. Il examinera quelques-unes des discussions dans la littérature économique. Enfin, il semblerait qu'un changement vers un type de régime fiscal nettement différent profiterait à tous les acteurs de l'économie. II. La terminologie de la terminologie Les termes d'incidence quottaxique et de charge quottaxale sont jetés assez vaguement dans la littérature économique et dans la presse populaire. Certains auteurs les utilisent de façon interchangeable pour l'un ou l'autre des concepts de l'effet d'une taxe. Certains auteurs les utilisent pour des concepts distincts, mais différents auteurs ne s'entendent pas sur quel terme signifie quel concept. Ce document cherchera à distinguer clairement entre plusieurs concepts distincts de quotincidence d'une taxe et à réserver un terme unique pour chacun d'eux. Nous définissons trois concepts: Quotstatutoryquot ou quotlegal obligation, qui se réfère à la personne à qui la loi dit que l'obligation fiscale tombe (ce qui peut avoir peu de relation avec qui ressent effectivement la douleur). L'incidence économique quotinitial (ou quotinitidisquot à court terme ), Qui est de savoir comment les conditions économiques d'offre et de demande sur le marché du produit ou du service taxé ou du facteur de production répartissent la taxe entre les fournisseurs et les consommateurs de l'élément taxé (qui peut être différente à court et à long terme) Le quotultimbre fardeau économique (ou quotburme court), qui mesure l'évolution des revenus des personnes après impôt après que tous les ajustements économiques de la taxe aient eu lieu dans tous les marchés affectés à mesure que les comportements de consommation, l'utilisation des ressources et les revenus se déplacent vers leurs nouveaux modèles . Ces définitions distinguent entre les termes quotincidence et quotburden. On entend par incidence les effets économiques partiels de la taxe sur le marché propre, qui peuvent également être considérés comme des analyses d'équilibre partiel. «Burdenquot» se définit comme les résultats économiques d'équilibre général impliquant tous les marchés. Lorsque le journal cite d'autres sources qui utilisent les termes différemment, le lecteur doit effectuer la traduction mentale nécessaire.3 III. L'exemple simple d'une taxe d'accise sélective: Obligation statutaire, Incidence initiale, Charge ultime Définition d'une taxe d'accise simple Considérons l'imposition d'une taxe d'accise sélective, comme la taxe sur les cigarettes ou la taxe sur l'essence. (Voir le graphique 1.) En l'absence d'impôt, l'offre serait égale à la demande au point d'équilibre E0, avec un prix unitaire de P0 et une quantité de Q0 unités. Imposer une taxe par unité de t (Pc-Pp) entraîne un coin entre le prix payé par le consommateur (Pc) et le prix reçu par le producteur (Pp). Comme le prix brut à l'acheteur est augmenté, la quantité demandée diminue (mouvement le long de la courbe de demande). Comme le prix net reçu par le vendeur tombe, moins est fourni (mouvement le long de la courbe d'offre). La quantité de sortie tombe de sa valeur initiale (Q0) à sa nouvelle valeur (Q1). L'équilibre du marché passe de E0 à E1. Les recettes fiscales sont t x Q1 (la superficie ombragée, la quantité de taxes unitaires). Notez que le revenu n'est pas égale à t fois la quantité initiale du produit en l'absence de la taxe il est t fois la réduction de la production provoquée par la taxe. Dans le langage courant, on considère que la partie supérieure du rectangle des revenus (Pc-P0) x Q1 est la part de la taxe qui incombe au consommateur parce qu'il paie maintenant un prix plus élevé pour l'impôt. La partie inférieure du rectangle (P0-Pp) x Q1 est considérée comme la part de la taxe qui incombe au producteur sous la forme d'un prix net d'impôts et de recettes moins élevé pour la vente du produit. La réduction de la production prive le consommateur de la valeur qu'il place sur la production perdue, la zone trapézoïdale plus grande sous la courbe de demande entre Q0 et Q1. La réduction de la sortie libère des ressources pour d'autres utilisations égales à la zone trapézoïdale plus courte sous la courbe d'offre entre Q0 et Q1. Le triangle ombré entre les courbes d'offre et de demande est le coût social de la taxe, représentant la valeur excédentaire du produit perdu sur son coût de ressources, réparti entre le consommateur et le producteur. L'imposition de la taxe est parfois illustrée par un déplacement vers l'arrière de la courbe d'offre (déplacement de la courbe de l'offre tax-inclusive pour passer par le point E1, quotsupply marqué avec taxoy dans le diagramme). Cela peut être considéré comme montrant la taxe à un coût d'appel du produit. Alternativement, il est décrit comme une représentation d'une taxe imposée au consommateur, en insistant sur le prix brut plus élevé payé à la suite de l'impôt. La taxe peut également être tirée comme un changement vers l'arrière dans la courbe de demande, le déplacement de passer par le point où le prix est égal à Pp et la quantité est égale à Q1. Cela est parfois décrit comme illustrant une taxe imposée au producteur, en insistant sur la réception par le producteur du prix net de la taxe plus bas. Que la taxe soit décrite comme payée par le producteur ou par le consommateur, le résultat est le même: la hausse du prix à l'acheteur à Pc, la baisse du prix au vendeur à Pp, et la baisse de la production à Q1 sont identiques selon la vue et dépendent entièrement du taux de la taxe et des pentes (élasticités) des courbes d'offre et de demande. L'élasticité sera discutée plus en détail ci-dessous. Obligation légale ou légale d'une taxe d'accise Qui paie une taxe d'accise sélective L'obligation légale de payer dépend du libellé de la loi. Elle pourrait être appelée soit une taxe au consommateur (par exemple, la taxe d'accise sur l'essence, perçue à la pompe), soit une taxe au niveau du producteur (par exemple les taxes sur l'alcool et le tabac, recueillies auprès des fabricants). Comme le montre le diagramme, la distinction n'a pas de signification économique et ne reflète pas la division économique de la charge fiscale. Les consommateurs et les producteurs sont tous les deux touchés dans une certaine mesure, indépendamment de l'étiquette réglementaire. La façon dont ils partagent l'incidence de la taxe dépend entièrement de leur réactivité aux fluctuations des prix, des pentes des courbes de l'offre et de la demande et non de la question de savoir si le libellé de la loi accorde au consommateur la taxe Transmis au gouvernement, ou si la loi désigne le vendeur comme étant directement chargé de la taxe. Incidence économique d'une taxe d'accise L'incidence économique initiale est calculée comme étant proportionnellement inférieure aux consommateurs, à l'étendue des recettes qu'ils paient, plus leur part du triangle des pertes mortelles et en partie aux producteurs, dans la mesure des recettes qu'ils paient Plus leur part de la perte mortelle. Les producteurs sont les travailleurs qui fournissent la main-d'oeuvre et les investisseurs qui fournissent le capital à une entreprise. Qu'entend-on par dire qu'une partie de la taxe d'accise incombe aux producteurs? Lorsqu'une taxe est imposée sur un produit final, la réduction de la demande et de la production du produit réduit à son tour la demande pour les intrants utilisés pour produire le produit Réduit les salaires des travailleurs et les rendements des investisseurs en matière d'épargne. Il est à noter que la plupart des consommateurs sont aussi des travailleurs et / ou des fournisseurs de capital (sauf s'ils vivent entièrement de l'aide sociale ou d'autres paiements de transfert). La taxe d'accise, dans la mesure où les consommateurs la paient ou dans la mesure où elle les amène à réaffecter leurs ressources à des choix de deuxième choix, réduit la quantité et la valeur de ce qu'ils peuvent acheter avec un dollar de revenu supplémentaire. La taxe dévalue leurs gains de travail ou d'épargne. C'est-à-dire que, dans la mesure où la taxe est dépassée pour les consommateurs, elle est en fin de compte une taxe sur leurs revenus de travail et de capital. Toutes les taxes sont en fin de compte des impôts sur le revenu, c'est-à-dire sur les producteurs. Une taxe d'accise s'applique soit à la main-d'œuvre et au capital employés dans l'industrie taxée, soit aux consommateurs qui fournissent des services de main-d'œuvre et de capitaux dans d'autres industries. Incidence et élasticité. La façon dont les acheteurs et les vendeurs partagent l'incidence initiale d'une taxe dépend de leur comportement sur le marché. La partie de la taxe que l'acheteur ou le vendeur assume comme payante dépend de la réactivité de la demande et de la fourniture du produit ou de l'intrant au fur et à mesure que le prix change. Dans le graphique, cela se reflète dans la pente des courbes de demande et d'offre. «Élasticité» désigne la variation en pourcentage de la quantité d'un produit (ou d'un facteur de production, de travail, de capital, de terre, etc.) fourni ou demandé divisé par la variation en pourcentage de son prix (ou salaire ou taux de rendement). Par exemple, si les gens sont facilement découragés d'acheter un produit particulier (ou d'employer un facteur particulier) à mesure que son prix augmente, ce rapport sera élevé, la demande pour le produit (ou pour le facteur) sera élastique et La courbe de demande est plutôt plate. Si les gens ne veulent pas abandonner une grande partie du produit (ou facteur) même si le prix augmente brusquement, le ratio sera faible, la demande est inélastique et la courbe de demande est raide. Les élasticités de la demande et de l'offre tendent à être plus importantes à long terme qu'à court terme. Il faudra peut-être un certain temps pour que les gens s'adaptent pleinement à un changement d'impôt. Par exemple, à court terme, une hausse de la taxe sur l'essence pourrait encourager les gens à réduire leurs déplacements en moins de temps, en mettant en commun leurs véhicules ou en se tournant vers les transports en commun. À long terme, les gens peuvent remplacer leurs voitures existantes par des modèles qui offrent une économie de carburant plus élevée ou peuvent se rapprocher de leur travail. La demande d'essence à long terme devrait être plus élastique que la demande à court terme. Quatre cas extrêmes d'élasticité. Il y a quatre cas extrêmes ou limitatifs qui ne sont généralement pas vus dans le monde réel qui illustrent le concept d'élasticité et ses implications. Approvisionnement parfaitement élastique (graphique 2a). Si un produit est facilement reproduit ou obtenu au même coût unitaire, peu importe le nombre d'unités recherchées, la courbe d'offre est horizontale et le prix net de la taxe est fixé à ce coût marginal. (Exemple: l'approvisionnement dans une petite ville d'une marchandise vendue à l'échelle nationale, par exemple, Budweiser). Si les acheteurs dans la ville sont prêts à payer le prix du marché, ils peuvent obtenir une offre pratiquement illimitée ou au moins tout ce qu'ils peuvent détenir. S'ils ne sont pas disposés à payer ce prix, ils obtiendront aucun.) Toute taxe est supportée par le consommateur. La production ou la disponibilité diminueront si la demande est sensible au prix. Demande parfaitement élastique (graphique 2b). Si la demande est parfaitement élastique, toute hausse du prix entraînerait un effondrement de la consommation. (Exemple: la demande de bière sur un des stands de la concession sur 12. Si un stand tente de facturer plus que les autres, il perdra toute son activité aux autres stands.) La courbe de demande est horizontale et le marché Le prix est fixe. Toute taxe imposée (sur ce seul site de vente de bière) abaissera simplement le prix net de la taxe au producteur, qui doit supporter la totalité de la taxe. La production tombera si l'offre est sensible au prix. Approvisionnement parfaitement inélastique (graphique 2c). Si l'approvisionnement est parfaitement inélastique, la même quantité de produit doit être offerte quel que soit le prix. (Exemple: fraises périssables sur un marché fermier à la fin de la journée.) La courbe d'offre est verticale. Le prix est fixé par la demande (ce que les consommateurs sont prêts à payer). Toute taxe imposée entraînera une baisse du prix net de la taxe au vendeur, qui doit supporter la taxe. La sortie est inchangée. (Les fraises sont un exemple à court terme. L'incapacité répétée de vendre les fruits se traduira par moins d'être cultivés la saison prochaine.) Demande parfaitement inélastique (graphique 2d). Si la demande est totalement insensible au prix, les gens insistent sur la même quantité de production indépendamment de ce qui doit être payé. (Par exemple, les drogues addictives. Les toxicomanes qui ont besoin d'un correctif exigeront que les médicaments atteignent la totalité de leurs ressources.) La courbe de demande est verticale et toute taxe sera supportée par les consommateurs. La sortie est inchangée. (Il est évident qu'il s'agit d'une langue dans la joue.) Un marchand de drogues illégales n'est pas plus susceptible de percevoir et de remettre une taxe de vente hypothétique qu'il est de signaler ses profits illégaux à l'IRS en vertu de l'impôt sur le revenu. L'impôt sur le revenu n'éliminerait pas l'évasion fiscale dans l'économie clandestine.) La base d'imposition parfaite sans distorsion Les politiciens recherchent avec ardeur ces deux dernières situations d'offre et de demande parfaitement inélastiques dans leur quête d'une assiette fiscale parfaite. Peu importe à quel point ils pourraient pousser la taxe sur un tel produit, l'assiette fiscale ne s'effondrerait pas et les recettes continueraient à grimper. En particulier, les politiciens aiment croire que les courbes de demande pour les cigarettes, l'alcool et le jeu sont parfaitement inélastiques. Ils ont tort, mais ils continuent de pousser le tabac et l'alcool taux d'imposition plus élevés, en espérant un miracle. Ils obtiennent également avare avec les rapports de paiement sur les loteries parrainées par l'État. Dans ce cas, ce sont ceux qui achètent des billets de loterie qui espèrent un miracle. En théorie, les gouvernements pourraient réduire les distorsions économiques et minimiser les pertes de poids mortel en mettant les taux d'imposition les plus élevés sur les produits ou les intrants qui sont dans la demande ou l'offre la plus inélastique. L'exemple ultime d'une taxe non faussante serait une taxe de tête ou une taxe de scolarité qui est due seulement pour être en vie et qui est totalement sans rapport avec les gains supplémentaires ou le montant de l'activité économique. Toutefois, une telle taxe pourrait ne pas dépasser le critère de la quote-part, à moins qu'il ne puisse être démontré que toutes les parties participeraient à l'amélioration de la production et du revenu nationaux. Charge économique d'une taxe d'accise Le fardeau économique ultime d'une taxe d'accise serait obtenu en portant l'analyse d'un pas de plus. Ce n'est pas seulement les consommateurs et les producteurs du produit taxé qui sont touchés par la taxe. Les ressources tirées de la production des articles taxés doivent chercher un emploi alternatif et généralement gagner des rendements inférieurs dans ces deuxièmes meilleures utilisations. Ils seront en concurrence avec et affectent les ressources dans ces autres utilisations. Par exemple, les terres retirées de la production de tabac en raison de la hausse des taxes sur les cigarettes peuvent être utilisées pour produire des légumes, réduisant le prix des légumes. Les cultivateurs de tabac déplacés et les camionneurs existants qui sont maintenant confrontés à une concurrence accrue sont blessés, tandis que les consommateurs de légumes en bénéficient. L'impact de la taxe peut changer avec le temps. Une nouvelle taxe sur le vin peut tout d'abord frapper les vignobles, car leurs vignes, cuves de fermentation et machines d'embouteillage sont encore en place et gagneront plus d'être utilisés que d'être fermés si les revenus réduits après impôt couvrent au moins les coûts de main-d'œuvre. Plus tard, cependant, les vignes peuvent être déterrées et la terre déplacée vers d'autres cultures qui donnent maintenant un rendement plus élevé. La machine peut s'user et ne pas être remplacée. À mesure que l'offre