Uma Receita Federal cara, ineficiente e injusta

Parece a nossa, mas não é. Se trata da americana, que ainda tem a vantagem, sobre a brasileira, de ser menos fascista e de pesar menos sobre a economia em seu conjunto: em media menos de 30% do PIB, contra 38% no nosso caso.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Make the Government less taxy
Opinion - Pete du Pont
The Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2013

Americans don't like things that are inefficient, costly or unfair. Our federal tax code seems designed to be all three, a failing exacerbated by a patchwork of economically distorting subsidies and preferences found throughout the code and elsewhere.
In a 2009 survey by the Tax Foundation, more than 80% of respondents felt the tax code was complex and that it should be completely overhauled or needed major changes. The only surprise about this result is that 20% could think otherwise.
The federal tax code has become a morass of different rates, deductions, credits, exemptions, exceptions and phase-outs, and it changes every year. The end result is that no one understands how it all works. The Government Accountability Office once presented 19 professional tax preparers with tax-return information, and not a single one generated a return that was correct. It has been estimated that Americans spend well more than six billion hours a year simply filing out tax forms—the equivalent of more than three million people working full-time all year.
Difficulty in understanding and complying with the code is just the start. Tax rates are too high. Individuals and families face a top marginal federal income tax rate in excess of 40%, and that doesn't include state income taxes, Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, sales taxes and any number of hidden levies. Taxes this high can only hurt economic growth.
Our individual tax code is, as it should be, progressive, but perhaps the pendulum has swung too far in this direction. The top 10% of taxpayers pay around 70% of federal income taxes, while the bottom half of all taxpayers pay just 2%. Is it not perhaps unfair and potentially damaging to the long-term prospects for economic growth to have such a disparity?
Looking at the corporate tax code, we also see rates that are too high, at 39% when federal and state rates are combined (the highest in the developed world). And ObamaCare imposes new costs on employers and new taxes on life-saving medical devices. Sadly, the corporate tax code is just as complicated and convoluted as the individual code.
But, our nation is hurt by more than just high rates and an unfair and complex code. We also suffer from economic distortion caused by subsidies, grants and other preferences in the code and elsewhere.
There are literally thousands of such preferences. That some are for good causes is certain. Unfortunately, just as certain is the economic inefficiency caused by taking money from one group of decision makers (taxpayers) and transferring it to constituencies favored by the White House and various members and committees in Congress. From politically protected subsidies for corn, peanuts, sorghum and the like, to wasteful tax credits, grants and loans for the flavor of the day in green energy, our federal government tries to pick winners and losers to the tune of billions of dollars a year.
Trying to "pick winners and losers" is probably not an accurate description, since governments have never been very good at picking winners. For years, well-intentioned ethanol preferences have driven up the cost of gasoline and corn, all in the interest of protecting the environment. This approach was not just costly but ineffective, as even Al Gore finally admitted.
We simply have to make some changes. We need a tax code that is flatter, fairer and simpler. Our code should retain its progressivity, but it can do so with lower rates and a wider tax base, something along the lines agreed by President Reagan and a Democratic Congress in the 1980s.
We need to cut back drastically on federal subsidies and preferences. The White House seems intent to repeatedly call for cuts in "oil and gas subsidies." Fine, but let's also cut back on subsidies for other industries. Let's cut agricultural subsidies, green energy subsidies, and any corporate welfare such as loan guarantees, research grants and targeted development funds. Federal subsidies for public broadcasting should be cut, as well as subsidies for Amtrak and speculative high-speed rail projects.
Fixing the tax code to make it encourage instead of discourage economic growth is critical for our nation's long-term success as it competes in the world economy. Cutting Washington's wasteful counterproductive efforts to take taxpayer dollars and hand them out to favored constituencies will not fully solve our deficit problem, but it would help. Putting the two together would be a strong start in solving our nation's economic problems and making our system efficient, cost effective, and fair

Onde Margareth Thatcher errou, economicamente - Murray Rothbard

Mrs. Thatcher's Poll Tax
by Murray N. Rothbard
The Mises Daily, April 10, 2013
[This article is featured in chapter 62 of Making Economic Sense by Murray Rothbard and originally appeared in the June, 1990 edition of The Free Market]

Riots in the streets; protest against a hated government; cops arresting protesters. A familiar story these days. But suddenly we find that the protests are directed, not against a hated Communist tyranny in Eastern Europe, but against Mrs. Thatcher's regime in Britain, a supposed paragon of liberty and the free market. What's going on here? Are anti-government demonstrators heroic freedom-fighters in Eastern Europe, but only crazed anarchists and alienated punks in the West?

The anti-government riots in London at the end of March were, it must be noted, anti-tax riots, and surely a movement in opposition to taxation can't be all bad. But wasn't the protest movement at bottom an envy-ridden call for soaking the rich, and hostility to the new Thatcher tax a protest against its abstention from egalitarian leveling?

