Overselling the Economic Efficiency Gains from Shifting the Tax Mix towards Consumption Taxes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is frequently argued that it would be beneficial to move the tax mix towards greater reliance on consumption taxes, with offsetting reductions in income taxes. Proponents argue that this would increase the incentives to “work, save, and invest” and would help improve productivity growth. in Canada, policy experts have generally advocated shifting the tax mix towards consumption. However, on a number of occasions when such a choice was put to the electorate, this shift was rejected. In fact, when one looks at the empirical research on response elasticities, it suggests that the net positive impacts are likely to be relatively small. the most reliable estimates from economic models indicate a small positive impact on economic efficiency from changing the tax mix. the largest and clearest impact of changing the tax mix is on the distribution of income, as the income tax is much more susceptible to being progressive. Therefore, the positive impact on overall GDP would be too small to compensate most taxpayers. Middle income earners in particular are likely to be net losers from changes in the tax mix. Designing changes in the tax mix so as to make everybody better off is a complex task. Voters seem to be aware of the income distribution impacts, and vote in their own self-interest. in a referendum in the province of British Columbia, the majority voted to repeal a value added tax. the percentage voting for repeal was highest in the lowest income electoral districts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".