The Political Economy of Optimal Taxation

IF 2.1 2区 社会学 Q1 SOCIOLOGY
Elias Nosrati
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Abstract

The question of how to design socially optimal tax policies is located at the epicenter of today’s inequality debate. However, the field of optimal policy design is dominated by a distinctive brand of economic analysis which suffers from a blinkered theoretical lens and weak empirical foundations. This article offers an alternative framework for studying optimal policy design that replaces the dominant economic model’s emphasis on individual utility with a sociological emphasis on unequal life chances. Cross-national data are mobilized to study the architecture of contemporary tax systems across different institutional contexts. The dual taxation of labor and capital income coupled with the preferential treatment of socially concentrated wealth accumulation is shown to have generated sharp tax regressivity at the top of the resource distribution in all countries under consideration, from the (neo)liberal Anglosphere to social-democratic Scandinavia. Rationales for and possible designs of a progressive wealth tax, for which there is renewed international interest, are then explored in detail. A tractable formal model of optimal policy design is presented in which the net welfare effect of a tax policy reform emerges as a weighted sum of how the reform impacts aggregate life chances, inequality in life chances, and the ambient ecosphere. Under common normative and analytical assumptions, a socially optimal annual wealth tax levied on society’s most affluent——defined above a high exemption threshold——is shown to be positive and, in empirically realistic scenarios, lies upward of 10 percent. The corresponding top income tax rate exceeds 65 percent and can, on “limitarian” grounds, approach the confiscatory rate.
最优税收的政治经济学
如何设计社会最优的税收政策是当今关于不平等辩论的核心问题。然而,最优政策设计领域是由一种独特的经济分析主导的,这种分析受到了理论透镜的蒙蔽和经验基础的薄弱的影响。本文为研究最优政策设计提供了另一种框架,它用社会学对不平等生活机会的强调取代了主流经济模型对个人效用的强调。动员跨国数据来研究跨不同制度背景的当代税收制度架构。从(新)自由主义的盎格鲁文化圈到社会民主主义的斯堪的纳维亚,对劳动和资本收入的双重征税,加上对社会集中的财富积累的优惠待遇,显示出在所有考虑的国家中,在资源分配的顶端产生了急剧的税收递减。然后详细探讨了累进财富税的基本原理和可能的设计,国际社会对累进财富税重新产生了兴趣。本文提出了一个易于处理的最优政策设计的正式模型,在该模型中,税收政策改革的净福利效应表现为改革如何影响总体生活机会、生活机会不平等和环境生态圈的加权总和。在常见的规范和分析假设下,对社会上最富裕的人征收的社会最优年度财富税(定义高于高豁免门槛)被证明是积极的,在经验现实的情况下,其税率高达10%以上。相应的最高所得税率超过65%,在“极限主义”的基础上,可以接近没收率。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Sociological Science
Sociological Science Social Sciences-Social Sciences (all)
CiteScore
4.90
自引率
2.90%
发文量
13
审稿时长
6 weeks
期刊介绍: Sociological Science is an open-access, online, peer-reviewed, international journal for social scientists committed to advancing a general understanding of social processes. Sociological Science welcomes original research and commentary from all subfields of sociology, and does not privilege any particular theoretical or methodological approach.
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