Reddit reviews Taxing Ourselves, 4th Edition: A Citizen's Guide to the Debate over Taxes

This is an objective book about US federal income taxes. Very informative and gives you both arguments in favor and against it and other proposals. Would recommend for undergraduate econ major taking a class on taxes.

I'm going to try to summarize the research, provide you some links, and avoid giving an opinion, since that's what you asked for (and frankly, this is a very difficult question that I'm not sure that we know the answer, despite what might be a growing consensus that the answer is "high marginal tax rates don't affect growth that much"). One thing that I will point out is that there's too much attention paid to marginal tax rates in the news, and not other aspects of the tax system like deductions, investment tax credits, loss carry-forwards and carry-backs, foreign tax credits, etc. Those things have the potential to have just as much an effect on growth as marginal tax rates, but marginal tax rates are easier to understand. They're all ways of changing tax liabilities based on behavior by tweaking what counts as income rather than tweaking tax rates.

For a public audience, I think everyone should read Taxing Ourselves. It's been a while since I read it, but they're surely a discussion of taxes and growth.

So are there papers that address marginal tax rates and growth directly? A causal effect like this is a very difficult question to answer convincingly, because when it comes to changes in GDP, we don't have good counterfactuals. If you just want to see tax rates against GDP growth directly, I'm sure you can find that information via Google, but it's correlation not causation. Who knows what would have happened if taxes had not changed in 1986, or whether things in 1986 were so different from things now that studying responses to TRA86 are totally useless for 2012? Who knows if studying tax changes in all OECD countries really tells us much about tax and growth in general? The only paper I know of on this question is Romer & Romer. It was later published in the AER. There's a story behind this paper that I'm having trouble remembering; I think there's a growing strain of thought for why its methodology is misleading. Someone fill me in if they know more about this. There might be more papers like this in the macro literature (please someone reply if there are), but the data are pretty limited on this front.

Now, another way to approach this is to realize that, in order for taxes to affect growth, they have to affect behavior. If everyone did the exact same thing they did with a low marginal tax rate, then you'd just be shifting output from the "C" or "I" column to the "G" column. So how could taxes affect behavior? They could cause less investment, especially new investment, or they could cause people to work less, or consume less etc. Taxes would have to have strong effects on these things in order to affect growth. So here's the evidence I know of on that stuff. A lot of the attention is on the rich here, since they're the ones most affected by the top marginal tax rates on income, corporations, and capital gains (remember that these are all different tax rates, and might have differing effects on behavior/growth).

Does Atlas Shrug? The Economics of Taxing the Rich This edited volume is absolutely the best collection on this topic. If you read the articles, and then the peer-reviewed articles cited most often in them, then you'll know everything the economists know.

Diamond & Saez Have a great paper summarizing the evidence that's most relevant for income tax policy.

Saez, Slemrod, and Giertz summarize the evidence on a new-ish approach to answering these questions involving the Elasticity of Taxable income.

Read the articles, and pay attention to what's cited in the articles, and you'll be off to a good start.

Dear llordlloyd,

I am not an expert in taxation, but there is theory of optimal taxation called Ramsay taxation that to minimize tax distortion and inefficiencies, the tax rate has to be *inversely proportional" with its elasticity. The idea here is that higher tax rate lowers incentive to work. But if a person's effort on a particular occupation is inelastic, a high tax rate is efficient because it only reduces work effort by a small amount, while an occupation in which its work effort is sensitive to a higher tax rate, then a smaller tax rate should be implemented because you don't want to drastically reduce the amount of work effort.

I wish I could tell you more about taxation but Joel Slemrod's Taxing Ourselves is a good layman's book on the subject of taxation.

Sorry to hijack BUT... Enough (not a lot) of the comments here made feel that a lot of people could use a nice primer on taxes (esp the income tax)

I recommend reading this book: http://www.amazon.com/Taxing-Ourselves-4th-Edition-Citizens/dp/0262693631

It is a very good book that merely seeks to inform the reader about taxes never taking a stand by condoning or condemning. It was published in 2008 and the statistics reflect that BUT the underlying analysis is still relevant AND it is easy to attain up to date statistics.

Funniest thing about the book is the opening quote:

Albert Einstein, "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."

Not an article, but most tax economists (that I know) would suggest you read Taxing Ourselves by Slemrod and Bakija

edit: to hedge

Check out the book Taxing Ourselves.

your State sales tax is a fully flat tax - nobody thinks State sales taxes are unfair.

How about answering my question? Is it not fair enough that 10% of the population pays 70% of the personal income taxes collected ??? If not, do you think it should be 75%? 85%? 95%? why?

If you really want to educate yourself, read "Taxing Ourselves":

http://www.amazon.com/Taxing-Ourselves-4th-Edition-Citizens/dp/0262693631/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335350735&sr=8-1