tombe, la taxe d'accise sera transférée aux consommateurs à plus long terme. Ils devront payer plus pour une bouteille de vin. Ils peuvent transférer une partie de leurs dépenses à d'autres biens et services, affectant d'autres industries. Le capital humain peut supporter une partie du coût. Si une taxe sur le vin oblige un vignoble à se transformer en raisins de table ou en avocats, les ouvriers du vignoble peuvent être tenus de tendre et de cueillir les nouvelles récoltes si leurs compétences sont transférables. Il serait différent pour les experts techniques responsables de la fermentation, des essais et de la dégustation des vins, ils ne peuvent pas avoir recours à ces compétences hautement spécialisées qui deviennent redondantes. Ces spécialistes qui sont forcés dans d'autres professions vont perdre la prime de salaire de leurs compétences commandé. Les grottes dans lesquelles les vins sont stockés et les pentes avec des microclimats propres à la production viticole perdront leur avantage et une partie du loyer qu'ils commandent dans la production de vin. La nécessité de considérer ces ramifications à l'échelle de l'économie et à long terme, appelée analyse d'équilibre quotgénéral, n'est pas une idée nouvelle dans la théorie fiscale. La discussion classique d'Alfred Marshall sur les incidences de la fiscalité dans ses Principes de l'Economie est aussi valable aujourd'hui qu'elle l'était il y a environ cent ans. Les impôts sur les intrants sont supportés en grande partie par les fournisseurs des intrants si ces intrants n'ont pas de bonnes utilisations alternatives (approvisionnement inélastique), mais sont supportés en grande partie par les consommateurs du produit si les intrants sont facilement déplacés vers d'autres utilisations. Une nouvelle taxe imposée sur le capital existant sera supportée à court terme par le capital, mais elle peut décourager le renouvellement du stock de capital au fur et à mesure de son usure, ce qui entraînera l'imposition de la taxe sur les consommateurs à long terme (et sur tout autre intrant immobile Qui aurait travaillé avec le capital perdu). Une taxe nationale peut avoir un impact sur les producteurs et les consommateurs du produit, mais une taxe locale poussera simplement les producteurs à transférer leurs intrants vers une autre partie du pays. En termes de Marshallrsquos: Il est un principe général que si une taxe empiète sur quelque chose utilisé par un ensemble de personnes dans la production de biens ou de services pour être disposé à d'autres personnes, la taxe tend à vérifier la production. Cela tend à transférer une grande partie de la charge des impôts sur les consommateurs, et une petite partie vers l'arrière à ceux qui répondent aux besoins de cet ensemble de producteurs. De même, une taxe sur la consommation de quelque chose est déplacée plus ou moins vers l'arrière vers son producteur. Par exemple, une taxe imprévue et lourde sur l'impression frapperait fort les commerçants, car s'ils cherchaient à hausser les prix, la demande s'effondrerait rapidement; mais le coup porterait inégalement sur les différentes classes engagées dans le commerce. Comme les machines à imprimer et les compositeurs ne peuvent pas facilement trouver un emploi hors du commerce, les prix des machines à imprimer et les salaires des composteurs seraient maintenus à un niveau bas pendant un certain temps. D'autre part, les bâtiments et les machines à vapeur, les porteurs, les ingénieurs et les commis n'attendraient pas que leur nombre soit ajusté par le lent processus de décroissance naturelle à la demande diminuée, certains d'entre eux seraient rapidement à l'œuvre dans d'autres métiers, Et très peu de la charge resterait longtemps sur ceux d'entre eux qui sont restés dans le commerce. Une partie considérable de la charge relèverait encore des industries secondaires, comme celles qui se consacrent à la fabrication du papier et du type, car le marché de leurs produits serait réduit. Les auteurs et les éditeurs et booksellershellipwould souffrir un littlehellip. Si la taxe n'était que locale, les compositeurs migreraient hors de leur portée et les propriétaires d'imprimeries pourraient supporter une part plus importante de la charge que ceux dont les ressources étaient plus mobiles. Ensuite, supposons que la taxe soit prélevée sur les machines à imprimer plutôt que sur les imprimés. Dans ce cas, si les imprimeurs n'avaient pas de presses semi-obsolètes qu'ils étaient enclins à détruire ou à laisser inutilisés, la taxe ne frapperait pas la production marginale: elle n'influerait pas immédiatement sur la production de l'imprimerie ni sur son prix. Il n'intercepterait qu'une partie des gains des presses sur le chemin des propriétaires et abaisserait les quasi-loyers des presses. Mais cela n'influerait pas sur le taux des bénéfices nets nécessaires pour inciter les gens à investir du capital liquide dans les presses; par conséquent, à mesure que les anciennes presses s'épuisaient, la taxe augmenterait les dépenses marginales. L'offre d'impression serait réduite, son prix augmenterait: et les nouvelles presses ne seraient introduites que jusqu'à la marge à laquelle ils seraient capables de payer la taxe et de produire des bénéfices normaux sur les dépenses. Lorsque cette étape serait atteinte, la répartition du fardeau d'une taxe sur les presses sera dorénavant presque la même que celle d'une taxe sur les coquilles d'impression.4 Les tableaux de fardeau de la taxe d'accise Taxe de taxe Qu'incidence et quelles tables de fardeau utilisent le moins significatif de tous les concepts ci - De l'incidence et du fardeau de répartir l'incidence des droits d'accise. Les tableaux des charges supposent que toutes les taxes d'accise, qu'il s'agisse de consommateurs étiquetés ou de fabricants, sont payées entièrement par les consommateurs des produits (comme dans le cadre du concept d'obligation légale d'une taxe de consommation). La quote-part de la taxe entre les niveaux de revenu est calculée en prenant le montant moyen dépensé sur le produit par des personnes dans diverses classes de revenu brut ajusté multiplié par le taux d'imposition. Les tableaux ne tiennent pas compte de la scission entre les producteurs et les consommateurs qui doit se produire sur tout marché à élasticités normales. En outre, ils ne considèrent que les recettes collectées, t x Q1, et ignorent la perte de poids mort, de sorte que, même en ignorant la scission, ils ne mesurent pas l'incidence initiale totale correctement. Un analyste de la taxe d'accise au JCT ou au Trésor utilisera les élasticités à long terme de la demande et de l'offre pour le bien imposable pour estimer le changement éventuel de la consommation (la baisse du Q0 au T1) et estimera les recettes fiscales que le Trésor recevra Au nouveau niveau de consommation réduit. Dans la construction d'un tableau des charges, il attribuera toute l'incidence de la taxe aux consommateurs. Toutefois, l'analyste n'assurera aucune perte de rendement ou d'efficacité totale pour l'ensemble de l'économie et aucune perte de recettes provenant d'autres impôts, car il suppose que les ressources tirées de la production du bien taxé trouvent un autre emploi à des gains pratiquement inchangés. Il ignore tout déplacement du fardeau économique pour les producteurs à mesure que les ressources sont transférées vers des utilisations alternatives, moins payées. L'analyse des tables de charge rend donc le total et la distribution des taxes d'accise erronées, sauf dans le cas extrême d'un produit dans une demande absolument inélastique. IV. Extension de l'analyse: impôts sur le revenu et sur la masse salariale sur le capital et la main-d'œuvre Le même type de diagramme peut s'appliquer à toute taxe. La taxe peut être une taxe générale sur les ventes ou un impôt sur la masse salariale ou sur le revenu des personnes physiques ou l'impôt sur le revenu des sociétés. Dans le cas d'une taxe sur le revenu du travail, le prix devient le salaire, et la quantité devient des heures travaillées ou le niveau d'emploi ou une autre mesure des services de travail. Dans le cas des services de capitaux, le prix devient le taux de rendement du capital, et la quantité est le montant des services de capitaux à venir provenant du stock d'équipement, de structures et de terrains. La demande de main-d'œuvre et de capital reflète la valeur pour l'employeur d'utiliser des unités supplémentaires de main-d'œuvre et de capital. La production additionnelle obtenue en employant un autre ouvrier ou une autre machine est le produit quotmarginal de la main-d'œuvre ou du produit marginal du capital. La production physique additionnelle multipliée par le prix qu'elle vend (produit de valeur marginale) est la plus qu'une entreprise paiera pour embaucher un Travailleur supplémentaire ou payer les services d'une machine ou d'un bâtiment supplémentaire. Comme plus d'un facteur est ajouté, d'autres facteurs maintenus constants, la production augmente, mais à un taux de diminution. C'est le fameux quotlaw des rendements décroissants. Le déclin progressif des produits marginaux du travail ou du capital comme plus d'un d'entre eux est employé est pourquoi les courbes de demande pour les facteurs pente vers le bas. Les graphiques 3 et 4 illustrent les conditions d'offre et de demande généralement présumées pour les entrées de main-d'œuvre et de capital largement définies, respectivement, et les différents effets que l'on pourrait s'attendre de l'imposition de ces facteurs. L'offre de travail. L'offre de travail est plutôt inélastique. Il était à la mode dans les années 1950 et 1960 d'affirmer que l'offre de main-d'œuvre était presque parfaitement inélastique par rapport au salaire (ou salaire après impôt). C'est-à-dire que les travailleurs n'ont pas beaucoup changé leur offre de travail en réponse à des changements dans le salaire après impôt. On pensait que les hommes adultes représentaient la plus grande partie de la main-d'œuvre et, en tant que famille, ils étaient très attachés à la main-d'œuvre. En outre, ils étaient généralement des employés de sociétés ou d'autres entreprises qui fixaient leurs heures de travail, leur donnant pratiquement aucune option que de travailler une semaine de 40 heures à moins qu'il y ait des heures supplémentaires, qui étaient généralement obligatoires, ou ils étaient prêts à prendre des emplois secondaires. Étant donné leur capacité limitée à modifier leurs heures de travail ou leur participation au marché du travail, ces travailleurs étaient censés supporter tous les impôts perçus sur le travail, y compris l'impôt sur le revenu et l'impôt sur les salaires. C'est la convention encore utilisée dans les tables de charge. Au fil du temps, la plupart des femmes mariées et de nombreux adolescents sont entrés sur le marché du travail, et un nombre croissant de quotretirees occupent des emplois à temps partiel. Beaucoup de ces travailleurs sont moins étroitement liés à la main-d'œuvre que les hommes de premier âge. Depuis les années 1980 et 1990, une plus grande partie de la main-d'œuvre est devenue un travailleur autonome ou cherche à travailler à temps partiel. Ces travailleurs ont beaucoup plus de souplesse pour fixer leurs propres heures et d'afficher un attachement moins rigide à la main-d'œuvre que les hommes adultes. En outre, comme les couples à deux soutiens sont devenus la norme, les hommes ont eu plus de possibilités de travailler moins, grâce à leurs revenus de femmes. Bien que les hommes ont peut-être moins travaillé que le revenu familial augmenté, le couple peut avoir travaillé plus, en prenant les deux conjoints efforts ensemble. On devrait s'attendre à des élasticités plus élevées pour les travailleurs à revenu élevé, dont le revenu et la richesse leur donnent une plus grande souplesse pour modifier leurs heures tout en maintenant un niveau de vie élevé. Les estimations consensuelles modernes de l'élasticité de la main-d'œuvre, bien que toujours faibles, sont généralement non nulles. Par exemple, une enquête auprès de 65 économistes du travail a produit des estimations de l'élasticité de l'offre de travail pour les hommes de 0,1 (estimation moyenne) et de zéro (estimation médiane). Pour les femmes, l'enquête a donné des estimations de 0,45 (moyenne) et 0,3 (médiane) .5 La demande de main-d'œuvre. La demande de main-d'œuvre est modérément élastique. Sa part importante du revenu national en fait une dépense importante pour les employeurs, et le produit marginal du travail ne diminue que graduellement à mesure que la main-d'œuvre augmente. Dans une certaine mesure, le capital peut être substitué à la main-d'œuvre si le coût de la main-d'œuvre augmente. Il est également possible de déplacer la production à forte intensité de main-d'œuvre à l'étranger pour tirer parti de la baisse des coûts du travail si la main-d'œuvre étrangère est suffisamment productive pour faire une différence dans les coûts unitaires de main-d'œuvre. L'offre de capitaux. L'offre de capitaux est très élastique. Le capital physique (équipements et structures industrielles, commerciales et résidentielles) peut être facilement reproduit ou agrandi (avec un peu de temps). De plus, les investisseurs semblent disposés à construire et à employer des installations, des équipements et des bâtiments supplémentaires chaque fois que le taux de rendement après impôt corrigé du risque s'approche d'environ 3% (encore une fois, un peu plus tard) 6. (buy claims to the earnings of) capital assets at about a 3 percent after-tax risk-adjusted rate of return, substituting additional saving for additional consumption. Thus, the supply of investment goods and the supply of saving to pay for it are both fairly elastic over time. Conversely, when rates of return on physical capital fall below that level, old assets are not replaced when they wear out. Investors and savers use a bit more of their income for consumption instead, which is, at the margin, virtually as attractive as the foregone investment. The Demand for Capital. The demand for capital is fairly elastic because the marginal product of capital declines only gradually as the stock increases. Years of real-world observations suggest that it takes a significant rise in the quantity of capital and the capital-to-labor ratio to depress returns and discourage further investment. Incidence of taxes on labor and Capital Incidence of labor Taxes. The relatively elastic demand for labor, coupled with the assumption of a highly inelastic supply of labor, means that labor bears most of the initial economic incidence of taxes on labor income. It has become common to assert that all taxes on labor income fall on the worker, including the employersrsquo share of the payroll tax, the employeesrsquo share of the payroll tax, the unemployment compensation tax, and the portion of the income tax that falls on wages and salaries. However, the modern workforce is seen to display some elasticity of supply and to that extent, it must be assumed that workers will respond to higher tax rates by taking more leisure, and the quantity of labor supplied would fall. A reduced workforce would lower the productivity of the capital stock, suggesting that some of the ultimate burden of a tax on labor would fall on capital owners. (Just as the productivity of a given number of workers is enhanced if they have more capital to work with, the productivity of a given amount of capital is enhanced if there are more workers, particularly more skilled workers, to utilize it. Conversely, if fewer skilled workers were available, the productivity of capital would decline. Think of what would happen to the earnings of the fifth truck at a small trucking company if one of the five truck drivers called in sick.) However, the capital stock may contract in response to a drop in its productivity and rate of return in order to restore its former rate of earnings (see below), which would shift the burden back onto the work force. Incidence of taxes on Capital Income. The incidence of a tax on capital income depends greatly on the time frame. Physical capital cannot disappear overnight (in the event of a tax increase), and it takes time to add to the stock of plant, equipment, and buildings (in the event of a tax reduction). Immediately