[rayiner]

We already have expert consensus on what’s the best taxes, people just don’t like the answer: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-... (“Three. Eliminate the corporate income tax. Completely. If companies reinvest the money into their businesses, that's good. Don't tax companies in an effort to tax rich people.

Four. Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. All of them. For everyone. Taxes discourage whatever you're taxing, but we like income, so why tax it? Payroll taxes discourage creating jobs. Not such a good idea. Instead, impose a consumption tax, designed to be progressive to protect lower-income households.”).

[ekelsen]

At least for me, even income taxes as high as 53% have not discouraged me from trying to make more money. They have made me consider moving.

At some level, certainly at 90%+, the most rational thing to do to make more money is to spend time lowering your tax bill, which is not a particularly beneficial way (to society) of making more money.

But I can't image anyone at an income tax level of say 10% is being actively discouraged from making more money? Like you need it to survive, so choosing to make _no_ money because of taxes seems like a very bad strategy.

[roenxi]

Prices are set on the margins, the reason people are paid what they are is because even a relatively small change would cause someone to do something differently. Same theory as why we can be confident raising the price of something a few cents is likely to cause someone to change their decisions - if it wasn't, the seller would raise the price by a few cents.

It isn't obvious what a 10% across-the-market tax will do, but by the nature of prices they are always going to be set near tipping points so it probably is going to cause people to drop out of the workforce or reduce the amount of time they spend working. Maybe tip people into less productive jobs that pay cash. I dunno. How many people and how many hours is an open question but all your imagination is really telling you is that you don't deal with marginal participants in the workforce.

[satvikpendem]

Not necessarily, many things are sticky and inelastic where in a perfectly economically driven world they'd be elastic. People for example still paid for eggs even as the egg companies made record profits during the pandemic, turns out it wasn't all the bird flu.

[ekelsen]

I think you're relying far too much on an econ 101 idea to analyze a situation that's far more complicated.

[throw101010]

Why would you want to "discourage consumption" by taxing it? Following the logic in your message.

I know you are just quoting this transcript/article... but you likely have an idea of how this would work since you classify this as the best solution.

Especially interested on how you would progressively tax consumption... How do you apply brackets to the day-to-day purchases? The general answer is to demand people to report their income/savings and the difference is taxed... and rich people will just game this as easily as the income taxes (if not more easily).

[fyredge]

I was initially skeptical of removal of income tax, but it's replacement with consumption tax makes sense.

Currently, income is "discouraged" through financial instruments such as Securities-Backed Line of Credit (SBLOC), which are very much only feasible in the realm of the very rich. Some part of this loophole can be offset by corporate tax, but corporate tax is based on profit, not income, incentivising all sorts of unproductive spending behaviour e.g. stock buybacks.

To me, the switch to consumption tax does a couple of things:

1. Instill discipline. Higher spending does not equate to higher productivity. By taxing spending, discipline will be instilled in both the consumer and corporation. With consumption tax, there will be no brackets, rather the amount of tax will be based on what the government policy is. Smoking bad? Higher tax. Soy milk more environmentally friendly? Lower tax.

2. Simplify tax situation with "capital gains". You pay tax upfront, now we don't need to evaluate what happens to the value of the stock, that will be the problem for the next buyer. No loophole for capital gains tax with inheritance.

[shinryuu]

The problem with consumption tax is that it's regressive. Poor(er) people are hit harder with such a tax.

[satvikpendem]

That's why the quote explicitly says "Instead, impose a consumption tax, designed to be progressive to protect lower-income households." Now how that's calculated I'm not quite sure, maybe they'd pull up your income details at every point of sale.

[neonstatic]

Depends what is being taxed. Staples could be excluded, while luxury items taxed more heavily.

[shinryuu]

Generally agree here. The other question / issue here. Would a consumption tax actually bring in an equal amount of revenue?

My intuition says no.

[snovv_crash]

Senate argument: "This poweryacht is necessary for my donor's livelihood of entertaining billionaires"

[fyredge]

This argument kind of illustrates why consumption tax is better. It's easy to advocate "lower taxes for everyone!" giving rich people most of the benefit, but it's much harder to advocate for "lower yacht tax!" without pissing off a whole bunch of wage workers.

[rayiner]

I’m not classifying it as the best solution. I’m quoting an NPR article describing the consensus view of economics experts.

