دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی مالیات بر مصرف، مالیات بر درآمد و حساس بودن درآمد: دولت ها و رکود اقتصادی - Sage 2017

Abstract

This article uses an income-distributional approach to state tax sensitivity to examine the assumption that consumption taxes are more stable than income taxes. We estimate the 2007 to 2009 change in tax revenues as a function of state income distributions and tax burdens by income class. We estimate tax burdens as a function of income tax shares and consumption tax shares. We then simulate the change in tax revenues with tax shares at the national average. If high-income-tax states were to lower their reliance on this tax, the revenue decline during the recession would have been greater. For high consumption tax states, the revenue decline under higher income tax shares would have been smaller. Had they shifted toward consumption taxes, income tax reliant states would not have reduced the cyclical sensitivity of tax revenues during the Great Recession. The interaction between tax burdens and recession shocks by income class is key to these results.

Conclusion

The Great Recession was notable both for its overall severity and for differential impacts across states and income groups. While state tax revenues took a major hit during the Great Recession, the effect varied widely across states. Thirty-six of the forty-eight contiguous states experienced losses, and by 2014, real tax revenues were still below 2007 levels in many states. While over a third of state tax revenue comes from the personal income tax and a little less than half from taxes on consumption, states vary widely in their relative reliance on each of these taxes. Conventional analyses have attributed interstate differences in the cyclical sensitivity of state tax revenues to differences in their relative dependence on these two types of taxes, based on the notion that the income tax base is more volatile than the consumption tax base.

We propose an alternative model based on the distributional impacts of the recession and the distribution of tax burdens by income segment. Given the overall growth in inequality of incomes and the greater importance of capital gains to top incomes, differences across states in income inequality, and the disparate impacts of the recession by income level, we argue that analysis by segment of the income distribution enhances our understanding of the effect of this extreme business cycle on state tax revenues. We therefore analyze revenue changes as a function of the interaction between the distribution of income changes and the distribution of tax burdens by income level.