how taxes affect economy on the long run
Taxation
is play a very important role in the management of every economy and must be
designed in a way that everyone contributed to the national development
To ensure
the economy productive and sustainable, is to expand trade and to
create jobs to all citizens. Consultation with various stakeholders
need proper reviews to ensure tha the new regime when implemented would reflect
the country economic management priority.
Economic
activity reflects a balance between what people, businesses, and governments
want to buy and what they want to sell. In the short run, demand factors loom
large. In the long run, though, supply plays the primary role in determining economic
potential. Our productive capacity depends on the size and skills of the
workforce; the amount and quality of machines, buildings, vehicles, computers,
and other physical capital that workers use; and the stock of knowledge and
ideas.
Incentives
By
influencing incentives, taxes can affect each of these factors. Reducing
marginal tax rates on wages and salaries, for example, can induce people to
work more. Expanding the earned income tax credit can bring more low-skilled
workers into the labor force. Lower marginal tax rates on the returns to assets
(such as interest, dividends, and capital gains) can encourage saving. Reducing
marginal tax rates on business income can cause some companies to invest
domestically rather than abroad. Tax breaks for research can encourage the
creation of new ideas that spill over to help the broader economy. And so on.
Note,
however, that tax reductions can also have negative supply effects. If a cut
increases workers’ after-tax income, some may choose to work less and take more
leisure. This “income effect” pushes against the “substitution effect,” in
which lower tax rates at the margin increase the financial reward of working.
Tax
provisions can also distort how investment capital is deployed. Our current tax
system, for example, favors housing over other types of investment. That
differential likely induces overinvestment in housing and reduces economic
output and social welfare.
Budget
effects
Tax cuts
can also slow long-run economic growth by increasing budget deficits. When the
economy is operating near potential, government borrowing is financed by
diverting some capital that would have gone into private investment or by
borrowing from foreign investors. Government borrowing thus either crowds out
private investment, reducing future productive capacity relative to what it
could have been, or reduces how much of the future income from that investment
goes to US residents. Either way, deficits can reduce future well-being.
The
long-run effects of tax policies thus depend not only on their incentive
effects but on their budgetary effects. If Congress reduces marginal tax rates
on individual incomes, for example, the long-run effects could be either
positive or negative depending on whether the resulting impacts on saving and
investment outweigh the potential drag from increased deficits.
Putting
it together
That
leaves open questions on how large these effects are, and how to model them for
the purpose of analyzing policy changes. The Congressional Budget Office and the
Joint Committee on Taxation each use multiple models that differ in assumptions
about how forward-looking people are, how the United States connects to the
global economy, how government borrowing affects private investment, and how
businesses and individuals respond to tax changes. Models used in other
government agencies, in think tanks, and in academia vary even more. The one
area of consensus is that the most pro-growth policies are those that improve
incentives to work, save, invest, and innovate without driving up long-run
deficits.
The Tax
Policy Center has partnered with the Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania to analyze the long-run economic effects of tax proposals. The
Penn-Wharton Budget Model is an overlapping-generations model in which
simulated households make work and saving decisions to maximize their
well-being subject to given government policies and economic conditions. TPC
first used this model to estimate the economic and revenue effects of the tax
proposals of Hillary
Clinton and Donald
Trump (Page 2016, Page and Smetters 2016).
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