IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/mhr/finarc/urnsici0015-2218(2002-200305)592_264pfctri_2.0.tx_2-4.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Prospects for Consumption-Based Tax Reform in the United States

Author

Listed:
  • George Zodrow

Abstract

It appears that the debate in the US regarding "fundamental tax reform", commonly defined as replacing the existing corporate and individual income tax system with some form of consumption-based taxation, is about to resume in earnest. At the current time, however, the chances for passage of such reform do not seem particularly great. This paper argues that, in addition to political reasons, doubts about the desirability of reform exist because several key economic issues raised by fundamental tax reform are not yet fully resolved. Specifically, before a compelling case for fundamental reform can be made, its advocates must address five key issues - uncertainty about the economic effects of fundamental tax reform, concern about its distributive effects, uncertainty about the simplicity gains that might be obtained with fundamental reform relative to those under incremental income tax reform, concerns about undesirable transitional effects of fundamental tax reform, and concerns about its unintended side-effects. This paper examines the current state of the debate on each of these five issues.

Suggested Citation

  • George Zodrow, 2002. "Prospects for Consumption-Based Tax Reform in the United States," FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 59(2), pages 264-294, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:mhr:finarc:urn:sici:0015-2218(2002/200305)59:2_264:pfctri_2.0.tx_2-4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/en/article/prospects-for-consumptionbased-tax-reform-in-the-united-states-1016280015221032643146
    Download Restriction: Fulltext access is included for subscribers to the printed version.
    ---><---

    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. Michael P. Devereux & Peter Birch Sørensen, 2006. "The Corporate Income Tax: international trends and options for fundamental reform," European Economy - Economic Papers 2008 - 2015 264, Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission.
    2. Peter Birch Sørensen, 2006. "Can Capital Income Taxes Survive? And Should They?," EPRU Working Paper Series 06-06, Economic Policy Research Unit (EPRU), University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics.
    3. David F. Bradford, 2003. "The X Tax in the World Economy," Working Papers 109, Princeton University, Department of Economics, Center for Economic Policy Studies..
    4. Horacio L. P. Piffano, 2007. "Argentina and Brazil: Fiscal Harmonization and Subnational Sales Taxation – State / Provincial VAT versus State / Provincial Retail Sales Tax," IIE, Working Papers 069, IIE, Universidad Nacional de La Plata.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H20 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - General
    • H30 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - General

    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:mhr:finarc:urn:sici:0015-2218(2002/200305)59:2_264:pfctri_2.0.tx_2-4. 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.

    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: Thomas Wolpert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/fa .

    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.