after a tax increase is imposed on businesses or savers, their after-tax returns on old assets would be depressed. Financial market adjustments would come swiftly. Bond and stock prices would fall, restoring after-tax returns for new buyers and forcing new borrowers to offer higher interest rates and rates of return to new investors. Over time, investors in physical capital can adapt. The high long-run elasticity of supply of capital suggests that a tax imposed on capital will reduce the capital stock until the gross return rises to cover the tax, leaving the after-tax return about where it was before the tax was imposed. Because of the high elasticities of supply and demand for capital, the reduction in the capital stock may have to be substantial to increase its return by enough to cover the tax. As a result, taxes on the earnings of capital assets or on saving may result in sharp reductions in the stock of capital available for production. Downward adjustments in the physical capital stock may take time because capital takes some years to wear out. Eventually, the reduction in the capital stock (or slower than normal growth) will bring it back into balance with the growth in demand for capital associated with population growth. Adjustment to an adverse shock may take a few years for equipment, a decade or two for structures. (For example, in the 1988-1990 period, Japan instituted an quotanti-tax reformquot that sharply raised taxes on capital income, including interest and capital gains from stocks, and increased taxes on buildings and land. The result was a particularly severe economic shock that not only affected the returns to physical capital but threw much of the Japanese financial sector into chaos as stock and land prices plunged. It has taken nearly 15 years to sort out the mess. Most shocks are not that severe, and most adjustment periods are not that long.) Positive shocks may be easier to deal with. New equipment can be ordered and placed in service in a few months, new housing constructed within a few quarters, and new commercial or office buildings put up within two or three years. Implications of Incidence for the Tax Base The differences in the elasticities of supply and demand for labor and capital suggest that a tax imposed evenly on labor and capital income will reduce the stock of capital by more than the quantity of labor supplied. (Compare Charts 3 and 4.) Such a tax is more distorting of economic behavior than a tax imposed chiefly on labor income. This suggests an economic advantage from moving away from the so-called broad-based income tax, which actually taxes income used for saving and capital formation more heavily than income used for consumption, to various taxes that are saving-consumption-neutral.7 Such neutral taxes are often labeled as consumption-based or consumed-income-based and are often, somewhat erroneously, described as taxing labor and exempting returns on capital income. These taxes do, in fact, tax quasi-rents and other abnormal returns to capital that exceed the cost of the saving required to obtain the assets. One argument against major reform of the tax system (moving to a saving-consumption-neutral tax) is that, if labor is truly in highly inelastic supply, sweeping tax rate reductions would do little to boost labor force participation and hours worked and would have only limited economic benefits. Advocates of the tax status quo, or of higher tax rates on upper-income workers, should be careful in making such arguments. A highly inelastic supply of labor would also mean that there is a relatively small reduction in employment from taxes on labor income at all levels, which would make such taxes relatively non-distorting of economic activity. In theory, for those public finance graduates who put great stock on avoiding quoteconomic distortionquot and maximizing quoteconomic efficiency, quot this should make labor income the ideal tax base. One suspects, however, that people who oppose fundamental tax reform proposals on the grounds that they may appear superficially to be regressive and shift the tax burden from capital income to labor income would not favor heavy taxes on labor income as an alternative. The Ultimate Burden: Further Tax Shifting in a General Equilibrium Framework labor and Capital: Complements More than Substitutes. Output and incomes are at their highest when optimal amounts of labor and capital work together to create the goods and services on which consumers place the greatest value. Depending on the production process, there may be some room to substitute labor for capital (or vice versa) or to substitute skilled labor for unskilled labor. For the economy as a whole, however, and in most situations, the various skills and talents of the workforce, managers, and entrepreneurs and the services of various types of capital are complements in production, not substitutes. That is, the more there is of any one type of factor, the higher will be the productivity and incomes of the other factors that work with it and gain from its presence. If there is more capital for labor to work with, wages rise. If an increase in the skilled work force makes capital more productive, the returns on capital go up. taxes Matter quotat the Margin. quot taxes affect the willingness of labor and capital to participate in production or, put another way, taxes affect the cost of labor and capital services, and therefore the cost of production. Supply decisions are not usually all or nothing. One chooses to work a little bit more or less, or to save a little more or less, or to employ a slightly higher or lower number of machines, or slightly more or less powerful or modern ones, on the factory floor. The tax rates that affect such decisions are the marginal tax rates that apply to the last or next dollar to be earned from small reductions or increases in onersquos economic activity. taxes that fall at the margin on incremental activity reduce the quantity of resources available for production. With fewer inputs, there will be less output and income, according to the characteristics of the production process. Lump-sum taxes, such as a head tax, involve a fixed dollar amount owed regardless of income, and so have no impact on decisions about increasing onersquos earnings. Likewise, one-time retroactive tax hits do not apply to future income, although they may make taxpayers suspicious that they will be repeated. Such taxes are not quotat the margin, quot meaning that they do not affect the last or next dollar earned, and are the only kind of tax that does not reduce incentives and curtail activity. Similarly, rebates of taxes on income of past years, such as President Gerald Fordrsquos 1975 tax rebate on 1974 income tax liability, give no incentive to increase output in the future. Taxing One Factor Hurts the Other. If a tax falls quotat the margin, quot it depresses the reward to the taxed factor of production, and less of that factorrsquos services will be offered and employed. Because there is less of that input, all the other factors that work with it suffer a loss of productivity and income. They, too, bear some of the burden of the tax. For example, a tax that reduces the quantity of capital lowers the wages of labor. labor thus bears much of the burden of the tax on capital. (See Chart 5.) Taxing Capital Hurts labor a Lot. Insofar as some inputs are more affected by the taxes than others, they may withdraw their services to a greater or lesser extent than others do. As some inputs withdraw heavily from the market, their relative scarcity affects the productivity, employment, and income of other productive inputs with which they would normally work. Because capital is more sensitive to taxation than labor, a tax on capital will have a relatively large adverse impact on the quantity of capital, which will then cause a relatively large drop in the marginal product and compensation of labor. taxes on labor hurt capital as well, but because labor is less elastic in supply and withdraws less from the market, the effect is less pronounced. Consider a small trucking company with five vehicles. Suppose that the rules for depreciating trucks for tax purposes change, with the government demanding that the trucks be written off over five years instead of three. The owner has had enough business to run four trucks flat out and a fifth part-time. He is barely breaking even on the fifth truck under old law. It is now time to replace one of the trucks. Under the new tax regime, it does not quite pay to maintain the fifth truck. The owner decides not to replace it, and his income is only slightly affected. But what happens to the wages of the fifth truck driver If he is laid off, who bears the burden of the tax increase on the capital Consider another example, involving human capitalmdashspecifically, medical training. Suppose the imposition of a progressive income tax were to discourage the supply of physicians by inducing some doctors to retire, by causing others to work fewer weeks per year, and by dissuading people from applying to medical school. One result would be fewer Jobs available and lower levels of productivity and incomes for nurses and support staff in medical offices and hospitals. Another would be a rise in the price of health care for consumers (including the government). For example, assume that four doctors have been operating separate practices in a large town. Each has been taking off o Such effects may seem small or unlikely at curshyrent tax rates, but they are certainly pronounced when tax rates are very high. Historical examples abound. The 1954 tax overhaul in the United States did little to reduce the top World War II tax rates. The top rate went from 92 percent to 91 pershycent, where it remained until the Kennedy tax rate cuts, which lowered the top marginal rate in stages to 70 percent in 1964 and 1965. President Ronald Reagan often remarked that at such extreme tax rates, it did not pay him to make more that one or two movies a year. There were obvious adverse effects on the U. S. labor markets from the inflashytion-induced bracket creep of the 1970s, which pushed marginal tax rates higher across the board. The top tax rate in Britain before Margaret Thatchers reforms in 1979 was 98 percent. The infamous British brain drain was one result.8 In short, taxes on capital reduce the wages of labor taxes on labor reduce the rates of return on capital (at least in the short run, until the capital stock shrinks) taxes on certain types of labor reduce the wages of other types of labor taxes on certain types of capital reduce the returns on other types of capital. The repercussions of a tax on one factor of production on the income of other factors, or of a tax on one sector of the economy on other sectors, are general equilibrium effects. They occur outside of the immediate market for the factor or product being taxed and represent impacts that go beyond the initial economic incidence of the tax. Such effects are part of the ultimate economic burshyden of the tax and represent some of the shifting of the tax burden from the taxed factors or products to other factors and sectors. Implications of Burden Shifting for the Tax Base Even for labor, the Optimal Tax on Capital Is Zero. Several studies in the economic literature illustrate that a zero tax rate on capital income would raise the after-tax income of labor, in present-value terms, even if labor must pick up the tab for the lost tax revenue. That is, a tax on capital is effectively shifted to labor, which pays more than the full value of the tax. In a 1974 paper,9 Martin Feldstein explored the consequences of a variable capital stock for the distribution of the tax burden. Previous studies that generally assumed no change in the capital stock had concluded that the burden or benefit of a tax increase or decrease on capital was borne by capital. (See the discussion of the corporate income tax, below.) Feldstein showed the imporshytance of allowing for the capital stock to vary. Feldstein assumed the tax on capital income was eliminated and that on labor was increased in a revenue-neutral manner. He then looked at the least favorable case for labor, in which people were either savers who had no wage income or workers who did no saving. In a statutory obligation or burden table or static sense, the savers would enjoy all of the benefit from the initial tax cut on capital income. All workers would face an initial tax increase on wages equal to the dollar amount of the tax cut on capital. However, Feldstein argued, cutting the tax on the savers would enable them to save more, at the given propensity to save that they display, by leavshying them more after-tax income. The added saving would cause the capital stock to rise to a new equishylibrium level at which the added saving was just sufficient to cover the added depreciation so as to maintain the incremental stock. At the higher capital-to-labor ratio, the producshytivity of labor and the wage would both be higher (Chart 5 in reverse), leaving the workers with higher gross wages and more after-tax income in the steady state despite the higher tax rate on wages. Feldstein showed that, under plausible assumptions, the present value of the increase in future after-tax wages due to the rise in gross wages would be greater than the near-term reducshytion in after-tax wages due to the rise in the tax rate on wages. Workers would be better off in present-value terms with no taxation of capital. A 1986 study by Christophe Chamley showed that the optimal tax rate on capital is zero in the long run under a narrow set of assumptions, including a fixed growth rate not affected by taxes, a closed economy, and identical consumers living infinite lives.10 Many other studies on the shifting of taxes on capital to labor have expanded on this work by easing a number of Feldsteins and Chamshyleys restrictions and using different types of modshyels, showing it to be a more general proposition.11 For example, a 1999 study by Andrew Atkeson, V. V. Chari, and Patrick J. Kehoe demonstrated that Chamleys result holds under greatly relaxed assumptions, including heterogeneous consumers in overlapping generations, an open economy, and a growth rate that is affected by taxes.12 Speed of Adjustment Is Critical. The results in many of these studies are sensitive to the speed of adjustment of the capital stock. In a 1979 paper,13 Professor Robin Boadway questioned the conclusion that labor would gain in present value by eliminating the tax on capital. He suggested that a low elasticity of saving could slow the rise in the capital stock and delay the expected rise in after-tax incomes. If the added capital formation took long enough, the higher tax rate on labor in the not-so-short short run would then outweigh, in present value, the rise in after-tax incomes in the long run, and workers would be worse off. Similarly, a rise in the tax on capital and a reducshytion in the tax on labor might make labor better off for many years before the reduction in the capital stock lowered workers before - and after-tax wages by enough to make them worse off in present value. Boadway suggested that labor might gain from a tax on capital for as long as 65 years before the steady state was reached. Many of these presentations involve stylized models of a highly simplified economy or populashytion. They achieve the change in national saving and the capital stock solely on the basis of mechanically moving disposable income from those who do not save to those who do, at conshystant propensities to save (fixed rates of saving out of labor and capital income), and let the change in saving, which is only a fraction of the shifted income in this approach, determine the change in the capital stock. By contrast, in the real world, a tax change affects the cost of capital and the returns to saving, which in turn alter the desired capital stock and level of saving. These changes in saving and the capital stock can be much larger than the dollar amounts of the tax change. N. Gregory Mankiw has illustrated this mechanshyical type of model in a paper aptly titled The SavshyersSpenders Theory of Fiscal