But as I understand it, the reason is that consumption taxes have the least distortion in terms of deviating from the efficient behavior in the no-tax scenario: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/09/using-tax-to-tackle-...

[dpark]

That article spends most of its time explaining why a progressive consumption tax is obviously the right choice, then basically decries liberals as too dumb to understand it and conservatives as too evil to want it, but spends zero words to explain how a progressive consumption tax might possibly be implemented.

[hollerith]

>spends zero words to explain how a progressive consumption tax might possibly be implemented.

The implementation could consist of a tax on personal income, but any re-investment of that income is deductible, plus a tax on luxury items and products whose main purpose is status-signaling.

[dpark]

You’ve gotta squint each hard to call an income tax with deductions a consumption tax. That’s what we have in the US right now.

[satvikpendem]

Not really especially for W2 employees as they have very few deductions. In contrast, I have an LLC for my work and I can pay basically zero tax by reinvesting it into business expenses (which are consumption like new office equipment or client meals) or even funneling it into my 401k. That's the model they mean, not the current W2 deduction model.

[rayiner]

> basically decries liberals as too dumb to understand it and conservatives as too evil to want it

Yes, that’s the expert consensus.

[spwa4]

This is easily defeated by fake companies. This only works if companies always work in the best interest of the economy. If someone were to create a company that sells doohickeys for profit AND to make sure one particular family is comfortable (ie. directly providing housing for them, servants, an "expense account", ...) that would defeat such a tax scheme.

Systems are built on human behavior. Humans who spend entire lives looking for ways to exploit system. The above system was tried, and indeed got exploited for luxury in a big way.

To some extent I agree to the income tax idea. But you're far too extreme. Income tax makes jobs possible or impossible. The lower it is, the more occupations are realistic to have. So we should have a rule for governments: if unemployment is above, say, 4%, income tax must go down until unemployment drops below that 4%. If unemployment is below 2%, income tax should rise, and the state should be forced to deal with the lost income. This probably isn't a good rule as stated, but something along these lines would be good.

[ieatcandlewax]

This is something that happens right now and is currently known as "embezzlement". This will generally get you in trouble right now, so I can conceive of a world where it would get you in trouble.

I can imagine that some people would get away with it—but that's also kind of how the world works, some people will always game the system to their benefit like they do in every political system.

I think we're pretty far from devising a perfect system that is ungameable, so I don't see the point in devising scenarios where they are gamed.

A better metric imo for a tax system is seeing how much of the tax burden rests with people who work for wages vs people who own capital and comparing that to their proportion of the total wealth.

[jdashg]

It's better for five people to earn $100k than for one person to earn $500k and four people nothing. That is a societal negative that progressive and marginal income tax discourages.

[altmanaltman]

This is not "expert consensus", they bought in 5 economics with different political leanings and tried to get them to agree to common points (even though they do not agree with each other politically) and this was what they agreed on. And this was in 2012, 14 years ago. If you do the same experiment again with 100 economists, they might have a widely different plan.

Yes its an interesting article but you can't call it expert consensus and neither does NPR or any of the economists linked in there.

[rayiner]

The economists were asked to weigh in on behalf of their field, not just their personal views:

> There you have it, six major proposals that have broad agreement, at least among economists

The NPR article attributes the proposals to economists broadly, not just the specific panel.

[godwinson__4-8]

This reminds me of a rather odious napkin.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_14392...

I wonder if people like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld being at the scene of the crime is part of why "people just don't like the answer". Then again, perhaps it is revealing in some way of the answer offered itself.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

This approach is the perfect "the richer get richer" inequality engine that would run things even faster than our current system (which works pretty well already). Even the most consumerist of the super-rich spend that tiniest fraction on taxable consumables compared with any given salaried employee. Which means they have more to invest to increase their wealth (and gap between them and everyone else) even faster.

[rayiner]

The key insight is that wealth that’s not spent has no effect on anyone else. It’s just a number on paper.

[skt5]

Wealth could be invested (impacts those borrowing), used on consumables (impacts businesses), or hidden under the mattress or equivalent (reduces the supply of money so acts deflationary).

I would argue that those 3 are the main downstream effects of having wealth -- and they all impact people at large enough values.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Would political contributions count as taxable spending?

[TimorousBestie]

> This approach is the perfect "the richer get richer" inequality engine that would run things even faster than our current system (which works pretty well already).

