I love your username Miamiu
lol.
Is it even possible to collect the same amount of revenue from each tax while having them have the same progressivity level? I don't see how a sales tax will bring in the same amount of revenue as a bracketed income tax and have the same level of progressiveness.
I only said that to stop this being an argument about progressiveness and quantity of taxation, and keep it about the style of tax. You may be right, technically, in that more money is recieved as personal income then is spent. But that also holds true for a flat or regressive income tax vis a vis a flat or regressive consumption tax. And we're talking there about maximum potential revenue... no one is considering a 100% tax therefore the percentage tax rater would just need to be set higher for consumption tax for it to recieve the same quantity of revenue.
My entirely unfounded impression of how it should be until someone talks sense into me is:
Income/Payroll Tax > Capital Gains Tax > Consumption Tax > Corporate Tax > Property Tax
I'll accept that invitation
.
I'd first point to the the OECD study in question(
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/34/49/46617652.pdf) which stated
"The analysis suggests a tax and economic growth ranking
order according to which corporate taxes are the most harmful type of tax for economic
growth, followed by personal income taxes and then consumption taxes, with recurrent
taxes on immovable property being the least harmful tax."
The reason for the ranking are several:
1) Ease of escaping the tax. Corporations can easily outsource and conceal their real net revenue. Workers have a harder time immigrating then corporations do(though corporation can outsource their jobs) but they can easily conceal their real income. Consumption cannot be outsourced and is quite hard to conceal. Land value is impossible to outsource or conceal.
2) Economic effects. A corporate tax leaves some corporations unviable. An income tax leaves a higher quantity of people unemployed and reduces marginal incentive to work. A consumption tax directly reduces consumption. But what economic activity does a land tax reduce?... land supply is almost totally inelastic. It can actually increase economic activity if structured as a land value tax(calculated based on the value of the land itself while excluding the value of improvements made to it(ie. a house)), because it strongly penalizes underutilization of land.
I would also add 3) Moral and philosophical arguments.
a)Whereas wealth from income is earnt, wealth from land is entirely unearnt... the value goes up or down without any input from it's owner. Even stockmarket investors have an edge there... their money is being directly utilized by the company to enable growth, whereas your land is not being utilized at all to stimulate the increase in land value. It is a fundamentally undeserved increase in wealth.
b)Land ownership is zerosum, unlike labour/enterprise/capital/investment. Your owning it comes at the expense of everyone else because its supply cannot be increased.
c)Its fundamentally more egalitarian. The biggest source of the gap between the wealth of white versus nonwhites is not income, it is land value(especially since the presence of whites tends to increase a neighborhoods land value while white flight leads to a collapse in land values).