Policy.14 Such models generally assume a closed economy (not open to trade and international capital flows), limshyiting the supply of saving available to boost domestic investment. Most assume their elasticishyties without deriving them from a general equilibshyrium model tested against actual experience. Hence, they cannot be considered robust pictures of the real world. These studies, of which the Boadway study is a good example, produce unduly pessimistic estimates of the length of time it takes to increase the capital stock following a reduction in the tax rate and of the amount by which the capital stock would rise. Reality Check. Traditional economists are used to thinking in terms of a fairly constant propenshysity to save and an inelastic supply of saving. They may be skeptical that the quantity of domesshytic saving can increase by enough to allow for a strong burst of capital formation needed to bring about a rapid adjustment of the capital stock to a tax shock. Their focus on the channels by which the needed investment is financed is misplaced. They should look first at the speed of adjustment in the historical record of the real world and then worry about how it happens rather than declaring an observed phenomenon to be impossible.15 How rapidly the economy will invest or disinshyvest to reach the new equilibrium level of capital depends on several factors, such as the elasticity of saving with respect to the rate of return, the ease with which existing saving flows can be redirected across national borders, the elasticity of the global supply of investment goods and their resulting cost, and the rate at which existing capital wears out (in the case of disinvestment). Although these sources of financing and the production streams of physical capital are flows, they are part of a complex stock adjustment process. One could try to imagine or to measure separately how flexible these flows may be. Alternatively, one could review the changes in the capishytal stock that have occurred in the past following shocks to the after-tax rate of return. The latter approach gives an important reality check. If adjustment of the capital stock has proceeded more rapidly in the past than can be accounted for by the flows of saving and investment preshydicted by some current models, then there may be additional or deeper channels for capital flows in the real world that are not recognized by the models. Its fine in practice, but it will never work in theory. is an indictment of the theory, not of the real phenomenon. Rapid Adjustment of Capital Is the Norm. How fast the capital stock adjusts, which is to say how quickly the return on capital is restored to normal levels after a shock, is really an empirical question, not a theoretical one. Many events, such as technological change, a shift in tax policy, or a shift in inflation, can change the expected returns on capital investment or alter the user cost of capishytal. The result will be a shift in the desired stock of capital, toward which the economy will move over a number of years. Are changes in the rate of return to capital merely consequences of business cycles, or are they independent factors that drive savers and investors to adjust the size of the capital stock to conform to new economic conditions, causing changes in the rate of investment that generate business cycles Gary Robbins of Fiscal Associates and the Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analshyysis has plotted after-tax rates of return to business capital over time. He finds that the movements in the return to capital, in the desired capital stock, and in the resulting swings in investment activity are seen to lead the business cycle up and down. They are therefore most likely to be a cause, not a result, of the business cycle. (See Chart 6.) Robbins also finds that the rates of return have tended strongly to remain in the neighborhood of 3 percent. Between 1956 and 2000, the four-quarter moving average rate averaged 2.76 percent and was within half a percentage point of this average 60 percent of the time. Not only do the returns on capshyital remain within a fairly narrow band over time, but they tend to revert to the band fairly quickly. This implies that, each time there was a major shock to the rate of return, whether traceable to tax, inflation, or technological changes, the quantity of capital has adjusted rapidly and the rate of return was restored soon to its long-run average.16 Robbins has tested the speed of adjustment by running regressions looking at implied desired stocks versus the actual deliveries of capital using various distributed lags. He finds that roughly half of the investment in equipment and structures needed to move to the new desired capital stock will occur in the first three years following the shock and that nearly all of the adjustment is completed within five to 10 years (with structures taking a bit longer than equipment). If the bulk of the increase in the capital stock occurs in the first decade following the tax change, as Robbins has found by looking at historishycal experience, then the case for eliminating the tax on capital is quite strong. An Open economy and Flexibility of Saving Speed the Adjustment of Capital. The observed stability in the real after-tax rate of return in the United States and the speed of adjustment of the capital stock to shocks make sense because, in a global economy, the risk-adjusted rate of return in any sub-region should be kept in rough alignment with global returns. Put another way, the size of the capital stock in any one country is sensitive not merely to the innate desired rate of return that humans display (the marginal rate of time prefershyence), but also to its relative rate of return comshypared to that available on capital abroad. The elasticity of the capital stock in a region is much higher than for the world as a whole. In a closed economy, net national saving (net of government dissaving) equals private investment, and the speed of adjustment to a new desired equilibrium capital stock following a shock is limshyited by the change in the national saving rate. In the case of a tax change in the closed economy, the change in national saving and investment will depend on the immediate effect of the tax change on the government deficit (which is the only effect considered in fixed-GDP static analysis used by government officials) and on the subsequent dynamic effects of the tax change on the nations own domestic private saving, investment, and income, which in turn depends on the elasticity of domestic saving and investment with respect to the after-tax rate of return. However, the limitation imposed by the flexibility of own-country saving does not hold in an integrated world economy with international capital flows. In todays world, it would be a great mistake to assert that the progress of any one nation toward a new equilibrium capital stock following a tax or technological change is limited by its own saving elasticity or by the static tax-induced change in its own national saving rate. Changes in the flow of capital across national borders can have a major impact on the speed of adjustment. For example, following the major tax and monetary policy changes of the early 1980s, new U. S. bank lending abroad dropped from roughly 120 billion in 1982 to under 20 billion in 1984. The drop in U. S. capishytal outflow of 100 billion more than covered the 19821984 change in the government deficit folshylowing the 1980 and 19811982 recessions and the 1981, 1982, and 1984 tax changes. The shift to domestic lending was large enough to finance a large portion of the increase in private investment in the first half of the decade. In addition, the private savshying rate increased. There was only a modest rise in foreign capital flows to the United States in that period. (They rose further later in the decade). Longer time horizons reinforce the importance of international capital flows and of how a nation treats foreign investment. From the first Spanish and English settlements in Florida (St. Augustine, 1565) and Virginia (Jamestown, 1607) until World War I, a period of over 300 years, the region that became the United States experienced a massive inflow of population and capital from Europe, Africa, and Asia. The capital inflow allowed the country to run current account deficits for most of that period. (There was a brief period of current account surplus for about a dozen years after the Civil War, when the U. S. was deflating and importing gold to restore the dollar to the gold standard at the pre-war parity. Being money, the gold inflow was not considered an import. If gold were treated as a commodity, even these surpluses might have been deficits.) Much of the investment in the early U. S. canals, railroads, and industry was financed by foreigners. International capital flows are not a new phenomenon. Neither is awareness of the implications of an open economy for the stock of capital, the wages of labor, and the revenues of the state. Adam Smith laid out the case for treating capital with kid gloves in The Wealth of Nations : The proprietor of stock is properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country. He would be apt to abandon the country in which he was exposed to a vexatious inquisition, in order to be assessed to a burdensome tax, and would remove his stock to some other country where he could either carry on his business, or enjoy his fortune more at his ease. By removing his stock he would put an end to all the industry which it had maintained in the country which he left. Stock cultivates land stock employs labor. A tax which tended to drive away stock from any particular country would so far tend to dry up every source of revenue both to the sovereign and to the society. Not only the profits of stock, but the rent of land and the wages of labour would necessarily be more or less diminished by its removal.17 In addition to the international flow of capital, one must consider the willingness of savers to increase saving at the expense of consumption and to alter their investment plans as conditions change. Since Michael Boskins 1978 paper on savshying and after-tax returns, people have been a bit more willing to concede some flexibility in saving behavior.18 Does Atlas Shrug . edited by Joseph Slemrod, contains a number of interesting studies describshying the taxation of the rich and their responses.19 In Chapter 13. Entrepreneurs, Income taxes, and Investment. authors Robert Carroll, Douglas HoltzEakin, Mark Rider, and Harvey S. Rosen explored the effect of changes in marginal tax rates on the investment behavior of entrepreneurs. They found that a five-percentage point rise in marginal tax rates would reduce the proportion of entrepreshyneurs who make new capital investments by 10.4 percent. Further, such a tax increase would lower mean capital outlays by 9.9 percent. They add. the magnitudes of the estimated response are quite substantial. Our response to the question posed by the title of this volume is that these parshyticular Atlases do indeed shrug.20 Progressive taxes on Human Capital May Also Hurt labor, and a Flat Rate Tax May Be Best. People with particularly high levels of human capital earn returns well above those available to ordinary labor. They may have special talents, such as athletes and entertainers. They may be people with an unusual ability and willingness to make decisions and manage risk, such as successful entreshypreneurs. They may be people who have acquired advanced educations and skills. Such people are among the highest paid people in the country. They earn more, but they also face higher average and marginal tax rates than most workers. Because labor is not homogeneous and there are significant differences in the skill mix across the population, the relative amounts of skilled and unskilled labor can make a difference in the wage rates earned by each group. Taxing the earnings of people with significant human capital at higher rates than ordinary labor may prove to be countershyproductive to workers, just as excessive taxation of physical capital appears to be. If people with sigshynificant human capital withdraw that capital from the market due to high tax rates, the productivity, wages, employment, and incomes of other people who would have worked with them may be lowshyered. The tax on the personal service income of the highly compensated is then shifted to other workshyers and factors.21 Some studies indicate that high-income workers do not seem to reduce work effort in the presence of high tax rates. Several reasons are offered. Upper-income individuals may receive some of their compensation in the form of psychic perks rather than financial rewards. The tax may be avoided by changing the method of compensation. The tax may be shifted to other factors. Psychic perks might include the power and presshytige that are associated with prominent positions in business, sports, or entertainment. These perks are unaffected by high tax rates. Economist Henry Simons, godfather of the progressive income tax, offered this as a justification for not fearing adverse consequences from steeply progressive taxation. Simons dismissed the concern that highly skilled workers or entrepreneurs would cut back on their efforts very much simply because they were taxed, on the grounds that their Jobs were interesting. Our captains of industry are mainly engaged not in making a living but in playing a great game. and that the status and power attached to these Jobs were rewards enough to encourage continued effort.22 This cavalier assumption cannot hold, however, when highly progressive rates reach down to tens of millions of small-business owners and professional couples in the middle class. High tax rates can sometimes be avoided by employing alternative forms of financial compenshysation that allow the recipients to defer the high tax payments, as with pension plans, or by taking them in a form, such as capital gains or stock options, that is subject to a lower rate of taxation and which also have a deferral feature. There has been a surge in stock options as a form of compenshysation in recent years, spurred in part by the 1993 Tax Act. That Act raised the top marginal tax rates to 36 percent and 39.6 percent from 31 percent. It also decreed that executive salaries in excess of 1 million would be non-deductible business expenses, apparently in a misguided effort to disshycourage inequality across the wage scale and to punish corporate boards perceived as being too generous to top management. To the extent that the marginal product of the affected senior manshyagement justified the higher salaries, the meddling of the law reduced economic efficiency and equity rather than enhancing it. The options explosion, however, altered incentives for senior management and has been blamed for some recent corporate scandals which, though small in number, have been rather spectacular. Another reason that the rich may not appear to be stampeding into retirement may be that they are able to shift the tax to other factors. Such peoshyples human capital and talents may be in someshywhat inelastic demand. If so, with only a small change in their numbers, they may be able to trigshyger higher compensation to cover their higher taxes. The burden of the tax would shift to other workers and consumers without the appearance of a large reduction in the hours worked of the rich. In a typical production function, a small distinct factor of production would typically have a smaller elasticity of demand than larger or more readily substitutable factors. As highly paid as some CEOs are, their compensation is generally a small pershycent of a businesss total costs, and their knowlshyedge of the business and ability to run it at maximum efficiency may be very hard to replace, at least in the short run. Their administrative or inventive talents, however, may be transferable to other applications, and they may be more mobile, across companies or across borders, than ordinary labor. This would suggest a further ability to shift taxes to other factors. Neutrality and Economic Efficiency Versus