Not really. There is no question that the new Thatcher "community charge" was a bold and fascinating experiment. Local government councils, in many cases havens of the left-wing Labour Party, have been engaging in runaway spending in recent years. As in the case of American local governments, basic local revenue in great Britain has been derived from the property tax ("rates" in Britain) which are levied proportionately on the value of property.

Whereas in the United States, conservative economists tend to hail proportionate taxation (especially on incomes) as ideal and "neutral" to the market, the Thatcherites have apparently understood the fallacy of this position. On the market, people do not pay for goods and services in proportion to their incomes. David Rockefeller does not have to pay $1000 for a loaf of bread for which the rest of us pay $1.50. On the contrary, on the market there is a strong tendency for a good to be priced the same throughout the market; one good, one price. It would be far more neutral to the market, indeed, for everyone to pay, not the same tax in proportion to his income, but the same tax as everyone else, period. Everyone's tax should therefore be equal. Furthermore, since democracy is based on the concept of one man or woman, one vote, it would seem no more than fitting to have a principle of one man, one tax. Equal voting, equal taxation.

The concept of an equal tax per head is called the "poll tax," and Mrs. Thatcher decided to bring the local councils to heel by legislating the abolition of the local rates, and their replacement by an equal poll tax per adult, calling it by the euphemism, "community charge." At least on the local level, then, soaking the rich has been replaced by an equal tax.

But there are several deep flaws in the new tax. In the first place, it is still not neutral to the market, since--a crucial difference--market prices are paid voluntarily by the consumer purchasing the good or service, whereas the tax (or "charge") is levied coercively on each person, even if the value of the "service" of government to that person is far less than the charge, or is even negative.

Not only that: but a poll tax is a charge levied on a person's very existence, and the person must often be hunted down at great expense to be forced to pay the tax. Charging a man for his very existence seems to imply that the government owns all of its subjects, body and soul.

The second deep flaw is bound up with the problem of coercion. It is certainly heroic of Mrs. Thatcher to want to scrap the property tax in behalf of an equal tax. But she seems to have missed the major point of the equal tax, one that gives it its unique charm. For the truly great thing about an equal tax is that in order to make it payable, it has to be drastically reduced from the levels before the equality is imposed.

Assume, for example, that our present federal tax was suddenly shifted to become an equal tax for each person. This would mean that the average person, and particularly the low-income person, would suddenly find himself paying enormously more per year in taxes--about $5,000. So that the great charm of equal taxation is that it would necessarily force the government to lower drastically its levels of taxing and spending. Thus, if the U.S. government instituted, say, a universal and equal tax of $10 per year, confining it to the magnificent sum of $2 billion annually, we would all live quite well with the new tax, and no egalitarian would bother about protesting its failure to soak the rich.

But instead of drastically lowering the amount of local taxation, Mrs. Thatcher imposed no such limits, and left the total expenditure and tax levels, as before, to the local councils. These local councils, Conservative as well as Labour, proceeded to raise their tax levels substantially, so that the average British citizen is being forced to pay approximately one-third more in local taxes. No wonder there are riots in the streets! The only puzzle is that the riots aren't more severe.

In short, the great thing about equal taxation is using it as a club to force an enormous lowering of taxes. To increase tax levels after they become equal is absurd: an open invitation for tax evasion and revolution. In Scotland, where the equal tax had already gone into effect, there are no penalties for non-payment and an estimated one-third of citizens have refused to pay. In England, where payment is enforced, the situation is rougher. In either case, it is no wonder that popularity of the Thatcher regime has fallen to an all-time low. The Thatcher people are now talking about placing caps on local tax rates, but capping is scarcely enough: drastic reductions are a political and economic necessity, if the poll tax is to be retained.

Unfortunately, the local tax case is characteristic of the Thatcher regime. Thatcherism is all too similar to Reaganism: free-market rhetoric masking statist content. While Thatcher has engaged in some privatization, the percentage of government spending and taxation to GNP has increased over the course of her regime, and monetary inflation has now led to price inflation. Basic discontent, then, has risen, and the increase in local tax levels has come as the vital last straw. It seems to me that a minimum criterion for a regime receiving the accolade of "pro-free-market" would require it to cut total spending, cut overall tax rates, and revenues, and put a stop to its own inflationary creation of money. Even by this surely modest yardstick, no British or American administration in decades has come close to qualifying.

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the Austrian School. He was an economist, economic historian, and libertarian political philosopher. See Murray N. Rothbard's article archives.
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Tributando "ricos" e pobres: uma receita para a estagnacao

Este debate, mutatis mutandis, vale para o Brasil também, embora nosso vício em tributar demais, e tributar errado, seja muito mais grave do que nos EUA.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

OPINION
Get Ready for a 70% Marginal Tax Rate
By MICHAEL J. BOSKIN
The Wall Street Journal, JULY 18, 2011

Some argue the U.S. economy can bear higher pre-Reagan tax rates. But those rates applied to a much smaller fraction of taxpayers than what we're headed for without spending cuts.

