Consumption versus Income Taxation: Three Moments in the Political Economy of Fiscal Choice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most modern economies tax both consumption and labour income. While there is an extensive normative literature on the optimal mix of the two taxes, there is little examination of what determines the actual mix in a well specified political economy context. We use a multi-dimensional spatial voting framework to simulate endogenous political tax equilibria. the model accommodates complex interactions between many of the first three moments (mean, variance and skewness) of three distributions identified in the literature as crucial: the distribution of income, of preferences for public goods and the distribution of political influence. to simplify, we focus on a balanced and an asymmetric society and analyze how different combinations of distributional moments interact in the determination of tax equilibria. Interesting links emerge between the nature of the distribution of preferences for public expenditure, income inequality and the relative importance of consumption taxation. the analysis suggests that studies of single taxes have limited relevance for the explanation of the observed tax mix.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".