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journal article Tax Avoidance and the Deadweight Loss of the Income TaxThe Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 81, No. 4 (Nov., 1999) , pp. 674-680 (7 pages) Published By: The MIT Press https://www.jstor.org/stable/2646716 Read and download Log in through your school or library Alternate access options For independent researchers Read Online Read 100 articles/month free Subscribe to JPASS Unlimited reading + 10 downloads Purchase article $19.00 - Download now and later Abstract Traditional analyses of the income tax greatly underestimate deadweight losses by ignoring its effect on forms of compensation and patterns of consumption. The full deadweight loss is easily calculated using the compensated elasticity of taxable income to changes in tax rates because leisure, excludable income, and deductible consumption are a Hicksian composite good. Microeconomic estimates imply a deadweight loss of as much as 30% of revenue or more than ten times Harberger's classic 1964 estimate. The relative deadweight loss caused by increasing existing tax rates is substantially greater and may exceed $2 per $1 of revenue. Journal Information The Review of Economics and Statistics is an 84-year old general journal of applied (especially quantitative) economics. Edited at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, The Review has published some of the most important articles in empirical economics. From time to time, The Review also publishes collections of papers or symposia devoted to a single topic of methodological or empirical interest. Publisher Information Among the largest university presses in the world, The MIT Press publishes over 200 new books each year along with 30 journals in the arts and humanities, economics, international affairs, history, political science, science and technology along with other disciplines. We were among the first university presses to offer titles electronically and we continue to adopt technologies that allow us to better support the scholarly mission and disseminate our content widely. The Press's enthusiasm for innovation is reflected in our continuing exploration of this frontier. Since the late 1960s, we have experimented with generation after generation of electronic publishing tools. Through our commitment to new products—whether digital journals or entirely new forms of communication—we have continued to look for the most efficient and effective means to serve our readership. Our readers have come to expect excellence from our products, and they can count on us to maintain a commitment to producing rigorous and innovative information products in whatever forms the future of publishing may bring. Rights & Usage This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. Video transcriptVoiceover: Let's look a little bit at the market for hamburgers. This is the supply and the demand curve for the price and the quantity of hamburgers sold per day. If we have a completely unfettered market, no intervention, no taxes, nothing like that, then we see we have an equilibrium price and an equilibrium quantity. The equilibrium price looks like it's about $3.75 per hamburger. The equilibrium quantity looks like it's about a little bit more ... Maybe if I draw that line a little bit differently, the equilibrium quantity looks like it's about $3 - Sorry, it's about 3.5 million hamburgers per day. Just to review what we've talked about before, up here, below the demand curve and above the price. The price equals $3.75 line, right over here. This is how much value, this is how much benefit the consumers are getting above and beyond what they have to pay. That is the consumer surplus. Then, between this price equals $3.75 line and the supply curve, you have your producer surplus. This is how much more the producers are getting for each hamburger, relative to what their opportunity cost of producing that incremental hamburger was. This right over here is the producer surplus. Now, let's say ... Actually these numbers are quasi-realistic. I have a 3.5 million hamburgers per day. I actually looked it up before this video. It looks like McDonalds, at least based on the information I got, sells a little bit over 4 million hamburgers per day in the United States. I didn't clarify whether this is just hamburgers from one vendor or multiple vendors, but it's not a crazy number of hamburgers to sell in a fairly large country. For the sake of this, it's not necessarily McDonalds hamburgers, we're just talking about this is the total market for hamburgers in a country. We're making the simplifying assumption that all hamburgers are created equal, which we know is not true. Now, the government in this hypothetical civilization says, "Wow, a lot of hamburgers are being sold. "We need more revenue for the government "to do other things," or maybe to pay off their debt or whatever they need to do. So they decide to tax hamburgers. They want to tax hamburgers. They're going to make it very simple. They're not even going to do a percentage. Most sales taxes tend to be a percentage of the price, but instead they're just going to do a tax of $1 per hamburger. Let's think about what this does to the