The Design of the Tax System

曼昆-经济学原理 12

Summary of Chapter 12 – The Design of the Tax System

关键词：

deadweight loss: 无谓损失
legal tax avoidance: 合法避税
illegal tax evasion: 逃税
marginal tax rate: 边际税率
average tax rate: 平均税率
lump-sum tax: 定额税
vertical equity: 纵向公平
horizontal equity: 横向公平
proportional tax: 比例税
regressive tax: 累退税
progressive tax: 累进税
tax incidence: 赋税归属

In designing a tax system, policymakers have two objectives: efficiency and equity.

One tax system is more efficient than another if it raises the same amount of revenue at a smaller cost to taxpayers.

1. The most obvious cost is the tax payment itself.
2. The deadweight losses that result when taxes distort the decisions that people make. The deadweight loss is the inefficiency that a tax creates as people allocate resources according to the tax incentive rather than the true costs and benefits of the goods and services that they buy and sell.
3. The administrative burdens that taxpayers bear as they comply with the tax laws. The burden includes not only the resources cost in tax process, but also the behavior of legal tax avoidance and resources devoted to complying with the tax laws. The administrative burden could be reduced by simplifying the the tax laws. Yet simplification is always politically complicated.

Everyone agrees that the tax system should be equitable, but there is much disagreement about what equity means and how the equity of a tax system can be judged.

1. When discussing the efficiency and equity of income taxes, economists distinguish among three notions of the tax rate: the average tax rate, the marginal tax rate and the lump-sum tax.
2. The benefits principle: people should pay taxes based on the benefits they receive from government services.
3. The ability-to-pay principle: taxes should be levied on a person according to how well that person can shoulder the burden. This principle leads to two corollary notions of equity: vertical equity and horizontal equity.
   • Vertical equity states that taxpayers with greater ability to pay taxes should contribute a larger amount. There are three systems, differing in how quickly taxes rises with income: proportional, regressive and progressive.
   • Horizontal equity states that taxpayers with similar abilities to pay taxes should pay the same amount.

Tax incidence–the study of who bears the burden of taxes–is central to evaluating tax equity.