That’s the idea. Lawyers accustomed to the patronage of wealthy clients need more of them to maintain their lifestyle.

[rayiner]

No, I'm just another third worlder who escaped a socialist country.

[TimorousBestie]

As you remind us all once or twice a day. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive, of course.

[rayiner]

Yet you continue to make ad hominem arguments based on imagined motivations.

[dmitrig01]

To what end? "Best" implies towards a certain goal. Is the goal economic growth? Or is it a fair society? Those are very different.

For example, if the goal is a fair society, then we should have a wealth tax, to disincentivize wealth equality. (And an income tax isn't so bad either in).

Having only a consumption tax makes sense if the goal is (only) to reduce consumption.

[rayiner]

The goal is economic growth, which matters more than anything else. Fun fact: in 1900, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world, at about 60% of US GDP per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/argentina-was-one-o.... Today, Argentina has under 20% of the GDP per capita of the US. The difference is that the U.S. has grown at about 1.7% annually for the past century and change, while Argentina only grew at about 1% annually.

Maybe you're willing to give up 70 basis points in pursuit of a "fairer" society, but that means your grandkids will live in a much poorer society than they'd otherwise live in. This is the trajectory Europe is in currently. Having missed the boat on the Internet, space travel, and now AI, I suspect my grandkids will see a world where people are immigrating from Europe to China the way we see people immigrating from Argentina to the U.S.

[applfanboysbgon]

GDP per capita is possibly the most worthless, detached-from-reality statistic I've ever seen. Japan has 38% of US GDP per capita; Mississipi, the lowest state, has a significant lead. And yet day-to-day life in Japan is infinitely richer than in even the highest GDP state. A much greater percentage of Japanese people have access to adequate food, housing, and healthcare, with sufficient money left over to enjoy life/hobbies. Perhaps a lower percentage of Japanese people have superyachts. Optimizing for the outcome of a shithole nation where tens of millions are denied access to healthcare, life expectancy is below almost any other developed nation, crime is out of control and the prison population is the highest in the world, etc seems greatly mistaken to me.

[autoexec]

> The goal is economic growth, which matters more than anything else.

That sounds like an argument for human slavery

[rayiner]

Economists have known slavery is inefficient since Adam Smith. Non-free labor creates a deadweight loss and inefficient allocation of capital.

[simianwords]

False. The consensus is that slavery hurts economic growth.

[OKRainbowKid]

And is not sustainable with finite and contested resources.

[dmitrig01]

> The goal is economic growth, which matters more than anything else.

To some people, but not everyone. It doesn't make sense to give unqualified "bests" without these kinds of caveats.

I don't personally share this view. I don't think growth or wealth are inherently good.

[TimorousBestie]

I believe economic growth is important to improve the lives of citizens who struggle to obtain the means of subsistence, but beyond that I don’t really see the point. Growth becomes actively harmful when it exacerbates wealth inequality.

Using GDP per capita as the metric assumes that the proceeds of economic growth “trickle down” uniformly, and this is obviously not true.

[dpark]

This is not an expert consensus. It’s one random npr story.

Switching entirely to consumption tax is a billionaires dream. Dropping corporate income tax is a CFO’s dream. (Whoever wrote the line about how reinvested money shouldn’t be taxed is also an idiot. Taxes are on profits. Money reinvested in the business becomes an expense and so is not taxed. What is discouraged through business taxation is sitting on large corporate coffers.)

[rayiner]

It's an NPR story with economics experts describing positions that are consensus in their field but politically unpopular.

> Tuesday's show presented the common-sense, no-nonsense Planet Money economic plan — backed by economists of all stripes, but probably toxic to any candidate that might endorse it... There you have it, six major proposals that have broad agreement, at least among economists.

[astrange]

I doubt deleting income tax is a popular view among economists.

Income and payroll taxes have the feature that you always have the money when it's time to pay the tax. That also means they're disinflationary. Whereas property taxes can be inflationary because they may require you to sell assets.

[snovv_crash]

Georgism style property taxes are only due on the sale of the property so also have the money available then.

[astrange]

I thought the point of an LVT was to force land sales for more productive uses.

[dataflow]

> Taxes discourage whatever you're taxing, but we like income, so why tax it?

How about to discourage the development of extreme income and/or wealth inequality? Or do you want to encourage them?