FUNDAMENTAL REQUISITES OF TAX REFORM

Might Fundamental Tax Reform Increase Criminal Activity?

There is a widely held perception that fundamental tax reform would reduce the level of criminal and other “underground” economic activity. The popular argument relies on the idea that replacing the income tax with a sales tax would implicitly tax the return to criminal activity, whereas the return to crime is effectively untaxed by an income tax. This paper finds instead that the impact of tax...

Simulating Fundamental Tax Reform in the U.S

This paper uses a new, large-scale, dynamic life-cycle simulation model to compare the welfare and macroeconomic effects of five fundamental alternatives to the U.S. federal income tax: a proportional income tax, a proportional consumption tax, a flat tax, a flat tax with transition relief, and a progressive variant of the flat tax called the X tax. The model incorporates intragenerational hete...

THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF FUNDAMENTAL TAX REFORM bY

Tax Reform and Poverty

The tax system has a pervasive impact on poverty, both directly through its role in the distribution of society’s resources and indirectly through its effects on the incentives for economic decisions like working and saving. The two most important facets of the tax system for low-income families are payroll taxes and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the former of which levies a tax on earne...

Evaluating International Tax Reform

This paper introduces “capital ownership neutrality” (CON) and “national ownership neutrality” (NON) as benchmarks for evaluating the desirability of international tax reforms, and applies them to analyze recent U.S. tax reform proposals. Tax systems satisfy CON if they do not distort the ownership of capital assets, which promotes global efficiency whenever the productivity of an investment di...