[redahs]

Tax policy has a huge impact on growth. However what matters much more than quantity of tax is the quality of tax.

Money is public credit and varies in quality depending upon what it is secured by. Broad-based sales and payroll taxes are the worst possible quality of tax which undermine their own base. Sales taxes destroy commerce and payroll taxes which shift the tax burden from old savers onto young workers make it harder for families to afford having kids as early.

Land value and property income taxes are the best quality of tax, because the state simply confiscates a portion of the free lunch which would otherwise be privately captured by landlords, without discouraging any productive economic activity.

Louisiana is an example of a state with very poor tax "quality": low property tax, large property tax exemptions for businesses, and high sales taxes. It has negative real GDP growth per capita.

The public is frequently malinformed by experts as to what taxes are the best quality, because many tax 'reform' advocacy organizations actually advocate that the governments use the worst possible quality tax because they hypothesize that it will cause voters to advocate for lower government spending.

[defertoreptar]

A large amount of Louisiana's employment is in resource extraction. Petroleum refining, petroleum, and coal products are the LA's largest exports. As a result, the drop in oil prices since 2014 have had a large effect on Louisiana's economy.

That said, I agree that property tax is probably the least bad tax.

[akimball]

Better is inflation.

[skookumchuck]

Taxing pollution, instead of taxing productive activity, is a quality tax. Instead of spending money to combat pollution, people are incentivized to find solutions. Instead of punishing productive people to get government money, polluters are punished.

[tomatotomato37]

Pollution taxes can only work for post-industrial countries that are able to run on mostly service industry and import everything that requires manufacturing. As thus, they would be fine for most European countries but crappy for industrializing countries like India.

[zozbot123]

Even in a developing country like India or China, a pollution tax would be an effective (and lucrative) defense against opportunistic "race to the bottom" behavior. There are plenty of emerging industries, even in manufacturing, that don't depend on polluting the environment for their viability.

[akimball]

And the ones that do need to pay the cost of their actions. Taxing pollution means society can control the incentive tipping point to optimize cost-benefit.

[JamesBarney]

> Tax policy has a huge impact on growth.

I don't think this is true except at very high levels of taxation.

The taxation styles and rates of the U.S. and the E.U have been wildly different for the last 40 years, but the growth rates have been very similar.