Tax Reform Proposals Research Articles

Tax Reform and Real Estate

The recent tax reforms proposed by the Administration have occasioned bitter debate over the consequences of tax changes for rents and the value of real property. Many have claimed that these reforms will lead to immediate and sharp reduction in property values and large increases in rental payments. The analysis presented in this article shows that the effect of the proposed tax reforms on rents and property values is likely to be minor; in fact, the values of commercial buildings would be more likely to rise than fall and there should be little or no increase in tenant rents while apartment rents may even be expected to decline.

ASSESSING AUSTRALIAN TAX REFORM PROPOSALS

Economic Papers: A journal of applied economics and policyVolume 4, Issue 3 p. 18-41 ASSESSING AUSTRALIAN TAX REFORM PROPOSALS JONATHAN R. KESSELMAN, JONATHAN R. KESSELMAN Professor of Economics, University of British Columbia. This paper reflects developments through July 1985; the “postscript” section was added in September 1985. The author acknowledges the helpful comments of John Bossons and the support of a Reserve Bank of Australia Professorial Fellowship in Economic Policy but is solely responsible for all views.Search for more papers by this author JONATHAN R. KESSELMAN, JONATHAN R. KESSELMAN Professor of Economics, University of British Columbia. This paper reflects developments through July 1985; the “postscript” section was added in September 1985. The author acknowledges the helpful comments of John Bossons and the support of a Reserve Bank of Australia Professorial Fellowship in Economic Policy but is solely responsible for all views.Search for more papers by this author First published: September 1985 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1759-3441.1985.tb00490.xCitations: 4 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume4, Issue3September 1985Pages 18-41 RelatedInformation

World oil outlook

Thank you for inviting me to testify at your hearings on the world oil outlook. You have also asked for comments on other subjects such as the Treasury Department’s tax reform proposals affecting the oil industry. I will briefly comment on this issue following my discussion on the world oil outlook.

Analyzing Impacts of Potential Tax Policy Changes on U.S. Oil Security

This study uses the Treasury Department tax reform proposal as an extensive example of how one might quantitatively analyze the oil market impacts of changing US taxation policy and in so doing provides rough estimates of the oil security and economic impacts of tax proposals similar to those of the Treasury Department. Tax changes such as proposed by the Treasury Department can be expected to increase the cost of developing indigenous crude oil reserves. Lower domestic reserves would lead to lower domestic production and increased oil imports. Increasing import demand for oil would mitigate downward pressure on world crude oil prices in the short-to-intermediate term and would increase the rate of price increases in the intermediate-to longer term, when the existing OPEC excess crude oil production capacity will be greatly diminished. These crude oil price changes would increase energy prices and would increase the total cost of oil imports. Under these circumstances, any disruption in the international flow of petroleum would result in higher oil prices and more severe economic consequences if tax changes such as proposed by the Treasury Department were to be adopted. Such economic consequences are important and worthy of careful analysis in the context of anymore » tax reform debates. 14 references, 8 figures, 6 tables.« less

Partial Tax Reform: An Optimal Taxation Perspective

This paper presents a framework for evaluating partial tax reform proposals, based on the theory of optimal taxation, which is complementary to an analysis based on the theory of equitable taxation developed by Walter Hettich in this Journal. The analysis focuses on the fundamentally different perspectives on tax reform of the two schools of thought; never- theless, the two approaches are complementary in that first, they require decision-makers to state explicitly their views on horizontal and vertical equity, and second, they then provide a systematic means of evaluating partial tax reforms based on those criteria.

