Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Trends in federal tax progressivity, 1980–93
- COMMENTS
- 3 The lifetime incidence of state and local taxes: measuring changes during the 1980s
- COMMENTS
- 4 Trends in income inequality: the impact of, and implications for, tax policy
- COMMENTS
- 5 The efficiency cost of increased progressivity
- COMMENTS
- 6 On the high-income Laffer curve
- COMMENTS
- 7 Tax progressivity and household portfolios: descriptive evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances
- COMMENTS
- 8 Progressivity of capital gains taxation with optimal portfolio selection
- COMMENTS
- 9 Perceptions of fairness in the crucible of tax policy
- COMMENTS
- 10 Progressive taxation, equity, and tax design
- Index
COMMENTS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Trends in federal tax progressivity, 1980–93
- COMMENTS
- 3 The lifetime incidence of state and local taxes: measuring changes during the 1980s
- COMMENTS
- 4 Trends in income inequality: the impact of, and implications for, tax policy
- COMMENTS
- 5 The efficiency cost of increased progressivity
- COMMENTS
- 6 On the high-income Laffer curve
- COMMENTS
- 7 Tax progressivity and household portfolios: descriptive evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances
- COMMENTS
- 8 Progressivity of capital gains taxation with optimal portfolio selection
- COMMENTS
- 9 Perceptions of fairness in the crucible of tax policy
- COMMENTS
- 10 Progressive taxation, equity, and tax design
- Index
Summary
It is always a pleasure to be asked to comment on a paper that treats an interesting subject, is done by a scholar one respects in a defensible way, and reaches conclusions that appear to be valid. Robert Triest has written such a paper. Of course, my pleasure is even greater when I turn to the bibliography and discover more references to my own work than I have ever had the chutzpah to insert into my own papers. Could Bob have known in advance who his discussant would be?
A good economist has applied state-of-the-art techniques to analyze an important topic in empirical public finance: the efficiency losses of increased redistribution. His methods are similar to – but improve upon – those used in other recent articles on this subject, several of which have been published in the best scholarly journals.
One odd thing about this early version of the paper is that it virtually ignores the lessons that can be learned from the most relevant empirical literature, the NIT (negative income-tax) experiments. As I recall, the government spent about $150 million to measure the efficiency costs of an NIT using classical experimentation. So far as I know, this doesn't happen very often in our branch of science. The government then spent additional millions creating data sets and computer software to generalize the experimental responses to the entire population. The experimental results are directly relevant to measuring one of the most important efficiency costs of redistribution: the work-effort and earnings effects of higher transfers on the low-income population, which would receive greater transfers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Tax Progressivity and Income Inequality , pp. 170 - 176Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994