IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/mes/postke/v33y2010i1p83-104.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Capital wealth taxation as a potential remedy for excessive capital wealth inequality

Author

Listed:
  • James A. Yunker

Abstract

In this paper, it is first shown that a simple model of inheritance and chance, neither of which involve entrepreneurial or other productive contributions on the part of the capital owner, is quite successful in predicting the empirical capital wealth distribution in the United States as indicated by data taken from the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances. To the extent that an extremely high level of capital wealth inequality does not play an essential role in maintaining effort incentives and economic prosperity, the possibility of reducing it via taxation becomes more attractive. Estate taxation has been in existence for a long time, but model simulations suggest that while it can slow the rise of capital wealth inequality from an initial condition of perfect equality, once capital wealth inequality has reached a high level, it is ineffective in reducing this level. However, further model simulations indicate that even a relatively modest rate of annual capital wealth taxation can be highly effective toward this end.

Suggested Citation

  • James A. Yunker, 2010. "Capital wealth taxation as a potential remedy for excessive capital wealth inequality," Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 33(1), pages 83-104, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:mes:postke:v:33:y:2010:i:1:p:83-104
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://mesharpe.metapress.com/link.asp?target=contribution&id=RL1R2M05JG78247L
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Hanna Karolina Szymborska, 2022. "Rethinking inequality in the 21st century – inequality and household balance sheet composition in financialized economies," Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 45(1), pages 24-72, January.
    2. Schnellenbach, Jan, 2012. "The economics of taxing net wealth: A survey of the issues," Freiburg Discussion Papers on Constitutional Economics 12/5, Walter Eucken Institut e.V..
    3. Olga Zakrevskaya & Sharon Mastracci, 2013. "Differential Effects of the Great Recession by Household Type," Challenge, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 56(6), pages 87-114.

    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:mes:postke:v:33:y:2010:i:1:p:83-104. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/MPKE20 .

    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.