Do Americans Want to Tax Capital? Evidence from Online Surveys / Raymond Fisman, Keith Gladstone, Ilyana Kuziemko, Suresh Naidu.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fisman, Raymond.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Gladstone, Keith.

Kuziemko, Ilyana.

Naidu, Suresh.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w23907.

NBER working paper series no. w23907

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2017.

Summary:

A vast theoretical literature in public finance has studied the question of the desirability of capital taxation. Distinct from questions of the optimality of taxing wealth is whether it is politically feasible. We provide, to our knowledge, the first investigation of individuals' preferences over jointly taxing income and wealth, via a survey on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. We provide subjects with a set of hypothetical individuals' incomes and wealth and elicit subjects' preferred (absolute) tax bill for these individuals. Our method allows us to unobtrusively map both income earned and accumulated wealth into desired tax levels. Our regression results yield roughly linear desired tax rates on income of about 14 percent. Respondents' suggested tax rates indicate positive desired wealth taxation. When we distinguish between sources of wealth we find that, in line with recent theoretical arguments, subjects' implied tax rate on wealth is three percent when the source of wealth is inheritance, far higher than the 0.8 percent rate when wealth is from savings. We show these tax rates are consistent with reasonable parameterizations of recent theoretical optimal wealth tax formulae.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2017.