9 The Perfect Tax - Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values and the Meaning of Life by Steven E. Landsburg - #perversionedellaparolaequità #paghiperchélavoriincassiperchègiochi #ilcontrattotranonnati #quantificarerawls #tassareilgenoma #tassarelaltezza #rawlsripugnante? #maschiepensioni #fingersistupidi #imalidelfiscoefficiente
9 The Perfect TaxRead more at location 1279
Note: I bambini sanno bene che la giustizia ripristina una simmetria. È un ottimo punto di partenza x spiegare l'iniquità del fisco... Esperimento mentale: A B C vivono su un isola e se la dividono. A e B sono abili costruttori e abbelliscono la loro parte di isola. Devono contribuire anche ad abbellire la parte di C? Ebbene, i codici fiscali nn sembrano rispettosi di alcuna simmetria. L'ironia sta nel fatto che la progressività della tassazione è spesso presentata come misura equa. Un bimbo ha tutti gli elementi per comprendere qs ironia... Gli economisti quando parlano di tasse dicono che c'è un trade off tra efficienza ed equità. La cosa sarebbe del tutto incomprensibile a un bambino... Tesi: quando il reddito dipende dalle scelte (a cominciare dalla scuola) la tassa + giusta è quella capitale... Lotteria dei talenti. Cosa scegliremmo dietro il velo d'ignoranza? N.b.: data l'opportunità di fingersi stupidi, ciò che rileva nn è il contratto effettivo ma quello che pesa i potenziali opportunismi. A meno che nn esista uno scanner dei talenti... Conclusione: la tassa ideale colpisce l'abilità, nn l'attività (tassa sulla natura nn sul lavoro). Tassare la razza, il sesso, la bellezza, l'altezza... Tasse del genere già esistono: le pensooni x le donne (che vivono di più). L'affirmative action x neri... Se tassare la razza vi sembra inaccettabile, allora è inaccettabile qualsiasi redistribuzione... Ma xchè la tassa xfetta ci sembra talmente imperfetta da risultare ripugnante (razzista, sessista)?… Edit
CHILDREN AND ECONOMISTS AGREE that fairness is about symmetry.Read more at location 1280
a fable. Manny, Moe, and Jack live on ten wooded acres each. They all want to build cabins. Manny and Moe are equally accomplished woodsmen; Jack has never wielded an axe in his life, and will perish from lack of shelterRead more at location 1281
could Manny possibly be more obligated to help Jack than Moe is? Surely not. Manny and Moe are different in some ways (they have different names, for example), but they are not different in any way that is relevant to the question at hand.Read more at location 1285
Manny decides to clear five acres and build himself a magnificent fifteen-room house. Moe, who has recently reread Walden, decides that he can get by with a single one-room lean-to, leaving himself more time to commune with nature.Read more at location 1288
Manny and Moe have different tastes in housing, but that difference seems to be of no greater moral import than the difference between their names. So the symmetry principle dictates that their obligations to Jack remain identical.Read more at location 1291
But if Manny, Moe, and Jack live in the United States, then they are subject to a tax code that completely flouts the symmetry principle.Read more at location 1293
Nobody would even consider insulting a child’s intelligence with a whopping non sequitur like “it’s fair for Johnny to get the bigger piece of cake because he played in the sandbox while you played on the swings.” Children understandRead more at location 1299
When it comes to tax law, economists like to say that there is a trade-off between “equity” (in the sense of redistributing income) and “efficiency”Read more at location 1305
a pure head tax (of, say, $3,000 a year regardless of your income) is said to be perfectly efficient but perfectly inequitable. But it is an act of violence against the English language to describe as “inequitable” a tax that charges everyone an equal amount. In the rhetoric of tax policy, the word “inequitable” almost never means “inequitable”; instead it means something like “less redistributionist than the speaker would prefer.”Read more at location 1308
“flat tax” to describe a tax which varies in proportion with income.)Read more at location 1312
I reject the equity/efficiency dichotomy, because I reject the notion that there is anything “equitable” about the usual approaches to income redistribution.Read more at location 1313
There’s nothing equitable about a system that imposes different obligations on essentially identical citizens.Read more at location 1314
When differences in income result exclusively from individual choices, it seems to me that a head tax is clearly equitable,Read more at location 1322
