IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/pubfin/v41y2013i6p755-790.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Pathways to Tax Reform Revisited

Author

Listed:
  • Leonard E. Burman

Abstract

There is widespread agreement in Washington that the income tax needs to be reformed, although little agreement about how to do it. A common thread in most reform proposals is that they would slash most so-called tax expenditures—spending programs run through the tax system. This follows a long tradition. Stanley Surrey viewed cuts in tax expenditures as the “pathway to tax reform,†and in 1973 made the case in a book of that title. This article revisits Surrey’s pathway, examining various proposals to eliminate, reduce, or reformulate tax expenditures as part of tax reform, including overall limitations on tax expenditures, converting most tax expenditures to credits, and more radical reforms that would vastly reduce the number of people who would file tax returns. The efficacy of introducing a new tax such as a value-added tax or carbon tax to supplement to the income tax is also examined.

Suggested Citation

  • Leonard E. Burman, 2013. "Pathways to Tax Reform Revisited," Public Finance Review, , vol. 41(6), pages 755-790, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:pubfin:v:41:y:2013:i:6:p:755-790
    DOI: 10.1177/1091142113499400
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1091142113499400
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/1091142113499400?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Burman, Leonard E. & Slemrod, Joel, 2013. "Taxes in America: What Everyone Needs to Know," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199890262, Decembrie.
    2. Anthony B. Atkinson & Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, 2011. "Top Incomes in the Long Run of History," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 49(1), pages 3-71, March.
    3. Leonard E. Burman & William G. Gale & Jeffrey Rohaly, 2003. "Policy Watch: The Expanding Reach of the Individual Alternative Minimum Tax," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 17(2), pages 173-186, Spring.
    4. Leonard E. Burman & Marvin Phaup, 2012. "Tax Expenditures, the Size and Efficiency of Government, and Implications for Budget Reform," NBER Chapters, in: Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 26, pages 93-124, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Leonard E. Burman & Christopher Geissler & Eric J. Toder, 2008. "How Big Are Total Individual Income Tax Expenditures, and Who Benefits from Them?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(2), pages 79-83, May.
    6. Easterly, William, 2007. "Inequality does cause underdevelopment: Insights from a new instrument," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(2), pages 755-776, November.
    7. Congressional Budget Office, 2012. "The 2012 Long-Term Budget Outlook," Reports 43288, Congressional Budget Office.
    8. Alan D. Viard & Robert Carroll, 2012. "Progressive Consumption Taxation: The X Tax Revisited," Books, American Enterprise Institute, number 10533, September.
    9. Burman, Leonard E. & Rohaly, Jeffrey & Rosenberg, Joseph & Lim, Katherine C., 2010. "Catastrophic Budget Failure," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 63(3), pages 561-583, September.
    10. Congressional Budget Office, 2012. "The 2012 Long-Term Budget Outlook," Reports 43288, Congressional Budget Office.
    11. Martin Feldstein & Daniel Feenberg & Maya MacGuineas, 2011. "Capping Individual Tax Expenditure Benefits," NBER Working Papers 16921, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. repec:aei:rpbook:33699 is not listed on IDEAS
    13. Michael J. New, 2009. "Starve the Beast: A Further Examination," Cato Journal, Cato Journal, Cato Institute, vol. 29(3), pages 487-495, Fall.
    14. Congressional Budget Office, 2012. "The 2012 Long-Term Budget Outlook," Reports 43288, Congressional Budget Office.
    15. Congressional Budget Office, 2012. "The 2012 Long-Term Budget Outlook," Reports 43288, 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. Laurence Seidman, 2014. "Book Review: The Death of the Income Tax: A Progressive Consumption Tax and the Path to Fiscal Reform by Daniel Goldberg (Oxford University Press, Oxford, Uk, 2013, 318 Pages)," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 67(1), pages 269-278, March.

