Forums

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
And in the process the wilfully obtuse socialist dimwits, cripple our economy and our freedom.


According to a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, we pay a very heavy price for the heavy taxation of saving, investment, corporations and estates that Tritch strongly favors. It found that the efficiency cost of the tax system -- the output that is lost over and above the tax itself -- is between 2 percent and 5 percent of the gross domestic product. In short, we lose between $240 billion and $600 billion every year just because of the way we raise taxes.

Based on past postings I think that we could safely replace "Tritch" with the names of any one of several leftwing posters from this board. I wonder what part of being exposed to the benefits of freedom and capitalist markets causes the lefties to turn on our system and seeks its destruction in the name of socialism, which is a slippery slope to Marxism. Why, Bilmoure, why?

Of course, if anybody is interested in what the report actually said, here's a quote from the abstract , acknowledging that it's largely guesswork:

Estimating efficiency costs is very challenging because the tax system has such extensive and diverse effects on behavior. In fact, we found no comprehensive estimates of the efficiency costs of the current federal tax system. The two most comprehensive studies we found suggest that these costs are large--on the order of magnitude of 2 to 5 percent of GDP each year (as of the mid-1990s). However, the actual efficiency costs of the current tax system may not fall within this range because of uncertainty surrounding taxpayers' behavioral responses, changes in the tax code and the economy since the mid-1990s, and the fact that the two studies did not cover the full scope of efficiency costs. The goal of tax policy is not to eliminate compliance and efficiency costs. The goal of tax policy is to design a tax system that produces the desired amount of revenue and balances the minimization of these costs with other objectives, such as equity, transparency, and administrability.