The reason I earn less than Frank Sinatra is not that I choose to spend fewer hours singing.Read more at location 1324
Imagine, in other words, that we could write contracts along the lines of “if one of us is born smart and the other is born dumb, the smart one will give the dumb one half his income.”3 There is a good philosophical case for enforcing those contractsRead more at location 1330
But you can’t enforce a contract unless you know what it says, so the problem is to figure out just what contracts our unborn selves would have written.Read more at location 1336
It’s not so hard to think about that problem quantitatively.Read more at location 1337
And we have pretty good data on real-world insurance purchases,Read more at location 1338
my colleagues Hugo Hopenhayn and James Kahn have estimated that at the Council of the Unborn, we’d all agree that about 77% of us—those with the most talent—should completely support the remainder.Read more at location 1340
If you buy the argument about enforcing contracts, it means that the real-world welfare state ought to be expanded dramatically.Read more at location 1343
But the Hopenhayn-Kahn calculation fails to recognize that this would lead to malingering—smart people playing dumb so they could go on welfare too.Read more at location 1347
if people can hide their skills, the original contract must be rewritten to avert disaster.Read more at location 1351
We have to shrink the system in order to save it. But shrink it by how much?Read more at location 1354
It turns out that after accounting for disincentive effects, we’d want to support an unemployed population not of 23%, but of just six tenths of 1%—in other words, practically zero.Read more at location 1356
In other words, we would agree to dismantle the welfare state almost entirely.Read more at location 1358
1. Ideally, there should be substantial redistribution from the most able to the least.Read more at location 1372
2. However, if redistribution has substantial disincentive effects, then it should be drastically scaled back—almost to zero.Read more at location 1374
4. We should tax not actual earnings, but potential earnings. In other words, we should tax not effort, but ability.Read more at location 1379
5. There should be some reasonable cap on individual tax liability. My own gut preference is that nobody should ever be required to pay more than five times the average taxRead more at location 1391
This fifth and final criterion proclaims the virtue of liberty,Read more at location 1393
If God wanted to implement a tax system based on these five criteria, He could do it with ease. God knows everyone’s earning potential,Read more at location 1402
To duplicate God’s tax code on earth would require leaders with omniscienceRead more at location 1405
the best we can do is approximate the ideal tax. That means taxing traits that are good predictorsRead more at location 1406
taxing whiteness would not discourage anything, while still redistributing incomeRead more at location 1408
taxing maleness, height, and beauty; all these traits are positively correlated with income.Read more at location 1412
You might think that taxing traits is a radical and untried proposal. But I’m not so sure of that. The Social Security system, for example, already taxes maleness,Read more at location 1420
so we resort to the indirect “whiteness tax” of affirmative action.Read more at location 1428
Ideally we’d redistribute on the basis of traits like intelligence, but that won’t work because it’s too easy to fake a low I.Q. test score. So we retreat to redistribution on the basis of traits like race, sex, and height.Read more at location 1435
If the trait tax is unacceptable, then so is every income redistribution program ever devised.Read more at location 1438
If this tax is so perfect, why does it seem at least vaguely distasteful—notRead more at location 1440
So let’s set out to explore the imperfections of this “perfect tax.”Read more at location 1442
First, efficiency is a mixed blessing. When governments can tax efficiently, they are likely to tax excessively. If the power to tax is the power to destroy, then the power to tax efficiently is the power to destroy with dispatch.Read more at location 1447
That’s an argument not just against the trait tax but against redistributive taxes in general.Read more at location 1449
Second, we haven’t finished exploring the logic of equity. There’s a lot more to be said about the moral status of those prebirth contracts,Read more at location 1451
Note: DUBBI SUL CONTRATTO DEI NN NATI