Expanding the Context of Curricular Reform

recent and widely publicized reports focus on alleged inadequacies in undergraduate education. These are not the only recent reports on academe. Others consider declining minority enrollment, declining faculty compensation and professional opportunities, and declining funding for research and research equipment, as well as increasing corporate educational needs, increasing corporatesponsored training, and increasing adult and continuing education. Many additional concerns press upon us. Federal educational funding is under attack, not only in the appropriation process but also in the legislative reauthorization of basic federal programs for higher education and in proposals for tax reform. International and regional competition have heightened awareness of the need for scientific research and training. Social inequities of income and educational opportunity are increasing and increasingly noted. Yet, despite the urgency of these issues, national attention has been drawn principally to the quality of undergraduate curricula and instruction. Does this mean that the inadequacies of undergraduate instruction are the most severe problems confronting universities and colleges? Clark Kerr so argued when he prefaced the renewed emphasis on undergraduate education in a speech to the Association of Colleges (AAC) early in 1984 in which he observed that: American higher education has been excellent in most respects; however, in the area of liberal learning there are great deficits, as there are in the teaching of basic skills.1 Thus faculty are damned with great praisedamned because his comment glosses over our many problems while criticizing us in our area of greatest public responsibility. Clark Kerr evades direct accusation of faculty by attributing opinions to the many: There are many in academe who feel it is the professors, who have fomented a 'subversion of liberal learn-

The Treasury's Proposals for Tax Reform: A Canadian Perspective

The U.S. Treasury Department's proposal entitled Tax Reform for Fairness, Simplicity, and Economic Growth' is bold and exciting and will generate much heated debate. It calls for a greatly broadened income base, for full inclusion of all real capital gains, for comprehensive measures to adjust for inflation, for depreciation allowances to approximate economic depreciation, for the elimination of special tax preferences for specific industries, for partial relief from the double taxation of dividends, for the curtailment of tax shelters, for tax simplification and for substantially reduced personal and corporate tax rates. These proposals are in response to President Reagan's call for basic tax reform. In his State of the Union address, the President said:

The Size of Government, Capital Accumulation, and the Tax Base

A central tax policy concern is the role of particular tax bases in either stimulating or discouraging capital accumulation. While the consumption tax has been proposed as superior to the income tax in terms of its treatment of saving, the literature has shown that whether a consumption or income-based tax system is associated with greater capital accumulation is theoretically indeterminate. This article incorporates the role of public accumulation and changing government activities into its analysis of capital accumulation, which enables this ambiguity to be resolved. An examination of U.S. data for the 1929–1978 period suggests that had inflation adjustment of the income tax been adopted it would, contrary to the implication of several tax reform proposals, have resulted in greater accumulation than the implementation of a consumption tax.

On Two Proposals to Promote Saving

This article presents a new technique for analyzing tax reform proposals. The main idea is to add an optimizing numerical procedure to the NBER Tax Simulation Model. This procedure enables the user of the model to find the transformation curve between the targets of the proposed reform. The technique is illustrated by analyzing two alternative proposals to promote saving.

A tax programming model

This paper presents a new technique for analysing tax reform proposals. The technique is general in the sense that it allows the user to choose the targets he thinks are the most important. Using this technique the Israeli Income Tax Reform of 1975 is evaluated.

Income and Payroll Tax Policy and Labor Supply

This paper considers both theoretical quest ions and empirical measures of the effects of various policies of income and payroll taxation on labor supply. It emphasizes deadweight loss as the correct criterion of taxation evaluation, rather than merely output effects. Distributional issues are also discussed. Simulations are done for the Kemp-Roth tax reform proposals to calculate both revenue effects and changes in deadweight loss. Deadweight loss calculations are also done for an equal yield progressive linear income tax.

State‐Financed Property Tax Relief

AbstractAs a result of widespread dissatisfaction with rising property tax burdens, state governments are being called on increasingly to provide property tax relief. Numerous tax reform proposals are being considered by the various states. The purpose of this paper is to develop an analytical framework for evaluating the potential impacts of alternative approaches to property tax relief. Applicability of the fiscal model is demonstrated using three alternative tax relief proposals—increased state funding of elementary and secondary education, revenue transfers for a general reduction in property taxes, and a circuit breaker to ease excessive property tax burdens.