Income Redistribution Neutral Tax Systems Maximize Income. The potential damage to ordinary labor from excessive taxation of capital, both physical and human, is significant. It suggests that a saving-consumption neutral tax with a flat rate would serve every type of economic actor better than the current tax sysshytem, which includes the graduated comprehensive personal income tax, the corporate income tax, and the estate and gift taxes. The alternatives might include a saving-deferred income tax,23 a national retail sales tax, a value-added tax (VAT),24 a returns-exempt Flat Tax,25 or some combination. The more familiar comprehensive or broad-based income tax in use today taxes most income as it is received, including income used for saving, and taxes the returns on saving as soon as they accrue (except for capital gains, which can be deferred until realized). Such taxes fall more heavily on income used for saving than for conshysumption. The tax bias against saving is made worse by imposing an add-on corporate tax and transfer (estate and gift) taxes.26 Any justification of the comprehensive or broad-based income tax and the additional corporate and death duties must rely on significant non-economic social benshyefits because these taxes impose high economic costs, including reduced incomes across the board. Redistribution Lowers Total Income and Can Hurt Those It Is Designed to Help. Early advoshycates of redistributionist tax systems acknowledged some of the costs. Professor Henry Simons was one of the most influential early advocates of the broad-based income tax. Simons and Professor Robert Haig defended the use of a definition of taxable income that includes both income saved and the subsequent returns on the saving, including capital gains, interest, and dividends (basically, ones income was defined as equal to current consumpshytion plus the increase in ones wealth during the year). This tax base is sometimes described as the increase in the ability to consume. It results in a tax that is not saving-consumptionneutral that is, it falls more heavily on income used for saving than consumption.27 Since the rich save more than the poor, taxing saving more heavily than consumption is assumed to be progressive. Simons also favored making the marginal tax rate structure graduated (higher tax rates imposed on incremental taxable income as it exceeds specified levels) to further increase the progressivity of the system. The pure HaigSimons definition of income did not allow for a corporate tax in addition to the individual income tax, however, because that would have been an additional layer of double taxshyation. The professors would have preferred an integrated tax structure that passed corporate income on to shareholders for taxation as it was earned, but were thwarted by practical impedishyments. Even for these redistributionists, the degree of double taxation and distortion inherent in an add-on corporate income tax went too far. Professor Simons was well aware that the twin distortions of the tax base and the rate structure inherent in the income tax could lead to a drop in saving, investment, and national income. Thereshyfore, he knew of the possibility of adverse shifts in the tax burden due to heavy taxation of capital income and progressivity. In his magnum opus, Personal Income Taxation . Simons wrote: The case for drastic progression in taxation must be rested on the case against inequalityon the ethical or aesthetic judgment that the prevailing distribution of wealth and income reveals a degree (andor kind) of inequality which is distinctly evil or unlovely. The degree of progression in a tax system may also affect production and the size of the national income available for distribution. In fact, it is reasonable to expect that every gain, through taxation, in better distribution will be accompanied by some loss in production. If reduction in the degree of inequality is a good, then the optimum degree of progression must involve a distinctly adverse effect upon the size of the national income. But what are the sources of loss, these costs of improved distribution There are possible effects (a) upon the supplies of highly productive, or at least handsomely rewarded, personal services, (b) upon the use of available physical resources, (c) upon the efficiency of enterpriser activity, and (d) upon the accumulation and growth of resources through saving. Of these effects, all but the last may be regarded as negligible.28 As mentioned above, Simons dismissed the conshycern that highly skilled workers or entrepreneurs would make less effort if highly taxed because they found their Jobs interesting. Simons took more seriously the possibility that saving and investshyment would suffer from his policy prescription: With respect to capital accumulation, however, the consequences are certain to be significantly adverse. It is hardly questionable that increasing progression is inimical to saving and accumulation. That the net effect will be increased consumption hardly admits of doubt.29 Simonss remedy was not to do away with proshygressivity, but to offset its effect on saving by runshyning federal budget surpluses: The contention here is not that there should be correction of the effects of extreme progression upon saving but that government saving, rather than modification of the progression, is the appropriate method for effecting that correction, if such correction is to be made.30 The assumption that the government virtuously would run large budget surpluses to make up for the anti-growth consequences of a biased and proshygressive tax system has proven to be utterly naive. Furthermore, a budget surplus cannot make up for the adverse effects that high corporate or individshyual tax rates and unfriendly capital cost recovery allowances have on the present value of after-tax cash flow from an investmenta calculation that any business school graduate will undertake in deciding on the feasibility of an investment project. Thus, even an offsetting budget surplus would not prevent a reduction in the equilibrium capital stock from a reduction in the marginal return on investment. Professor Alfred Marshall, who bowed to the general acceptance of progressivity, nonetheless favored a more neutral graduated tax on consumpshytion over a graduated tax on income: There is a general agreement that a system of taxation should be adjusted, in more or less steep graduation, to peoples incomes: or better still to their expenditures. For that part of a mans income, which he saves, contributes again to the Exchequer until it is consumed by expenditure.31 As Marshall pointed out, one does not need to adopt a non-neutral income tax to achieve proshygressivity. Saving-consumptionneutral taxes can be made progressive as well. In fact, it is not necesshysary to have graduated tax rates to achieve proshygressivity. A tax which exempts some amount of income at the bottom and imposes a flat marginal tax rate on income above that amount is progresshysive because the average tax rate will rise with income. A graduated consumption-based tax is not as economically efficient as a flat rate conshysumption-based tax because it increases the tax penalty at the margin the more productive an indishyvidual becomes and the more effort he or she makes. Nonetheless, it is far more efficient than a graduated income tax. The tax bias against saving that was built into the income tax may have been seen as a way of putting a kinder face on capitalism and defending the free market and private property against the foreign ideologies of fascism, national socialism, and communism that seemed to be sweeping the world in the 1930s. In retrospect, however, we can see that the broad-based income tax retards investshyment, which reduces wages and employment and keeps people who lack savings and access to capishytal from getting ahead. taxes on capital formation hurt the poor more than the rich (who can simply exchange the pleasures of current consumption for the future income of similar present value that their saving would have generated). Implication of Dynamic Effects of taxes for Estimating Federal Revenues A better understanding of the economic conseshyquences of taxation would also benefit the Treasury and the Congress as they plan the federal budget and contemplate changes in the tax system. Governshyment revenue estimators generally ignore the effect of tax changes on the overall level of economic activity, employment, incomes, payroll, profits, divishydends, and capital gains. This method is known as static revenue estimation or static scoring. Static scoring leads to misestimates of the effect of tax changes on revenues. In particular, the reveshynue losses from tax reductions that would promote an increase in economic activity are overstated, and the revenue gains from raising taxes in a manshyner that would retard the economy are overstated. Different tax changes have different effects on the economy. Ignoring these effects denies Congress and the Executive important information in choosshying among tax proposals. Inaccurate revenue estishymates therefore interfere with budget planning and assessment of proposed tax changes. In particular, they exaggerate the difficulty in achieving fundashymental reform of the tax system. By contrast. dynamic scoring would take into account the effect of tax changes on total income and its component parts. Dynamic scoring would lead to more accurate revenue forecasting and, one would hope, to tax bills that are more concerned with increasing national and individual income and less inclined toward redistributing a fixed pie. V. Burden Tables: An Exercise in Misdirection Whenever a change is proposed in the tax sysshytem, one of the first questions asked is. What is the distribution of the tax increase or decrease. That is to say. If this tax change is enacted, who will pay more, and who will pay less. or Who will be helped or hurt by the tax change. One possible concern is how the burden is distribshyuted among people of different incomes that is, how the tax change affects the progressivity of the tax system. Burden Table Assumptions, Methods at Odds with Economic Theory, Reality Tax analysts in the research community, the JCT, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and the Office of Tax Analysis of the Treasury (OTA) present burden tables or textual analysis to answer these questions. The presentation of these estimates has considerable political import. Thereshyfore, it is important to remember that, when tax analysts prepare burden tables or present a description of tax incidence, they must make assumptions and apply conventions to assign the incidence of the tax to various economic actors, be they consumers, workers, savers, etc. Among other things, they must make assumptions about the responsiveness of labor, capital, and consumshyers to the tax and what time frame to consider in presenting the burden. Some of these conventions have more to do with convenience than with accushyracy and are, in fact, highly arbitrary and often contrary to economic reality. Incidence, Not Burden. These burden tables or distribution tables show how a tax proposal would alter tax payments of individuals across varishyous income classes or quintiles in a given year, other things held constant. (One such table is the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center Microsimulation Model (version 03042), prepared jointly by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution and available on-line. Other methods of display are posshysible, such as listing how many tax filers get tax reductions of various amounts, how the tax cut is distributed among single filers, joint filers, families with children, the elderly, etc.) Such tables are based on existing levels of each type of pretax income and the existing distribution of whatever exemptions and deductions are in force at the time of the tax change. They attribute each tax either to consumers or producers, or to labor or capital, with a vague nod to economic theory in what would be a limited partial equilibrium analysis of the shifting of the tax within its own market if it were done consistently. However, they generally assume that taxpayers aggregate incomes and behavior are not affected by the tax change. Thus, the analysis is cut short of a full explorashytion of the economic consequences of the tax, and the ultimate burden of the tax is not described. Consequently, these burden tables attempt to demonstrate only the initial incidence of the taxes (and should be renamed incidence tables). They tell us virtually nothing about the distribution of the burden of the taxes after people adjust their behavior as a result of the levies. Inconsistent Attribution and Sloppy Theory. Furthermore, the conventions used in tax analysis are often inconsistent from one tax to the next and fail to do a good job of demonstrating even the inishytial incidence of the taxes. In standard JCT burden tables, and in Treasury and CBO analytical work, consumption taxes are usually assumed to be passed forward to consumers in the form of higher prices. These taxes include: Retail sales taxes and value added taxes, and excise taxes (whether imposed on the manushyfacturer, the distributor, or at the point of retail sale). Meanwhile, income taxes and other taxes on facshytors are assumed to be passed backwards to workers and owners of capital in the form of lower take-home pay and after-tax incomes from saving and investing. These taxes include: The personal income taxes (federal, state, and local) The corporate income taxes (federal, state, and local) The payroll tax The estate and gift taxes (federal and state) and Customs fees are an exception to this pattern. They are consumption taxes but are assumed (by the Treasury) to be borne by the suppliers of the foreign labor and capital that produced them. Consumption taxes, such as a retail sales tax, a VAT, or excise taxes, whether imposed on consumshyers or on manufacturers, are routinely described as being paid by consumers in the form of higher prices because it is assumed that consumers are less flexible than producers, so that consumer prices increase by an amount equal to the tax, with none of the tax borne by the producers of the taxed goods. It is as if the supply of goods and services were totally elastic, such that production would dwindle to zero if there were any reduction in the price received by the producers, so the consumers must foot the entire bill. The personal income tax, however, which falls on labor and capital income of individuals, is roushytinely described as falling entirely on individual income earners in the form of lower after-tax incomes, with none borne by the consumers of their output. The payroll taxes on wages are simishylarly assumed to be borne entirely by labor. The estate tax is assumed to fall on the decedents, and the gift tax, if triggered before death, on the donors. The distribution of the corporate income tax is so uncertain that it is left out of most burden tables but is thought to be borne mainly by either shareholders (at least in the short run) or workers (in the long run, as capital adapts). These taxes are described as if workers, savers, and investors offered their labor and capital in totally inelastic supply, undiminished in quantity, when the tax cuts their compensation. It is assumed that they make no demand for an increase in compensation in response to the tax, so they swallow the entire burden of the income and other factor taxes that they pay. These questionable presentations of initial incidence unfortunately can have a profound effect on the prospects for adoption of one or another tax change. Understanding the shortcomings of the existing quotburdenquot tables that are really bad efforts at quotincidencequot tables would improve the policy debate. The goal is not so much to arrive at a better presentation of quotincidencequot but to redirect attention from the concept of initial incidence and to refocus the debate on the actual economic consequences of tax changes, the ultimate burden of taxation, and the ultimate economic benefits of favorable tax