21世纪的税制改革毕业论文外文文献翻译及原文

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　　翻译日期： 2017.02.14

　　本科毕业设计（论文）外文翻译译文

　　21世纪的税制改革 Tax Reform in the 21st Century

　　作者：奥尔巴赫,艾伦?J

　　起止页码：

　　出版日期（期刊号）：2006年5月6日

　　出版单位：Berkeley Program in Law and Economics, Working Paper Series, Berkeley Program in Law and Economics, UC Berkeley

　　外文原文

　　I. Introduction

　　During the next decade or so, can the United States undertake a major reform to make its tax system simpler, fairer and more efficient? In addressing this question, I will focus mostly on reforms that incorporate at least some elements of consumption taxation, because this is the direction in which both economic research and policy discussions have pointed in recent years. But what constitutes a consumption tax, or entitles a system to be characterized as providing “consumption-tax treatment,” is not so obvious. There are many characteristics that distinguish a consumption tax and, indeed, the importance of different characteristics in delivering a tax system that is simpler, fairer and more efficient is to a large extent what this conference has been about.

　　Thus, I will frame my discussion by going through the attributes of a consumption tax, considering the impact of the choices made in constructing different reform proposals. This is one place where the state of our knowledge comes into play, as on some issues our knowledge is considerable, on others more research is required, while some decisions are of an unknowable nature, either because the necessary data won’t be available or because the circumstances we confront for the future go beyond our historical experience.

　　I begin, though, with a review of our state of knowledge on the fundamental issues relating to the choice between income and consumption taxation. Here, too, our thinking has evolved over the years, in part because of advances in economic theory and empirical evidence, but also because of changes in the way we view the comparison. As with the choices among

　　particular types of consumption tax, though, many important questions are still unanswered. II. The Choice Between Income and Consumption Taxes

　　A. Should Capital Income Be Taxed?

　　A consumption tax effectively exempts the return to saving from taxation, in a manner discussed more fully below. Thus, the debate over whether a consumption tax would be more desirable than an income tax involves asking whether it is a good idea to tax capital income.

　　Through the years, our perspective on whether a consumption tax would improve our tax system, in particular whether it would make the tax system more efficient , has become considerably more sophisticated and has tended to push in the direction of a consumption tax. There are now several strands of the literature arguing that a consumption tax would be more efficient than an income tax. I will not attempt a detailed survey of this rich literature here, trying instead to highlight some key results.

　　Thus, even though capital income taxes distort consumption more and more over the infinite horizon, positive taxes on capital income may be desirable if we seek to implement a plan for redistributive taxation, and negative taxes on capital income may be desirable to offset the effects of imperfect competition. On the other hand, one can scour the literature without finding a result suggesting that labor income and capital income should be treated equally by the tax system. This is hardly surprising, as there is no obvious intuition why such a result might make sense. It is no accident that the literature has focused on whether it is efficient for capital income taxes to be zero rather than on whether there should be equal taxes on capital income and labor income.

　　Can future research sharpen these predictions? Much of the work on dynamic optimal taxation is very recent, so we are likely to gain a better idea of how large capital income tax wedges should be, at least in the very stylized models of the literature. These models typically have a simple structure with regard to individual decisions and assume considerable flexibility with respect to the choice of tax instruments, so they will continue to serve as a guide rather than as a source of estimates unless they incorporate considerably more realistic characterizations of individual and institutional behavior. But this is an important service, as the evolution of thinking about the comparison of income and consumption taxes to date demonstrates.

　　B. Bequests and Inheritances

　　There are many potential explanations for bequests, and they differ in how they would affect the previous analysis. A strong altruistic bequest motive, as in Barro (1974), turns the decisions of a life-cycle individual into the infinite horizon calculations of a dynasty, thereby

　　increasing the deadweight loss from capital income taxation. At the other extreme, accidental bequests that occur because of incomplete annuity markets do not imply any extension of an individual’s planning horizon. In between are models in which there is some form of interest in the size of one’s bequest, either because of a joy of giving or because the prospect of bequests can be used to elicit favorable behavior from one’s potential heirs. While evidence strongly rejects the extreme version of Barro’s predictions (Altonji at al. 1997), it is likely that observed bequests reflect a mixture of motives. Indeed, this is Bernheim’s (2002, p. 1196) conclusion based on a review of our knowledge from the empirical literature. It is not clear how much the nature of the bequest motive matters for the choice between income and consumption taxes. As confirmed by simulations presented in Altig et al. (2001), even planned bequests, if they are motivated by the benefits of giving rather than the ultimate consumption of one’s heirs, need have little impact on the desirability of consumption taxes. Moreover, as already discussed above, the distortions of future consumption resulting from capital income taxation are already significant within the long-horizon life-cycle context, so the potential lengthening of the horizon beyond one’s own lifetime doesn’t make the efficiency argument for eliminating capital income taxes that much stronger.

　　Of course, the nature of the bequest motive matters considerably more as one considers the future of the estate tax or the possible role of inheritance taxes. A tax on unplanned bequests is a nondistortionary tax, whereas a tax on planned bequests is more akin to a capital income tax in its effects on saving behavior. Understanding the nature of the bequest motive, then, is very important to decisions about the role that transfer taxes should play in the tax system.

