IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iie/pbrief/pb15-4.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The True Levels of Government and Social Expenditures in Advanced Economies

Author

Listed:
  • Jacob Funk Kirkegaard

    (Peterson Institute for International Economics)

Abstract

Much of the conventional wisdom concerning social spending is faulty, especially in the United States. Analyses typically focus on readily available information about direct government social expenditures and overlook how tax systems and private spending affect the level of social spending in different societies. By taking the full effects of tax systems and social spending from both private and public sources into account, Jacob Funk Kirkegaard finds that the true level of US social expenditures is fully comparable to European spending—and yet yields worse outcomes than in Europe. Any debate in the United States on social spending should thus focus not on how much is spent but on how and for whose benefit the money is spent. High aggregate social spending in the United States has a very low impact on overall income inequality and healthcare outcomes. Adopting some best practices from other countries in health care could thus led to substantial efficiency gains, not to mention better health outcomes. Lastly, the relatively large scale of tax breaks for social purposes and the associated overall poor social outcomes in the United States indicates an excessively reliance on the tax system to the detriment of fiscal sustainability, transparency, and redistributive fairness. Improving the overall quality of US social spending therefore requires an overhaul of the US tax code.

Suggested Citation

  • Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, 2015. "The True Levels of Government and Social Expenditures in Advanced Economies," Policy Briefs PB15-4, Peterson Institute for International Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:iie:pbrief:pb15-4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/true-levels-government-and-social-expenditures-advanced-economies
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Congressional Budget Office, 2013. "The Distribution of Major Tax Expenditures in the Individual Income Tax System," Reports 43768, Congressional Budget Office.
    2. Congressional Budget Office, 2014. "The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2011," Reports 49440, Congressional Budget Office.
    3. Congressional Budget Office, 2013. "The Distribution of Major Tax Expenditures in the Individual Income Tax System," Reports 43768, Congressional Budget Office.
    4. Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, 2009. "Did Reagan Rule In Vain? A Closer Look at True Expenditure Levels in the United States and Europe," Policy Briefs PB09-1, Peterson Institute for International Economics.
    5. Congressional Budget Office, 2013. "The Distribution of Major Tax Expenditures in the Individual Income Tax System," Reports 43768, Congressional Budget Office.
    6. Congressional Budget Office, 2014. "The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2011," Reports 49440, Congressional Budget Office.
    7. Congressional Budget Office, 2013. "The Distribution of Major Tax Expenditures in the Individual Income Tax System," Reports 43768, Congressional Budget Office.
    8. Congressional Budget Office, 2014. "The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2011," Reports 49440, Congressional Budget Office.
    9. Congressional Budget Office, 2014. "The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2011," Reports 49440, Congressional Budget Office.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Christine Mayrhuber & Matthias Firgo & Hans Pitlik & Alois Guger & Ewald Walterskirchen, 2018. "Sozialstaat und Standortqualität," WIFO Studies, WIFO, number 61006, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Marianne Bitler & Hilary Hoynes & Elira Kuka, 2017. "Child Poverty, the Great Recession, and the Social Safety Net in the United States," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 36(2), pages 358-389, March.
    2. Peter Temin, 2016. "The American Dual Economy," International Journal of Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 45(2), pages 85-123, April.
    3. Branko Milanovic, 2022. "After the Financial Crisis: The Evolution of the Global Income Distribution Between 2008 and 2013," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 68(1), pages 43-73, March.
    4. Ethan Ilzetzki, 2015. "A Positive Theory of Tax Reform," Discussion Papers 1526, Centre for Macroeconomics (CFM).
    5. Jesse Bricker & Alice Henriques & Jacob Krimmel & John Sabelhaus, 2016. "Measuring Income and Wealth at the Top Using Administrative and Survey Data," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 47(1 (Spring), pages 261-331.
    6. Steven J. Davis, 2015. "Regulatory Complexity and Policy Uncertainty: Headwinds of Our Own Making," Economics Working Papers 15118, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
    7. Hager, Sandy Brian, 2015. "Public Debt as Corporate Power: Mapping the New Aristocracy of Finance," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2015/01, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    8. Jeff Larrimore & Jacob Mortenson & David Splinter, 2021. "Household Incomes in Tax Data: Using Addresses to Move from Tax-Unit to Household Income Distributions," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 56(2), pages 600-631.
    9. Koehne, Sebastian & Sachs, Dominik, 2022. "Pareto-improving reforms of tax deductions," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 148(C).
    10. Robert Grafstein, 2018. "The problem of polarization," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 176(1), pages 315-340, July.
    11. Alan J. Auerbach, 2017. "Tax Reform in an Era of Budget Stress, Inequality, and International Mobility," Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, Springer;Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics, vol. 153(2), pages 103-122, April.
    12. Ahiteme N. Houndonougbo & Matthew N. Murray, 2019. "Millionaires or Job Creators: What Really Happens to Employment Growth When You Stick It to the Rich?," Public Finance Review, , vol. 47(1), pages 112-141, January.
    13. Hager, Sandy Brian, 2015. "Corporate Ownership of the Public Debt: Mapping the New Aristocracy of Finance," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 13(3), pages 505-523.
    14. Alan J. Auerbach & Laurence J. Kotlikoff & Darryl Koehler, 2023. "US Inequality and Fiscal Progressivity: An Intragenerational Accounting," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 131(5), pages 1249-1293.
    15. Periklis Gogas & Rangan Gupta & Stephen M. Miller & Theophilos Papadimitriou & Georgios Antonios Sarantitis, 2015. "Income Inequality: A State-by-State Complex Network Analysis," Working Papers 201534, University of Pretoria, Department of Economics.
    16. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2015. "Inequality in America," The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, , vol. 657(1), pages 8-20, January.
    17. Jesse Bricker & Peter Hansen & Alice Henriques Volz, 2018. "How Much has Wealth Concentration Grown in the United States? A Re-Examination of Data from 2001-2013," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2018-024, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    18. Ilzetzki, Ethan, 2018. "Tax reform and the political economy of the tax base," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 164(C), pages 197-210.
    19. Severin Borenstein & Lucas W. Davis, 2016. "The Distributional Effects of US Clean Energy Tax Credits," Tax Policy and the Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 30(1), pages 191-234.
    20. Peter Temin, 2015. "The American Dual Economy: Race, Globalization, and the Politics of Exclusion," Working Papers Series 26, Institute for New Economic Thinking.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iie:pbrief:pb15-4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peterson Institute webmaster (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iieeeus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.