"How Much Do Taxes Matter?"

James Kwak reports on new research from Romer and Romer. The bottom line is that we can raise taxes on the wealthy without worrying that they will react by reducing work effort to any significant degree:

How Much Do Taxes Matter?, by James Kwak: Christina and David Romer’s new paper, “The Incentive Effects of Marginal Tax Rates: Evidence from the Interwar Era,” is available as an NBER working paper (if you are so lucky). Given the current debates about taxes, the paper is likely to garner some attention. ...

Their headline finding is that “The estimated impact of a rise in the after-tax share is consistently positive, small, and precisely estimated” pp. 15–16). They find an elasticity of taxable income with respect to changes in the after-tax income share of 0.19.

Advocates of lower tax rates are sure to seize on this as evidence that higher tax rates depress incentives to work. But that’s hardly what the paper says. First of all, the Romers’ elasticity estimate is lower than earlier empirical estimates that are largely based on the postwar period. To put this in perspective, an elasticity of 0.19 implies that tax revenues would be maximized with a tax rate of 84 percent; that is, you could raise taxes up to 84 percent before people’s reduced incentives to make money would compensate for the higher tax rates.

Second, remember that this is a study of the super-rich: not the top 1%, but the top 0.05%. These are the people whom one would expect to have the highest income elasticity, precisely because they don’t need the marginal dollar. Elasticities tend to be lower for ordinary people because they need to cover their expenses.

Finally,... taxable income ... can change both because people are earning less income and because they are engaging in tax strategies to reduce their taxable income. ...[R]ecent U.S. history shows that when you raise taxes on the rich, they don’t stop trying to make money: they just pay their lawyers and accountants more to avoid paying taxes. The solution to that is a simpler tax code with fewer exclusions and deductions.

The claim by some that we cannot raise taxes on the wealthy because they will just find a way to avoid them never struck me as very compelling. It's simply a matter of getting the rules right, and then doing what's necessary to enforce them.