Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Replacing the U.S. Income Tax with a Progressive Consumption Tax: A Sequenced General Equilibrium Approach

Contents:

Author Info

  • Don Fullerton
  • John B. Shoven
  • John Whalley

Abstract

This paper examines the welfare consequences of changing the current U.S. income tax system to a progressive consumption tax. We compute a sequence of single period equilibria in which savings decisions depend on the expected future return to capital. In the presence of existing income taxes, the U.S. economy is assumed to lie on a balanced growth path. With the change to a consumption tax, individuals save more and initially consume less. As the capital stock grows, consumption eventually overtakes that of the original path, and the economy approaches the new balanced growth path with higher consumption and a greater capital stock. Both the transition and the balanced growth paths enter our welfare evaluations. We find that the discounted present value of the stream of net gains is approximately $650 billion in 1973 dollars, just over one percent of the discounted present value of national income. Larger gains occur if further reform of capital income taxation accompanies the change. We examine the sensitivity of the results, both to the design of the consumption tax and to the values of elasticity and other parameters. The paper also contains estimates of the time required to adjust from one growth path to the other.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w0892.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 0892.

as in new window
Length:
Date of creation: Aug 1983
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:0892

Note: PE
Contact details of provider:
Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Phone: 617-868-3900
Email:
Web page: http://www.nber.org
More information through EDIRC

Related research

Keywords:

Other versions of this item:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Charles L. Ballard & Don Fullerton & John B. Shoven & John Whalley, 1985. "General Equilibrium Analysis of Tax Policies," NBER Chapters, in: A General Equilibrium Model for Tax Policy Evaluation, pages 6-24 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  2. Atkinson, A. B. & Stiglitz, J. E., 1976. "The design of tax structure: Direct versus indirect taxation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 6(1-2), pages 55-75.
  3. E. Philip Howrey & Saul H. Hymans, 1978. "The Measurement and Determination of Loanable-Funds Saving," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 9(3), pages 655-685.
  4. Summers, Lawrence H, 1981. "Capital Taxation and Accumulation in a Life Cycle Growth Model," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 71(4), pages 533-44, September.
  5. Bernheim, B Douglas, 1981. "A Note on Dynamic Tax Incidence," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 96(4), pages 705-23, November.
  6. Lewis, H G, 1975. "Economics of Time and Labor Supply," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 65(2), pages 29-34, May.
  7. Levhari, David & Sheshinski, Eytan, 1972. "Lifetime Excess Burden of a Tax," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 80(1), pages 139-47, Jan.-Feb..
  8. Martin Feldstein, 1978. "The Welfare Cost of Capital Income Taxation," NBER Chapters, in: Research in Taxation, pages 29-51 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  9. Boadway, Robin, 1979. "Long-run Tax Incidence: A Comparative Dynamic Approach," Review of Economic Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 46(3), pages 505-11, July.
  10. Atkinson, Anthony B, 1969. "The Timescale of Economic Models: How Long Is the Long Run?," Review of Economic Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(106), pages 137-52, April.
  11. Feldstein, Martin S, 1974. "Incidence of a Capital Income Tax in a Growing Economy with Variable Savings Rates," Review of Economic Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(4), pages 505-13, October.
  12. Robert E. Hall, 1987. "Consumption," NBER Working Papers 2265, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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 in new window

Cited by:
  1. Don Fullerton, 1984. "Which Effective Tax Rate?," NBER Working Papers 1123, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  2. Ahmed, S., 2004. "Modelling corporate tax liabilities using company accounts: a new framework," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 0412, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
  3. James Alm & Asmaa El-Ganainy, 2013. "Value-added taxation and consumption," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer, vol. 20(1), pages 105-128, February.
  4. Lin, Shuanglin, 1999. "Tax reform and external balance," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 18(6), pages 891-909, December.
  5. Timothy J. Kehoe, 1996. "Social accounting matrices and applied general equilibrium models," Working Papers 563, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
  6. Gordon, Roger H., 1989. "Notes on cash - flow taxation," Policy Research Working Paper Series 210, The World Bank.
  7. Bröcker, Johannes & Schneider, Martin, 1999. "How does economic development in eastern Europe affect Austria's regions? A multiregional general equilibrium framework," Discussion Papers 1/99, Dresden University of Technology, Faculty of Transportation and Traffic Sciences "Friedrich List", Institute for Transport and Economics.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:0892

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ().

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 references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link 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 profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

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