President Obama has been using the debt-ceiling debate and bipartisan calls for deficit reduction to demand higher taxes. With unemployment stuck at 9.2% and a vigorous economic "recovery" appearing more and more elusive, his timing couldn't be worse.

Two problems arise when marginal tax rates are raised. First, as college students learn in Econ 101, higher marginal rates cause real economic harm. The combined marginal rate from all taxes is a vital metric, since it heavily influences incentives in the economy—workers and employers, savers and investors base decisions on after-tax returns. Thus tax rates need to be kept as low as possible, on the broadest possible base, consistent with financing necessary government spending.

Second, as tax rates rise, the tax base shrinks and ultimately, as Art Laffer has long argued, tax rates can become so prohibitive that raising them further reduces revenue—not to mention damaging the economy. That is where U.S. tax rates are headed if we do not control spending soon.

The current top federal rate of 35% is scheduled to rise to 39.6% in 2013 (plus one-to-two points from the phase-out of itemized deductions for singles making above $200,000 and couples earning above $250,000). The payroll tax is 12.4% for Social Security (capped at $106,000), and 2.9% for Medicare (no income cap). While the payroll tax is theoretically split between employers and employees, the employers' share is ultimately shifted to workers in the form of lower wages.

But there are also state income taxes that need to be kept in mind. They contribute to the burden. The top state personal rate in California, for example, is now about 10.5%. Thus the marginal tax rate paid on wages combining all these taxes is 44.1%. (This is a net figure because state income taxes paid are deducted from federal income.)

So, for a family in high-cost California taxed at the top federal rate, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2013, the 0.9% increase in payroll taxes to fund ObamaCare, and the president's proposal to eventually uncap Social Security payroll taxes would lift its combined marginal tax rate to a stunning 58.4%.

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Martin Kozlowski
But wait, things get worse. As Milton Friedman taught decades ago, the true burden on taxpayers today is government spending; government borrowing requires future interest payments out of future taxes. To cover the Congressional Budget Office projection of Mr. Obama's $841 billion deficit in 2016 requires a 31.7% increase in all income tax rates (and that's assuming the Social Security income cap is removed). This raises the top rate to 52.2% and brings the total combined marginal tax rate to 68.8%. Government, in short, would take over two-thirds of any incremental earnings.

Many Democrats demand no changes to Social Security and Medicare spending. But these programs are projected to run ever-growing deficits totaling tens of trillions of dollars in coming decades, primarily from rising real benefits per beneficiary. To cover these projected deficits would require continually higher income and payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare on all taxpayers that would drive the combined marginal tax rate on labor income to more than 70% by 2035 and 80% by 2050. And that's before accounting for the Laffer effect, likely future interest costs, state deficits and the rising ratio of voters receiving government payments to those paying income taxes.

It would be a huge mistake to imagine that the cumulative, cascading burden of many tax rates on the same income will leave the middle class untouched. Take a teacher in California earning $60,000. A current federal rate of 25%, a 9.5% California rate, and 15.3% payroll tax yield a combined income tax rate of 45%. The income tax increases to cover the CBO's projected federal deficit in 2016 raises that to 52%. Covering future Social Security and Medicare deficits brings the combined marginal tax rate on that middle-income taxpayer to an astounding 71%. That teacher working a summer job would keep just 29% of her wages. At the margin, virtually everyone would be working primarily for the government, reduced to a minority partner in their own labor.

Nobody—rich, middle-income or poor—can afford to have the economy so burdened. Higher tax rates are the major reason why European per-capita income, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is about 30% lower than in the United States—a permanent difference many times the temporary decline in the recent recession and anemic recovery.

Some argue the U.S. economy can easily bear higher pre-Reagan tax rates. They point to the 1930s-1950s, when top marginal rates were between 79% and 94%, or the Carter-era 1970s, when the top rate was about 70%. But those rates applied to a much smaller fraction of taxpayers and kicked in at much higher income levels relative to today.

There were also greater opportunities for sheltering income from the income tax. The lower marginal tax rates in the 1980s led to the best quarter-century of economic performance in American history. Large increases in tax rates are a recipe for economic stagnation, socioeconomic ossification, and the loss of American global competitiveness and leadership.

There is only one solution to this growth-destroying, confiscatory tax-rate future: Control spending growth, especially of entitlements. Meaningful tax reform—not with higher rates as Mr. Obama proposes, but with lower rates on a broader base of economic activity and people—can be an especially effective complement to spending control. But without increased spending discipline, even the best tax reforms are doomed to be undone.

Mr. Boskin is a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.