TY - JOUR AU - Fullerton,Don AU - Shoven,John B. AU - Whalley,John TI - Replacing the U.S. Income Tax with a Progressive Consumption Tax: A Sequenced General Equilibrium Approach JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 892 PY - 1983 Y2 - August 1983 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w0892 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w0892.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Don Fullerton Department of Finance University of Illinois BIF Box#30 (MC520) 515 East Gregory Drive Champaign, IL 61820 Tel: 217/244-3621 Fax: 217/244-3102 E-Mail: dfullert@illinois.edu John B. Shoven Department of Economics 579 Serra Mall at Galvez Street Stanford, CA 94305-6015 Tel: 650/723-3273 Fax: 650/723-8611 E-Mail: shoven@stanford.edu John Whalley Department of Economics Social Science Centre University of Western Ontario London, ON N6A 5C2 CANADA Tel: 519/661-3509 Fax: 519/661-3666 E-Mail: jwhalley@uwo.ca AB - This paper examines the welfare consequences of changing the current U.S. income tax system to a progressive consumption tax. We compute a sequence of single period equilibria in which savings decisions depend on the expected future return to capital. In the presence of existing income taxes, the U.S. economy is assumed to lie on a balanced growth path. With the change to a consumption tax, individuals save more and initially consume less. As the capital stock grows, consumption eventually overtakes that of the original path, and the economy approaches the new balanced growth path with higher consumption and a greater capital stock. Both the transition and the balanced growth paths enter our welfare evaluations. We find that the discounted present value of the stream of net gains is approximately $650 billion in 1973 dollars, just over one percent of the discounted present value of national income. Larger gains occur if further reform of capital income taxation accompanies the change. We examine the sensitivity of the results, both to the design of the consumption tax and to the values of elasticity and other parameters. The paper also contains estimates of the time required to adjust from one growth path to the other. ER -