reform. Snapshots in Time Rather Than Lifetime Impacts. It is very misleading to display the distribution of tax changes as affecting people only in proportion to their current earnings. A very large share of the income inequality in our economy is due to the fact that more experienced and older workers earn more than their younger counterparts. Most people will experience a gradual increase in their real incomes as they advance in their careers and their work experience builds, followed by a decline in current earnings upon retirement. Even if everyone had the same lifetime incomes, people currently age 50 would probably display higher incomes than people currently age 20 or currently age 80. It is misleading to characterize these normal age-related or experience-related changes in income over peoplesrsquo lives as class-based income inequality. That, however, is exactly what the burden tables do when they lump all ages together. Similarly, saving behavior and ownership of assets vary with age. A reduction in the tax rate on capital gains does nothing this year for someone who has no capital gains this year but will help him in the future when he has gains to realize. Suppose Mr. Jones turns 70 this year and decides to sell his business of 50 years for a 1 million gain. Mr. Smith is only 69 and will wait to sell his business until next year. The reduction in the capital gains tax from 20 percent to 15 percent saves Mr. Jones 50,000 this year and saves Mr. Smith nothing. Should Mr. Smith feel left out Hardly. Hersquoll get his benefit next year. The burden tables would suggest massive unfairness each year because one (different) person each year gets a 50,000 tax break (in the one year of his life in which he has a million dollar gain) and another person the same year gets none. In this illustration, the capital gains of both Jones and Smith had built up over many years. Should the gain be counted as occurring only in the year it is taken, boosting the realizer into the top quintile Would it not better be counted for distribution purposes as it is accrued (at an average gain of 20,000 a year), which would make it clear that each man is solidly middle-class Should it be counted at all, in that the gain is merely the accumulated reinvestment (saving) of income recorded in the gross domestic product (GDP) in the years it was originally earned That makes it double counting, which is why economists do not count capital gains in national income (and why the capital gains tax is double taxation to begin with).32 The Treasury has recently constructed and quotagedquot a panel of taxpayers whose returns it has followed for several years, based on a sample of the taxpaying population.33 The panel enables the Treasury to examine how a tax change would affect a typical taxpaying population over time, not just in a single year. As an illustration, the authors compared the expanded distributional analysis of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA) and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA) over the span of the then-current budget period (2004-2013) to the distribution calculated at a point in time. Looked at over time, the major provisions of the bill benefitted many more taxpayers than was indicated by a one-year snapshot. In the panel study, some taxpayers who lacked dividends income or capital gains in some years of the period had dividends or capital gains in other years and benefitted from the billsrsquo reductions in the tax rates on dividends and capital gains. Some taxpayers who were in the lowest tax brackets in some years were in higher brackets in others and benefitted from the reduction in marginal tax rates in the four highest brackets at some time during the period. The authors report that: For example, in the first year 34.7 percent of taxpayers would benefit from the reduction of tax rates above 15 percent, whereas over ten years 60.7 percent would benefit in at least one yearhellip. In the first year, some tax return filers do not benefit from any of the major provisions of EGTRRA because they have no income tax liability under pre-EGTRRA law and do not qualify for the expanded refundability of the child credit. But over time, nearly all taxpayers, 94.4 percent, would benefit.34 Over time, then, the benefits of the bill are far more widely distributed than is indicated by the ordinary one-year snapshot of the distribution of the tax reduction. This research goes far in revealing the flaws inherent in standard distribution tables and the distributional objections to growth-oriented tax changes. Nonetheless, it still leaves out entirely the economic adjustments induced by the tax changes, which may have an even greater role in spreading the benefits of a growth-oriented tax change. For example, the reduction in the tax rates on dividends and capital gains lowers the service price of capital and will induce more investment, which will lead to higher productivity and higher wages across the board. Consequently, anyone who works will benefit from the higher wages triggered by the bill, even if he or she never has dividends or capital gains. Even people living entirely on Social Security will benefit from the lower cost structure and more plentiful supply of goods and services made possible by the lower tax rates on wages and capital income. These additional benefits can only be found by taking into account the shifting of the tax burden and the changes in peoplersquos economic circumstances that are due to the economic adjustments to the tax changes. Measuring Dynamic Responses Essential to a True Burden Table The burden tables normally produced by the Treasury, the congressional committees, and outside researchers do not take into account the economic consequences of taxation and the resulting shifts in incomes and tax burdens. These shifts can have very large effects on the pre-tax incomes of workers, savers, and investors at all income levels, which means that they can have a major effect on the level and distribution of tax burdens. Because the burden tables ignore these effects, they do not accurately measure the tax burden, either in the aggregate or as to how it is distributed among different groups within the population. A true burden table can only be created by undertaking an assessment of the dynamic effects of the tax on economic behavior. The information needed to produce a true burden table is identical to that which is required for dynamic revenue estimation (discussed earlier). Government revenue estimators are very reluctant to attempt dynamic scoring of the revenue effects of tax changes, claiming that the process is too difficult and controversial. If that is correct, then they need to give up the pretext that the burden tables that they routinely produce are accurate. If one cannot do dynamic scoring of tax changes for budget purposes, one cannot generate accurate burden tables. If burden tables are feasible, then so is dynamic scoring, and it should be adopted forthwith. VI. Analysis of Some Specific Types of taxes The Corporate Income Tax Initial Incidence of the Corporate Income Tax. No competent student of taxation believes that corporations pay the corporate income tax. Only people pay taxes. Things and abstractions do not pay taxes. A corporation is, in law, a legal person, but that is, in fact, a legal fiction. Therefore, corporations do not really pay the corporate income tax. Conservative Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman is well known for espousing that view, but liberal economists share it as well. The liberal Nobel economist Wassily Leontief told The New York Times 20 years ago: Corporate income taxes fall ultimately on people. Economists have tried but have never succeeded in finding out how the weight of these taxes is ultimately distributed among income groups. There can be little doubt that elimination of corporate income taxes would simplify our tax system and limit its abuse.35 Ultimate Burden of the Corporate Income Tax. Tax analysts generally assume that the corporate income tax is borne, at least in the first instance, by shareholders. As the Treasury put it, quotbecause corporations are owned by shareholders, corporations have no taxpaying ability independent of their shareholders. Corporations pay taxes out of the incomes of their shareholders. quot36 However, the analysis does not stop there. Economists also recognize that corporate taxes, though initially coming out of shareholdersrsquo incomes, have further economic repercussions that shift part of the ultimate burden to others. As the Treasury report continues: Importantly, the burden of the corporate income tax may not fall on shareholders. A corporate tax change could induce responses that would alter other forms of income as well. For example, some of the burden may be shifted to workers through lower wages, to consumers through higher prices, to owners of non-corporate capital through lower rates of return on their investments, or to landowners through lower rents. This shifting might not happen quickly, so the short-run incidence could well differ from the long-run incidence.37 (Note the Treasuryrsquos interchangeable use of the terms incidence and burden, for both the short-run own-market effect and the long-run general equilibrium outcome.) In years past, the Congressional Budget Office has also suggested that the corporate tax falls about half on owners of capital and about half on the workforce, arguing that the tax depresses capital formation and therefore depresses productivity and wages, shifting at least some of the burden to labor. More recently, the Treasury and the CBO have assumed that the corporate tax is borne by owners of all capital (corporate capital and competing non-corporate capital), and none by workers. Most economists believe that the burden of the corporate tax is borne to some extent by shareholders, workers, and consumers (who are often the same people in different roles), but they do not agree on the division of the burden. Because of the uncertainty in the profession, the JCT has stopped assigning it to anyone in the official quotburden tables. quot If the corporate income tax were raised and individual income taxes were cut by equal amounts, the burden tables would show a reduction in the tax on the population with no loss of federal revenuemdashan ultimate (and quite impossible) free lunch Of course, someone pays the corporate income tax even if the JCT cannot point out who it is. In fact, a modern view of the corporate tax in the context of an open, globally integrated economy holds that the burden of the corporate tax falls primarily on labor after all adjustments are taken into account. Varying Views of the Corporate Tax. In 1962, Professor Arnold Harberger produced a seminal article on the incidence of the corporate income tax.38 The article did more than analyze the corporate tax it showed the importance of going beyond narrow partial equilibrium analysis in looking at the effects of taxation. The early Harberger work suggested that the corporate tax was borne by the owners of all capital, not just corporate capital. Harberger assumed a closed economy with a fixed total capital stock . The capital could be allocated either to the corporate or to the non-corporate sectors, which were assumed to produce somewhat different goods and services.39 If a corporate tax were imposed, raising the tax rate above that of the non-corporate sector, capital would migrate to the non-corporate sector. Gross returns would rise in the corporate sector and fall in the non-corporate sector to equalize after-tax yields between the sectors. Thus, a portion of the corporate tax would be shifted to non-corporate capital. There would also be an efficiency (dead weight) loss that would make the burden greater than the amount of the tax itself. In later work, Professor Harberger changed his assumption that the economy is closed and concluded that the corporate tax is borne largely by domestic labor, at least in the case of a small open economy that has little impact on the world rate of return. Putting a tax on the income from corporate capital would simply lead to adjustments whereby less capital would be at work in that countryhellip. Where would the capital go It would go abroadhellip. In realizing that the presence of the tax implies that significantly less capital will be combining with the same amount of total labor (in the small developing country), it should come as no surprise that the equilibrium wage has to be lower. But there is an additional and more critical reason (above and beyond simple capital labor-substitution) why laborrsquos wage must fall: the need to compete with the ROW rest of the world in the production of manufactures (corporate tradables). The tax is a wedge that has been inserted into the pre-existing cost structure. The prices of corporate tradable products cannot go up because they are set in the world marketplace the net-of-tax return to capital cannot go down (except transitorily), because capital will not be content to earn less here (in the small developing country) than abroad. Some element of cost has to be squeezed in order to fit the new tax wedge into a cost structure with a rigid product price at one end and a rigid net-of-tax rate of return to capital on the other. The only soft point in this cost structure is wages. If they do not yield, the country may simply stop producing corporate tradables. Or, if the country continues to produce such goods, then wages must have yieldedmdashby just enough to absorb the extra taxes that have to be paidhellip.40 Harberger goes on to point out that the United States is a large country, not a small one, so the exit of U. S. capital would somewhat depress the rate of return to capital in the world, which would somewhat mitigate the capital flight and reduce the share of the tax burden passed on to U. S. labor. Nonetheless, he estimates that U. S. labor would still have to bear seven-eighths of the corporate tax.41 Harberger assumes an unchanged world capital stock, i. e. that the world stock of capital does not fall to restore after-tax returns to the levels they enjoyed before the imposition of the U. S. tax. If one instead adds the assumption that the world capital stock is elastic over time with respect to the rate of return, then even this modest offset to the impact of the U. S. corporate tax on U. S. labor would vanish. Harberger reiterated his analysis in a recent interview in the IMF Survey conducted by Prakesh Loungani.42 Loungani: The effects of some economic policies are better understood thanks to your academic contributions. You did path-breaking work on whether capital or labor bears the burden of the corporate income tax. Harberger: There are interesting developments to report on that front. In the closed-economy case that I analyzed in the 1960s, the natural result is that capital bears the burden of the tax and can easily bear more than the full burden. But my students and I have now analyzed the open-economy case, which is more applicable to todayrsquos global economy. The result in this case is that labor bears the burden and can easily bear more than the full burden. Loungani: Thatrsquos quite a flip. Why does it happen Harberger: Think of the so-called quottradable goodsquot sector of an open economy, the sector that produces goods that are traded on a world market. The prices of these goods are determined in the world market. And, with an open economy, the rate of return to capital is largely determined in the world market, because capital can flow from country to country in search of the highest return. Now the government gets in there and tries to impose a corporation income tax on capital. Well, who bears the burden Capital can move across national boundaries to try to escape the tax. So itrsquos labor, the factor of production that canrsquot easily escape national boundaries, that ends up bearing the burden of the tax. In this analysis, part of the fixed quantity of U. S. capital relocates abroad, and domestic labor suffers a loss in income and therefore bears the entire corporate tax, plus a dead weight loss. One could go two steps further in refining the analysis, however. First, one could note the effect of the shift of U. S. capital abroad on foreign labor and world capital returns while retaining the idea of a fixed total world capital stock. This would put some of the burden of the corporate tax back on U. S. capital. If the United States were a very small economy, the shift in U. S. assets abroad would have little impact on global rates of return, and the Harberger result for the U. S. would follow. Given the size of the U. S. economy, however, there would be some effects abroad. The tax on domestic U. S. corporations would drive some investment offshore, but that investment would have to compete harder for available foreign labor. Initially, the foreign capital-labor ratio would rise, increasing returns to foreign labor but reducing returns to foreign capital, consisting of the expatriate U. S. capital and the pre-existing foreign capital. The misallocation of the fixed world capital would depress capital returns here and abroad. At least temporarily, all capital, U. S. and foreign, would suffer some loss of income due to the U. S. tax. Nonetheless, U. S. labor would bear most of the burden of the tax, which would exceed the tax revenue due to the added dead weight burden of the economic distortions. Second, however, one really must relax the (still partial equilibrium) assumption of a fixed quantity of domestic and world capital. Capital formation has been shown to be sensitive to the after-tax return. Over time, there would be a reduction in the quantity of foreign-located capital (whether foreign - or U. S.