　　C. Eliminating Distortions in the Treatment of Assets and Liabilities

　　Tax reform discussion often relates not just to the overall level of capital income taxation, but also to differential capital income taxation. Since Diamond and Mirrlees (1971) showed that the efficient allocation of resources in production can be a desirable outcome even in the presence of other tax distortions, there has been a general sense that taxing different types of capital income at different rates reduces economic efficiency beyond the degree necessary to raise revenue for government spending and redistribution. Thus, we know that differential capital income taxation is a bad idea, at least under certain assumptions. Some take this as an additional argument in favor of consumption taxation, for taxing all capital income at a rate of zero if one method of implementing uniform capital income taxation.

　　The potential gains from reducing or eliminating the distinction between debt and equity, therefore, are hard to quantify based on our present knowledge. Certainly, the shift to a markedly different tax system would give us an opportunity to learn more from observed responses. But this information would not be available in advance.

　　D. How Large is the Capital Income Tax Wedge?

　　Calculations of the efficiency gains from eliminating the capital income tax wedge depend, of course, on this size of this wedge. If the before-tax rate of return to capital were high, a capital income tax could alter the price of future consumption substantially; if the before-tax rate of return were zero, on the other hand, a capital income tax at the same rate would collect no revenue and impose no distortions. Thus, although the theory might point toward elimination of capital income taxes, the potential efficiency gains depend critically on how big the tax wedge is to begin with.

　　Thus, the rate of return relevant in calculating the intertemporal distortion may be lower than has been assumed in simulation models, but the tax rate applicable to that lower rate of return is likely to be higher. How much higher is difficult to know, because it depends on an asset’s riskiness, the extent to which the firm is able to offset one asset’s losses with another asset’s gains, and how tax asymmetries interact with adjustments for risk. There have been some attempts in the literature to adjust effective tax rates separately for tax asymmetries and risk (e.g Auerbach 1983), but these calculations are more illustrative than comprehensive. The magnitudes of these adjustments are at this point more knowable than known.

　　E. Summary: Income Taxation versus Consumption Taxation

　　Consumption taxes may be superior to income taxes as a tax base, even taking distributional considerations into account. The gains may be greater still if the differential tax treatment of capital income present under the existing tax system is at least partially unavoidable under the income tax, or if the use of capital is distorted even in the absence of taxation. But there may also be incentive reasons to maintain capital income taxes, and the significance of the capital income tax wedge may have been substantially overstated by calculations based on observed before-tax rates of return. These conclusions, tentative and in conflict as they are, reflect the advances of recent decades in our thinking about the choice of tax base. We can learn still more from future research. But conclusions based on rather abstract characterizations of income and consumption taxes cannot be applied to the evaluation of concrete reform proposals without considering further details of their design and implementation.

　　III. Attributes of Consumption Taxes

　　To characterize a consumption tax, let us start with one version of the national income identity relating the product and income sides of Gross National Product (GNP),

　　(1) GNP = C + I +G + X ?M + R f = W + R + R f

　　where C is consumption, I is gross domestic investment, G is government spending, X is exports, M is imports, W is wage income, R is domestic gross capital income, and R fis net foreign income, i.e., foreign income of domestic residents less domestic income of foreign

　　residents.

　　The standard method for imposing consumption taxes, as under the VAT, is to start on the income side, taxing all factor returns but then forgiving taxes on sales that do not represent consumption, in particular:

　　(2) C = W + R ? I ?G ? X + M

　　So that sales for investment and export are free of tax while tax is imposed on imports.

　　A. Government Purchases

　　If the tax base is meant to be private consumption, then government purchases should also be excluded from the tax base. An equivalent treatment would be for the government budget to be adjusted to offset the taxation of government purchases, for there would be no change in the quantities of goods and services purchased by the government. But the government budget may not adjust, particularly if the federal government taxes the purchases of state and local governments and makes insufficient compensating transfers to these lower-level governments. In this event, taxing government purchases would reduce the real budgets of state and local governments.

　　Whether taxing the activities of state and local governments would improve welfare is unknown and largely unknowable. Starting from the view that it is a good idea to tax government-provided goods and services provided at the same rate as those provided privately to households, political economy considerations and an evaluation of the spillovers from government activities can make deviations in either direction possibly desirable. But it will be a difficult task ever to know the “right” answer.

　　B. The Treatment of Existing Capital

　　For a zero-present-value investment made today, the future additions to R or R f are equal in present value to the cost of today’s investment added to I or If. Thus, with tax rates constant over time, the decision of whether to include or exclude the components ( R- I)and(Rf-If)would have no impact on the present value of government revenues, nor would it have any impact on the incentive to undertake marginal investments the effective tax rate on such investments would be zero under both approaches. For some assets, notably owner-occupied housing and other consumer durables, it would be difficult to impose a tax on the elements of ( R- I)because this would require the taxation of imputed rental income. That is, we observe the investment flows as components of I but we do not observe all the components of R, just subsequent asset sales, not the flow of imputed rental income during the period of ownership. Hence, virtually all consumption tax proposals would exclude these components. Under the VAT, this would amount to taxing sales of new housing rather than the subsequent imputed rent.