ELIMINATION OF THE DOUBLE TAXATION OF DIVIDENDS AND CORPORATE FINANCIAL POLICY

IN RECENT YEARS, there has been a great deal of discussion about eliminating the double taxation of dividends. Tax reform proposals for eliminating double taxation were proposed by the Ford administration and currently are being proposed by the Carter administration. With the present tax system, the investor pays personal income taxes on cash dividends distributed to him and, in addition, his portion of the total earnings of the company is subject to the corporate tax rate. Thus, unlike other sources of income, corporate source income is taxed under two different income taxes-personal and corporate. Many economists propose the integration of corporate and personal income taxes. Full integration would eliminate the corporate income tax altogether with all corporate earnings being taxed at the stockholder level. As a result, a company's earnings, whether retained or distributed, would be taxable to the stockholder on the basis of his proportional ownership of the company. This would occur in the same way that the income of a partnership is taxed to the partners. While a number of economists advocate full integration,' there are many political and practical obstacles which thwart such a radical change.2 Consequently, most of the recent debate has focused on the partial integration of corporate and personal income taxes, one form of which is the elimination of the double taxation of dividends. In some measure, this debate is kept alive by the conspicuousness of the United States in being one of the few advanced industrial countries of the world without some form of partial integration.3 This paper will concentrate on the partial as opposed to the full integration of corporate and personal income taxes. In turn, there are several mechanisms for eliminating the double taxation of dividends. These include deduction of dividends at the corporate level, the stockholder credit method, or some combination of the two. Under the dividend deduction method, the corporation is allowed a tax deduction for dividends in the same way that it is allowed an interest deduction for its debt. Thus, the tax saving is received by the corporation and stockholders continue to

The political economy of a tax reform: Israel 1975

In July 1975 Israel adopted a new income tax system which marked a drastic departure from the old. It was based on a report of a commission appointed only seven months earlier. The paper gives a short description of the tax reform proposals and the background developments that led to them and concentrates on those items which may be of more general interest. These lie in the area of the design of income tax systems under rapid inflation, the combination of tax and transfer systems, and the political economy of introducing tax reform in a democratic society.

A methodology for evaluating tax reform proposals

Recent contributions to the theory of optimal taxation have shared a concern with the design of a tax structure de novo. In this paper, an attempt is made to use optimal tax theory as a framework for evaluating proposed changes in an existing tax system. Using data for the United States from 1967, five different tax reform proposals are examined on the basis of their impact on an explicit social welfare function.

Integration of the Personal and Corporate Income Taxes: The Missing Element in Recent Tax Reform Proposals

Integration of the Personal and Corporate Income Taxes: The Missing Element in Recent Tax Reform Proposals

German income tax reform. A simulation model

An independent commission on tax reforms and the Federal Ministry of Finance had been working for some time on basic changes of the German tax system. Their suggestions recently have been published (Bericht, 1971) just as many other proposals for tax reform from various experts, organizations, and political parties. Yet, compared with the Report (1966) of the Royal Commission on Taxation of Canada (Carter Commission) the German reform plans are less comprehensive and fundamental than the thorough economic analysis in the six volumes of the Carter Report. Since it is extremely difficult in Germany to obtain empirical data, I have attempted to develop a simple tax model to simulate the effects of a tax reform. The statistical analysis measures in particular the alternative consequences for the tax yield and the distribution of the tax burden to income groups.

Proposals for Tax Reform: A Review of the White Paper

Proposals for Tax Reform: A Review of the White Paper

Equity and Efficiency: The Canadian Proposals for Tax Reform*

Equity and Efficiency: The Canadian Proposals for Tax Reform*

Income Tax Planning for Farmers

N assignment to discuss income tax planning for farmers at a time when major tax reforms are being considered is a difficult, but, I must add, interesting task. I use the word interesting, but one can rest assured that many tax advisors, management companies, and investors use stronger descriptive terms. Football coaches respond to rule changes with new or revised strategies. I expect tax reform to lengthen the working day of many tax consultants as they devise new quick openers and end sweeps. This paper will discuss some farm tax planning opportunities that have existed during the last several years. Tax provisions used in tax loss farming will be emphasized. The principal features of proposed tax reforms as applied to agriculture will be summarized and some probable effects will be discussed.