-owned) to restore its normal after-tax return, reducing the gains to foreign workers. Foreign returns to capital would not decline significantly. The reduction in the quantity of U. S. capital would restore its original after-tax return as well. Capital would bear very little of the burden of the U. S. corporate income tax. In the long run, one should expect a general equilibrium result that the main losers would be U. S. workers. Other analysts have a different view of the corporate income tax in an open, or partially open, economy. For example, Jane Gravelle and Kent Smetters construct a model in which the largest part of the corporate tax can be borne by domestic capital in spite of trade and capital flows, in effect restoring the old view of who bears the corporate tax.43 They get this result by assuming imperfect substitution of domestic and foreign capital (people prefer the stocks and bonds of their home country governments and businesses) and imperfect substitution of domestic and foreign goods and services. They also assume a fixed total capital stock to abstract from the issue of the elasticity of saving. In their four-sector model, they get the usual result of a corporate tax shifted mainly to domestic labor when substitution elasticities are very large: Capital moves abroad, equalizing the domestic and foreign after-tax rates of return. The capital flight depresses rates of return to foreign capital (quotexportingquot some of the tax) and raises foreign wages. Wages of domestic labor (the immobile factor) fall. But assuming lower elasticities, which the authors feel are more plausible, less capital shifts abroad (because it is assumed to be somewhat immobile too). People are willing to accept a drop in the after-tax return on capital to own domestic assets, and the tax can open a permanent differential between rates of return at home and abroad. As a result, the bulk of the corporate tax falls on domestic capital, less on domestic labor. Some capital is exported, which shifts some of the tax to foreign capital with some gains to foreign labor, but less than in the high-elasticity case. There are several areas of concern with the Gravelle-Smetters approach: The assumption of a constant world capital stock is unrealistic, just as it is in the Harberger analysis, and simply throws out the bulk of the adjustment process. The quantity of capital has been seen to vary substantially to restore its after-tax rate of return to normal levels over time following a tax change. The lower worldwide return on capital post-tax would depress global capital accumulation and shift the tax back to labor. The assumption of a low substitutability of domestic and foreign capital appears to be at odds with observed international flows of financial and physical investment. Even if savers and investors on average display a home country preference, the capital markets act very quotopenquot if even a few large savers are, at the margin, willing to move capital freely across borders. It may be that many people never buy foreign securities and many companies prefer to invest at home, reducing the average ratio of global to local assets in domestic portfolios. At the margin, however, there are many people, businesses, and institutions that freely arbitrage across borders. Multinational financial and non-financial corporations send funds and direct fixed investment all over the world. Consider that the outflow of U. S. capital has been averaging roughly 400 billion a year and foreign investment in the U. S. has been averaging over 500 billion a year for some years. The sum of the annual cross-border investment flows has been about 1 trillionmdashalmost as large as total annual investment in the United States. In the cases where the corporate tax falls on domestic capital, the Gravelle-Smetters model implies that a tax increase can lower the after-tax rates of return on capital for a very long time and can lead to prolonged differences in the after-tax rates of return on domestic and foreign capital. This is disturbing on two grounds. First, in the modern world, returns on global assets of similar risk and quality do not display wide and permanent differentials. Second, taxation of capital has risen drastically over the past hundred years with the inventions of the corporate and personal national and sub-national income taxes, property taxes, and estate and inheritance taxes, yet there has been no correspondingly large change in the real, risk-adjusted after-tax yields on capital, either financial or physical. It appears that capital, by adjusting its quantity, is able to shift a large part of the taxes aimed at it onto other factors. The Payroll Tax The entire Social Security payroll tax on wages is remitted by employers to the Treasury, but according to statute, it supposedly is paid half by employees and half by employers (quotstatutory obligationquot). Most economists would argue that, legislative language notwithstanding, the initial incidence and the ultimate economic burden of the entire tax is borne by workers. Why The whole tax comes out of gross labor compensation that could otherwise have gone to labor. Furthermore, the supply of labor has been thought by many to be highly quotinelasticquot Consequently, the tax is assumed to be quotshiftedquot almost entirely onto the worker, not only in its initial incidence, but also in its ultimate burden. A more modern view of the labor force suggests that the workforce, particularly certain subgroups, such as secondary workers in a family and teenagers, does respond to changes in the after-tax wage. A general equilibrium economist would argue that this partial elasticity of the supply of labor would further shift a portion of the ultimate burden of the payroll tax to other economic factors, such as consumers, other types of labor, and any immobile forms of capital such as land, as the labor supply shrinks in response to the tax. Mobile capital, however, would bear little of the burden, as it could move abroad or shrink in quantity to restore its original rate of return. The Unified Estate and Gift taxes The federal unified gift and estate tax (the quotdeath taxquot) is an additional layer of tax on saving. Every cent saved to create an estate has either been taxed or will be taxed under some provision of the income tax. Ordinary saving by the decedent was taxed repeatedly when the decedent and the companies she or he may have owned shares in paid individual and corporate income taxes. Saving by the decedent in a tax-deferred retirement plan will be subject to the heirsrsquo income taxes and was subject to the corporate income tax in the case of stock holdings. The death tax is always an extra layer of tax. Prior to 2001, the estate and gift tax rate topped out at 55 percent if a parent left money to a child but could reach almost 80 percent under the generation-skipping tax (GST) if the bequest went to a grandchild or other relative more than one generation removed from the decedent. (The GST rate is equivalent to imposing a 55 percent tax on the estate as if it had gone to a child and then imposing another 55 percent rate on the remaining 45 percent of the estate as if it had gone from the child to the grandchild. Congress didnrsquot want to miss out on any potential revenue by letting anyonersquos death go untaxed) If a near-to-retirement couple were thinking of working an extra year just to add to an estate, the combined income, payroll, and estate tax rates could have exceeded 78 percent, or even 90 percent with the GST. That produced quite an incentive to retire instead of continuing to work or to reinvest interest or dividends in an estate. The 2001 Tax Act reduces the top estate tax rate to 45 percent by 2007 and raises the exempt amounts for the estate and gift tax. It will eliminate the estate tax (but not the gift tax) in 2010, but the tax will reappear at the old rates in 2011 unless Congress votes to make the repeal permanent. Under the conventions used by the Treasury, the unified estate and gift tax is assumed to be borne by the decedents (or donors if they exceed exempt amounts before they die). The assumption about decedents is distinctly odd, as they are beyond feeling any pain. The heirs are the ones who get lower bequests due to the tax, and they are a more reasonable choice for victims. However, there are no readily obtainable data on who the heirs are, so the decedents are selected by default. This is much the same rationale as that offered by the drunk who looks for his lost car keys on the sidewalk under the lamp post, instead of in the parking lot where he dropped them, because under the lamp post is the only place with enough light to search by. An even odder form of misrepresentation is that this tax is not even called a tax in the National Income and Product Accounts, which instead label it as an innocuous-seeming and voluntary-sounding quotasset transferquot from the private sector to the government. It is not a tax, in NIPAnese, because it falls on the principal rather than the income of the assetsmdasha distinction without economic meaning or merit. There is one way in which the decedents could be said to have borne the estate tax. If they had a rigid goal of how much after-tax bequest they wished to leave their heirs and trimmed their consumption during their lifetimes to save additional sums or to buy additional life insurance to cover the added tax cost of leaving an estate, then one could say that they had borne part of the burden of the tax. However, it is a fundamental law of economics that the more expensive you make something, the less people will do of it. The estate and gift taxes seem far more likely to reduce the personal saving and capital accumulation of the potential donors, rather than their personal consumption, and therefore to reduce the inheritances of their heirs. The heirs do not bear the full cost of the estate and gift taxes, however. These taxes add to the tax on capital formation and result in a reduced stock of capital. The economic consequences of the reduced capital stock are largely borne by the labor force. In spite of (or because of) its horrendously high tax rates, the death tax probably doesnrsquot raise any net revenue for the government. Professor B. Douglas Bernheim of Stanford estimates that avoidance of the estate tax by giving assets to children, most of whom are in lower income tax brackets than their parents, costs more in income tax revenue on the earnings of the assets than the estate tax picks up.44 Gary and Aldona Robbins of Fiscal Associates estimate that the reduced saving and capital formation lower GDP and wages by so much that the resulting reductions in income and payroll tax collections exceed the estate tax take.45 If Bernheim and the Robbinses are each even half right, the tax loses money. Estate tax repeal would pay for itself and would encourage wealth and job creation. Centuries of thought and research have been devoted to the relationship between taxes and economic behavior. Classical pioneers explored the price or incentive effects of taxes on the supply of factors and products over 200 years ago. Microeconomists refined the concepts a century later. In the middle of the past century, the Keynesian focus on aggregate demand turned taxes into a demand management tool divorced from price or incentive effectsmdasha theoretical detour that the monetarist school and the neoclassical resurgence have largely corrected. Today, although more sophisticated work than ever before is being done in the tax field, it appears that the original insights of the classical pioneers still hold true. Strenuous efforts to find exceptions to the quotlaw of demandquot have largely come a cropper. It is still the best presumption that, if something is made more expensive, people will buy less of it, and if something is made less expensive, people will buy more of it. This law still applies to work, saving, and investment and to the trade-off between current and future consumption, and between consumption of market goods and leisure. Increase the tax on effort, and less will be supplied. Reduce the tax on effort, and more will be offered. Fewer inputs mean less total output. Factors of production are largely complementary to one another. More of one factor of production boosts the productivity and income of the other factors. Less of a factor limits the productivity and income of all the other factors. It is well understood in the Economics profession that the current tax system imposes heavier taxes on income used for saving and investment, and on the formation of human capital, than on income used for consumption. Today, most economists would agree that these tax disincentives to save and invest, to work and take risk, have consequences. They lead people to undersave and overconsume and to work less and play more. These modern advances in economic understanding strongly urge us to dispose of the current income tax structure and replace it with a flat rate tax that is neutral in its treatment of saving and consumption. The tax biases against saving and investment and steeply graduated tax rates were introduced for the purpose of improving quotsocial equity. quot In decades past, it was assumed that the added layers of tax on income used for capital formation would do relatively little economic damage, would inconvenience only the wealthy, and would provide significant income redistribution. It is becoming apparent, however, that most of the taxes that seem to fall on those who supply physical capital, intellectual capital, or special talents to the production process may actually be shifted to ordinary workers and lower-income retirees in the form of reduced pre-tax and after-tax incomes. The adverse economic consequences of non-neutral taxation and graduated tax rates, and the resulting adverse impact on quotsocial equity, quot are not displayed in the so-called burden tables used to inform the public policy debate or the votes in Congress. With bad information, the public and the Congress are left with a bad tax system and a sub-optimal economy. A more rational system of calculating and displaying the real tax burdenmdashone that took full account of how taxes are shiftedmdashwould make it easier to explain and adopt a more rational tax system. A more rational tax system, in turn, would maximize the efficiency of the economy as a whole and would enable every individual to maximize his or her potential lifetime productivity and income. Stephen J. Entin is President and Executive Director of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation (IRET), a Washington, D. C.