NBER Working Papers by Diane Rogers

Fundamental tax reform may change relative prices of consumption goods and may therefore have important effects on the uses side that are ignored by most general equilibrium simulation models. For a uniform rate of tax, in our model, results on the uses side are driven by the nonuniform tax system being replaced. Similar effects occur under any uniform and comprehensive tax reform, whether the current system is replaced by a consumption tax, a wage tax, or a pure income tax. Any such reform that eliminates the current preferential treatment of housing would impose an additional one-time levy on the elderly, and any reform that eliminates the current double taxation of corporate capital would reduce the relative prices of corporate-capital-intensive goods bought by the poor.

All government agencies charged with the responsibility of estimating distributional effects use annual income to classify households and one year's tax to characterize tax burdens. In this paper, we describe an alternative procedure to estimate lifetime tax burdens as proportions of lifetime income. To illustrate this model, we calculate lifetime effects of a uniform consumption tax and a wage tax. This kind of analysis can supplement existing annual analyses, since policymakers might want to insure both that current taxes reflect current ability to pay and that lifetime taxes reflect lifetime ability to pay.

Recent academic research on tax incidence has shifted from an emphasis on static and annual perspectives to examinations of dynamic and lifetime issues. Meanwhile, policy economists are forced to rely on annual data and hence annual analyses. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the nature and analysis of lifetime tax incidence, and to compare and contrast this lifetime perspective with the more familiar annual perspective. In our comparison, we find that (1) the lifetime perspective requires much more data over longer periods of time, because results depends critically on the whole shape of the lifetime earnings profile, (2) individuals classified by annual income decile are often reclassified into very different lifetime income deciles, (3) the personal income tax and corporate income...