Do Taxes Matter? Lessons from the 1980s
Do Taxes Matter? Lessons from the 1980s
复制标题
税收重要吗？
DOI：
10.3386/w4008
复制
发表时间：
1992
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
J. Slemrod
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
J. Slemrod
经济对两项重大税收改革（尽管在重要方面起到了抵消作用）的反应，远小于热心的供给学派革命者的预期，因此表明，对反抗理由的重新评估是有必要的。本文提供了这样一个重新评估，首先讨论了1981年和1986年税收改革的证据如何反映了我们对税收反应的理解——特别是关于储蓄和资本利得的实现。然后，我重建了1992年关于税收如何影响行为的观点。一个统一的主题是，税收制度所做的远不止改变实际变量的相对价格——它还为误报收入、重组金融债权、调整交易时间、改变组织的法律形式等等提供了激励。因此，观察到的实际变量的低税收弹性可能是由于替代的低弹性或税收政策以复杂的方式改变机会集的事实。解开这些解释需要强调税收制度的交易基础性质以及税法的管理和执行。
The response of the economy to two major -- although in important respects offsetting -- tax reforms has been much smaller than ardent supply-side revolutionaries expected, thus suggesting that a reassessment of the grounds for revolt is in order. This paper offers such a reassessment by first discussing how the evidence from the tax reforms of 1981 and 1986 reflects on our understanding of the response to taxation -- with particular reference to savings and capital gains realizations. I then reconstruct a 1992 view about how taxes affect behavior. A unifying theme is that the tax system does much more than alter the relative prices of real variables -- it also provides incentives to misreport income, restructure financial claims, time transactions, change the legal form of organization, and so on. For this reason, observed low tax elasticities of real variables may be due to either low elasticities of substitution or the fact that tax policy changes opportunity sets in complex ways. Disentangling these explanations requires an emphasis on the transaction-based nature of the tax system and the administration and enforcement of tax laws.