-based pro - free market economic public policy research organization. This CDA Report is slightly adapted from IRET Policy Bulletin No. 88, September 10, 2004, and is published by permission of IRET. About the Author 1 U. S. Department of the Treasury, Report of the Department of the Treasury on Integration of the Individual and Corporate Tax Systems: Taxing Business Income Once . January 1992, p. 146. 2 Statutory obligation is not the same thing as the obligation to remit, which involves the tax collection laws and process. A tax is in a sense ampldquopaidamprdquo by whoever is legally responsible for remitting the money to the taxing authority, whether that is the U. S. Treasury or one of the various state and local tax departments or offices. Most people are sophisticated enough to realize that who sends in the check does not indicate who pays the tax. Income tax withholding is a good example. A workeramprsquos employer by law must transmit income taxes withheld from a workeramprsquos paycheck to the Treasury each pay period, but the tax actually falls according to statute on the workeramprsquos wages, not on the employeramprsquos income. ampldquoRemittanceamprdquo is not the same thing as ampldquostatutory obligation. amprdquo 3 See Don Fullerton and Gilbert E. Metcalf, The Distribution of Tax Burdens . International Library of Critical Writing in Economics, No. 155 (Northampton, Mass. Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. March 1, 2003). Fullerton and Metcalf use the term ampldquostatutory incidenceamprdquo to refer to the statutory obligation as defined by the tax law (what is here called ampldquostatutory obligationamprdquo). They use the term ampldquoeconomic incidenceamprdquo to refer to the changes in peopleamprsquos economic welfare brought about by the tax, in that the tax changes equilibrium prices, with wide-ranging consequences, what is here called ampldquoultimate economic burden. amprdquo For example, a tax on a particular product induces consumers to alter their purchases, which in turn affects the prices or returns paid to each input, thereby affecting the welfare of consumers, workers, and suppliers of capital. Two terms are not really enough, however. There is still the need to distinguish between the economic incidence revealed by ampldquopartial analysis, amprdquo which involves the changes in the price of the taxed product and its effect on that productamprsquos consumers and producers (and which must further be broken down into the short - and longer-run effects), and ampldquogeneral equilibrium analysis, amprdquo which must include all the subsequent adjustments as consumers switch to other products and factors shift to other uses, including leisure, or are reallocated between consumption and capital accumulation, altering the capital stock over time and affecting wages throughout the economy. The FullertonampndashMetcalf anthology contains many seminal papers on tax incidence that explore these different facets of the analytical spectrum. 4 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics . 8th edition (1920) (Philadelphia, Pa. Porcupine Press, reprinted 1982), Chapter IX, pp. 343ampndash345. The first edition was printed in 1890. Tax incidence and tax shifting are not new notions. 5 Victor R. Fuchs, Alan B. Krueger, and James M. Poterba, ampldquoEconomistsamprsquo Views About Parameters, Values, and Policies: Survey Results in Labor and Public Economics, amprdquo Journal of Economic Literature . Vol. 36 (September 1998). Some writers believe that the empirical evidence points to a labor supply elasticity of zero or less, which could lead to more work effort at higher tax rates and ampldquoreverseamprdquo tax shifting. For a number of reasons, that outcome is highly unlikely. For a more sympathetic view, see Jane Gravelle, ampldquoLabor Supply Elasticity and Dynamic Scoring, amprdquo Congressional Research Service Memorandum, August 21, 2002. 6 Gary Robbins and Aldona Robbins, ampldquoCapital Taxes and Growth, amprdquo National Center for Policy Analysis, Policy Report No. 169, January 1992, and Gary Robbins and Aldona Robbins, ampldquoEating Out Our Substance (II): How Taxation Affects Investment, amprdquo Institute for Policy Innovation, TaxAction Analysis Policy Report No. 134, November 1995. 7 Federal and state revenue systems tax income that is saved more heavily than income that is used for consumption. At the federal level, there are at least four layers of possible tax on income that is saved. (1) Income is taxed when first earned (the initial layer of tax). If one uses the after-tax income to buy food, clothing, or a television, one can generally eat, stay warm, and enjoy the entertainment with no additional federal tax (except for a few federal excise taxes). (2) But if one buys a bond or stock or invests in a small business with that after-tax income, there is another layer of personal income tax on the stream of interest, dividends, profits, or capital gains received on the saving (which is a tax on the ampldquoenjoymentamprdquo that one ampldquobuysamprdquo when one saves). The added layer of tax on these purchased income streams is the basic income tax bias against saving . (3) If the saving is in corporate stock, there is also the corporate tax to be paid before any distribution to the shareholder or any reinvestment of retained after-tax earnings to increase the value of the business. (Whether the after-tax corporate income is paid as a dividend, or reinvested to raise the value of the business and create a capital gain, corporate income is taxed twiceampmdash the double taxation of corporate income .) (4) If a modest amount is left at death (beyond an exempt amount that is barely enough to keep a couple in an assisted living facility for a decade), it is taxed again by the estate and gift tax (the ampldquodeath taxamprdquo) . Eliminating the estate and gift tax and the corporate tax would remove two layers of bias. Granting all saving the same treatment as is given to pensions or IRAs, either by deferring tax on saving until the money is withdrawn for consumption (as in a regular IRA) or by taxing income before it is saved and not taxing the subsequent returns (as in a Roth IRA), would remove the basic bias. Saving-deferred taxes, the Flat Tax, VATs, and retail sales taxes are examples of saving-consumptionampndashneutral taxes. For a further explanation of the biases against saving in the current income tax, see Stephen J. Entin, ampldquoFixing the Saving Problem: How the Tax System Depresses Saving and What to Do About It, amprdquo Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation, IRET Policy Bulletin No. 85, August 6, 2001, pp. 15 ff, available at iret. org . Also see David F. Bradford and the U. S. Treasury Tax Policy Staff, Blueprints for Basic Tax Reform . 2nd edition, revised (Arlington, Va. Tax Analysts, 1985). 8 Another result was conspicuous consumption. That is, saving was affected as well. At the 20 percent interest rates then prevailing in Britain (reflecting high tax rates and high inflation), one could invest 50,000 in a government note, earn 10,000 in interest, pay 9,800 in tax, and have 200 a year left over. Alternatively, one could give up the bond and the interest to buy a Rolls Royce for 50,000 and enjoy the car. Was driving a Rolls Royce worth 200 a year Many people thought so. 9 Martin Feldstein, ampldquoIncidence of a Capital Income Tax in a Growing Economy with Variable Savings Rates, amprdquo Review of Economic Studies . Vol. 41, No. 4 (1974), pp. 505ampndash513. 10 Christophe Chamley, ampldquoOptimal Taxation of Capital Income in General Equilibrium with Infinite Lives, amprdquo Econometrica . Vol. 54 (May 1986), pp. 607ampndash622. 11 Kenneth L. Judd, ampldquoRedistributive Taxation in a Simple Perfect Foresight Model, amprdquo Journal of Public Economics . Vol. 28 (October 1985), pp. 59ampndash83. Also see Kenneth L. Judd, ampldquoA Dynamic Theory of Factor Taxation, amprdquo American Economic Review . Vol. 77 (May 1987), pp. 42ampndash48 N. Gregory Mankiw, ampldquoThe Savers-Spenders Theory of Fiscal Policy, amprdquo American Economic Review . Vol. 90, No. 2 (2000), pp. 120ampndash125 and Casey B. Mulligan, ampldquoCapital Tax Incidence: First Impressions from the Time Series, amprdquo National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 9374, December 2002. 12 Andrew Atkeson, V. V. Chari, and Patrick J. Kehoe, ampldquoTaxing Capital Income: A Bad Idea, amprdquo Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review . Vol. 23, No. 3 (Summer 1999), pp. 3ampndash17. 13 Robin Boadway, ampldquoLong Run Tax Incidence: A Comparative Dynamic Approach, amprdquo Review of Economic Studies . Vol. 46, No. 3 (July 1979), pp. 505ampndash511. 14 Mankiw, ampldquoThe Savers-Spenders Theory of Fiscal Policy, amprdquo p.120. 15 Before van Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope, physicians knew that arteries carried blood from the heart and veins returned it, but they had no way to see the capillaries that connected the arteries to the veins. They were unable to map the full circulatory system, and many people were skeptical of the concept of a circular flow of blood. It would have been logical to assume that it was a single system in flow equilibrium, but that concept had not been invented yet. Today, many economists doubt the countryamprsquos ability to finance federal deficits and the investment that is increasing the stock of capital, and to balance saving and investment, because they cannot see where the financing is to come from. They will never be able precisely to predict or trace the flow of trillions of dollars of funds throughout the complex world financial system, but the funds do flow nonetheless. 16 Unpublished preliminary figures for a forthcoming study from The Heritage Foundation. See Gary and Aldona Robbinsamprsquos earlier work for the Institute for Policy Innovation, ampldquoEating Out Our Substance (II): How Taxation Affects Investment, amprdquo TaxAction Analysis Policy Report No. 134, November 1995, available at ipi. org . In the IPI study, using earlier Commerce Department data that have since been revised for the period 1954ampndash1994, the authors found that ampldquothe rate of return to new investment, after taxes, depreciation, and inflation, has been remarkably stable over the last forty years. The reason is that investors quickly counter shocks that cause their after-tax return to go up or down by changing their investment behavior. In short, increases in the after-tax return have led to an increase in the rate of capital formation until the return was driven back down to its long-run, economy-wide average of 3.4 percent old data. Conversely, decreases in the after-tax return have been followed by a decrease in investment until the after-tax return went back to 3.4 percent. And the adjustment generally takes five years or less. A major source of amplsquoshockamprsquo is changes in tax policy. amprdquo The revisions appear to have affected the level of the rate of return, but not the pattern of year-to-year changes or the conclusion that the public restores its desired rate of return to capital by adjusting the quantity of the capital stock it employs, and does so quickly. 17 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations . Chapter II, 1776. 18 Michael Boskin, ampldquoTaxation, Saving, and the Rate of Interest, amprdquo Journal of Political Economy . Vol. 86, Part 2 (April 1978), pp. S3ampndashS27. 19 Joel B. Slemrod, ed. Does Atlas Shrug The Economic Consequences of Taxing the Rich (New York, N. Y. and Cambridge, Mass. Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press, 2000). 20 Robert Carroll, Douglas HoltzampndashEakin, Mark Rider, and Harvey S. Rosen, ampldquoEntrepreneurs, Income Taxes, and Investment, amprdquo Chapter 13 in Slemr 22 Henry C. Simons, Personal Income Taxation (Chicago, Ill. University of Chicago Press, 1938), p. 20. 23 A tax on income less net saving, in which all saving is tax-deferred in the manner that current law allows for limited amounts of saving in an ordinary IRA, 401(k), or pension. This type of tax is also called an inflow-outflow tax, a consumed income tax, an individual cash flow tax, or an expenditure tax. 24 Value-added tax, including European-style credit invoice method VATs goods and services taxes or GSTs (as in Canada and Australia) or subtraction method VATs (also called business transfer taxes in the United States, such as is proposed in the USA Tax). 25 A returns-exempt tax does not allow a deduction for or deferral of current saving, which must be done on an after-tax basis, but it does not subsequently tax the returns on that after-tax saving. It is the method used for Roth IRAs. 28 Simons, Personal Income Taxation . pp. 18ampndash20. 31 Marshall, Principles of Economics . P. 661. 32 In a very fundamental sense, taxation of capital gains is double taxation of the future income of an asset. Assets have value because they provide income over time (by providing services over time for which the assetamprsquos owner is paid). In fact, the current market price of an asset is the present value of the expected after-tax future earnings of the asset (the future after-tax returns discounted to the present by an appropriate discount rate). It is the after-tax returns that are relevant because that is the only part of the returns that the owner can expect to keep. An asset will rise in value today if there is an increase in what people expect the asset to earn in the future. If the asset does in fact earn the higher expected income in the future, that higher income will be taxed when it is earned. To also tax the rise in the present value of that increased future after-tax income stream (the present-day capital gain) is to tax the future earnings twice. 33 See Julie-Anne Cronin, Janet Holtzblatt, Gillian Hunter, Janet McCubbin, James R. Nunns, and John Cilke, ampldquoTreasuryamprsquos New Panel Model for Tax Analysis, amprdquo prepared for the session on ampldquoForecasting Government Fiscal Situations, amprdquo 96th Annual Conference on Taxation, National Tax Association, Chicago, Ill. November 25, 2003 forthcoming in the proceedings of the conference. 35 Wassily Leontief, ampldquoWhat It Takes to Preserve Social Equity: Amid Dynamic Free Enterprise, amprdquo The New York Times . February 1, 1985, p. A29. 36 U. S. Department of the Treasury, Report of the Department of the Treasury on Integration of the Individual and Corporate Tax Systems: Taxing Business Income Once . P. 146. 38 Arnold C. Harberger, ampldquoThe Incidence of the Corporation Income Tax, amprdquo Journal of Political Economy . Vol. 70, No. 3 (June 1962), pp. 215ampndash240. 39 If the types of business organizations, corporate and non-corporate, were equally effective in all sectors of the economy, then there would be no cross-sector reallocation due to the tax and no reduction in the returns to the non-corporate sector. Corporate businesses would merely shift the form of their organization to non-corporate, giving up whatever efficiencies (for example, ease of financing or trading ownership in a large business) that had driven them to the corporate form to begin with. They would bear the burden of the tax. 40 See Arnold C. Harberger, ampldquoThe ABCs of Corporation Tax Incidence: Insights into the Open-Economy Case, amprdquo Chapter 2 in Tax Policy and Economic Growth (Washington, D. C. American Council for Capital Formation, 1995), pp. 51ampndash73. Cited lines on pp. 51ampndash52. 42 IMF Survey . Vol. 32, No. 13 (July 14, 2003). 43 Jane Gravelle and Kent Smetters, ampldquoWho Bears the Burden of the Corporate Income Tax in the Open Economyamprdquo National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 8280, May 2001. 44 B. Douglas Bernheim, ampldquoDoes the Estate Tax Raise Revenueamprdquo in Tax Policy and the Economy . Vol. 1, ed. Lawrence H. Summers (Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 1987), pp. 113ampndash138. 45 Gary Robbins and Aldona Robbins, ampldquoThe Case for Burying the Estate Tax, amprdquo Institute for Policy Innovation, IPI Policy Report No. 150, 1999.