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.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
0892.
Length: Date of creation: Aug 1983 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:0892
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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.:
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.
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