Revisiting the Classical View of Benefit-Based Taxation
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES REVISITING THE CLASSICAL VIEW OF BENEFIT-BASED TAXATION Matthew Weinzierl Working Paper 20735 http://www.nber.org/papers/w20735 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 December 2014 Thanks to Alan Auerbach, Rafael Di Tella, Roger Gordon, Louis Kaplow, Wojciech Kopczuk, Ilyana Kuziemko, Benjamin B. Lockwood, Greg Mankiw, David Moss, Kristi Olson, Andreas Peichl, Florian Scheuer, Daniel Shaviro, Pierre Yared, Glen Weyl, and participants at the 2013 NTA conference, NYU Law School Tax Policy Colloquium, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago's Becker Friedman Instituteís inaugural Normative Ethics and Welfare Economics conference. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2014 by Matthew Weinzierl. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. Revisiting the Classical View of Benefit-Based Taxation Matthew Weinzierl NBER Working Paper No. 20735 December 2014, Revised March 2016 JEL No. D63,H21,H41 ABSTRACT This paper explores how the persistently popular "classical" logic of benefit-based taxation, in which an individual's benefit from public goods is tied to his or her income-earning ability, can be incorporated into modern optimal tax theory. If Lindahl's methods are applied to that view of benefits, first-best optimal policy can be characterized analytically as depending on a few potentially estimable statistics, in particular the coefficient of complementarity between public goods and innate talent.
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