    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. Leonard Burman, 2013. "Pathways to Tax Reform Revisted," Center for Policy Research Working Papers 155, Center for Policy Research, Maxwell School, Syracuse University.
    2. Jeffrey B. Liebman, 2013. "The Deterioration in the US Fiscal Outlook, 2001-2010," Tax Policy and the Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 27(1), pages 1-18.
    3. Kazumasa Oguro, 2014. "Challenges confronting Abenomics and Japanese public finance ?Fiscal consolidation must start by squarely facing reality?," Public Policy Review, Policy Research Institute, Ministry of Finance Japan, vol. 10(2), pages 301-318, August.
    4. Thomas Grennes, 2013. "Diminishing Quality of Fiscal Institutions in the United States and European Union," Cato Journal, Cato Journal, Cato Institute, vol. 33(1), pages 91-109, Winter.
    5. Nora Traum & Shu‐Chun S. Yang, 2015. "When Does Government Debt Crowd Out Investment?," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 30(1), pages 24-45, January.
    6. Hans B. Christensen & Eric Floyd & Mark Maffett, 2020. "The Only Prescription Is Transparency: The Effect of Charge-Price-Transparency Regulation on Healthcare Prices," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 66(7), pages 2861-2882, July.
    7. David Greenlaw & James D. Hamilton & Peter Hooper & Frederic S. Mishkin, 2013. "Crunch Time: Fiscal Crises and the Role of Monetary Policy," NBER Working Papers 19297, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Joseph Steinberg, 2019. "On the Source of U.S. Trade Deficits: Global Saving Glut or Domestic Saving Drought?," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 31, pages 200-223, January.
    9. Christopher C. Afendulis & Michael E. Chernew & Daniel P. Kessler, 2013. "The Effect of Medicare Advantage on Hospital Admissions and Mortality," NBER Working Papers 19101, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Shinichi Nishiyama, 2013. "Fiscal Policy Effects in a Heterogeneous-Agent Overlapping-Generations Economy With an Aging Population: Working Paper 2013-07," Working Papers 44941, Congressional Budget Office.
    11. Sebastian Rausch & Hidemichi Yonezawa, 2018. "The Intergenerational Incidence Of Green Tax Reform," Climate Change Economics (CCE), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 9(01), pages 1-25, February.
    12. Won-Sik Hwang & Inha Oh & Jeong-Dong Lee, 2014. "Assessing the Socio-Economic Effects of Korea's Nuclear Power Policy," Energy & Environment, , vol. 25(5), pages 931-952, July.
    13. Michelangeli Valentina & Santoro Marika, 2013. "Households’ uncertainty about Medicare policy," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 13(1), pages 151-186, January.
    14. Jonathan A. Schwabish & Julie H. Topoleski, 2013. "Modeling Individual Earnings in CBO’s Long-Term Microsimulation Model: Working Paper 2013-04," Working Papers 44306, Congressional Budget Office.
    15. Jonathan M. Harris, 2019. "Responding to Economic and Ecological Deficits," GDAE Working Papers 19-01, GDAE, Tufts University.
    16. Cardon James H. & Moore Joel & Showalter Mark H., 2012. "The Distributional Effects of Health Reform Limits on Flexible Spending Accounts," Forum for Health Economics & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 15(2), pages 1-24, November.
    17. Robert D. Lieberthal, 2016. "Hedging Medical Spending Growth: An Adaptive Expectations Approach," Applied Finance and Accounting, Redfame publishing, vol. 2(2), pages 57-64, August.
    18. D. Tverdokhlibova, 2018. "Theory and practice of the use of fiscal sustainability indicators," Economy and Forecasting, Valeriy Heyets, issue 3, pages 7-47.
    19. UNDP Regional Bureau for Africa & Ayodele Odusola, "undated". "Fiscal Policy, Redistribution and Inequality in Africa," UNDP Africa Policy Notes 2017-08, United Nations Development Programme, Regional Bureau for Africa.
    20. Sonali Jain-Chandra & Tidiane Kinda & Kalpana Kochhar & Shi Piao & Johanna Schauer, 2019. "Sharing the Growth Dividend: Analysis of Inequality in Asia," Journal of Banking and Financial Economics, University of Warsaw, Faculty of Management, vol. 2(12), pages 5-28, September.

    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:sae:pubfin:v:41:y:2013:i:6:p:755-790. 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: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    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.