surplus, to the price at which transactions will go on and what people will have to pay versus what they will have to get. At any given point, if we look at the supply curve right over here, in order to get someone to produce that very first hamburger, they have to get at least $2 for it, because that's their opportunity cost. They could use those exact same resources, that land, the labor, whatever else, to produce something else that has $2 of value, so you have pay them at least $2 in order for them to produce hamburgers. The more hamburgers you want the suppliers to produce you have to pay them more and more for those incremental hamburgers, because they're going to start using resources that might have better used for other things and that are not as efficiently used for hamburgers. You have to pay them more and more and more. This is what the supply curve that I originally drew in magenta is what the suppliers need to see in order to produce a certain quantity. If you want them to produce 3 million hamburgers, you have to be willing to pay $3 per hamburger, because that's their opportunity cost of those incremental hamburgers up here. Now, let's think about what happens when you add the tax. This is what the suppliers are going to get or the producers are going to get, but when you put a tax, the consumers are going to have to pay a dollar more. Over here, in order to produce this much, the suppliers are going to have to get $3 per hamburger, but then the consumers are going to have to pay a dollar more, so they're going to have to pay $1 more. In order to get the suppliers to produce 2 million hamburgers, you're going to have to pay them this much, you're going to have to pay them about $2.50, but then the consumers are going to have to pay a dollar more than that. They're going to have to pay that much. In order to get them to produce it all, you're going to have to pay at least $2, but then if the suppliers or producers are getting $2, the consumers are going to have to pay a dollar more for the tax. One way to think about it is the supply curve, from the consumer's point of view, is going to be shifted a dollar more than the supply curve from the producer's point of view. It's going to be shifted up $1, so it's going to look something ... I can do a better job than that. It's going to look something like that. At every point, because this is a fixed dollar, it's not a percentage, at every point, this distance right over here is going to be $1. What happens there? From the consumer's point of view, what we have is now a new price that they're willing to consume at, because now this reality is not possible anymore. There's no way for the consumers to pay $3.50 and for the producers to see $3.50, as well. So we get to a new equilibrium price and equilibrium quantity now, because now, since this is from the consumer's point of view, the point at which they intersect is right over there, which is about a little bit over $4 per burger and it's a slightly lower quantity. It's about, let's just say just for round numbers, that's about 3 million burgers per day. What happened there? Before this whole area was a total surplus. Below this green line was the producer surplus, above the green line and below this curve right here was the consumer surplus. Now we've lost part of it. We've lost this part right over here, so this is our dead weight loss. This is no longer part of the total consumer and producer surplus. That is dead weight loss. The taxation got us from an efficient situation, where we had that maximum consumer and producer surplus. This is our dead weight loss over here. How much revenue is the government going to get now? Well, if we assume that this is 3 million, they're going to have 3 million burgers. This is 3 million right over here. They're going to have 3 million burgers times a dollar per burger. Let me do it this way. This length right over here is going to be the area of this rectangle that I'm doing in orange. This length right over here is 3. That length right over there is 3 million and then height is that dollar. Let me shade it in. The height is that dollar right over there. This is going to be $1 height. The tax revenue that the government is going to get is 3 million times $1. 3 million burgers times $1, which is going to be $3 million per day, which is interesting, because maybe the government officials thought they were going to get more, because they look at the projections and they say, "Wait. "There's going to be 3.5 million burgers sold per day, "so I'm going to get $3.5 million." What they didn't realize is that they're making the burgers more expensive, so there's going to be a lower quantity demanded. The actual clearing quantity or the actual equilibrium quantity now is only going to be 3 million. The way we see it, it removed this surplus here, from both the consumer surplus and the producer surplus and no one's getting that, not even the government's getting that. No one's getting that white part right over there and this orange part right over here is eating into the consumer surplus, so now they're paying more than ... Another way to think about it is the difference between the benefit they're getting and what they're paying at any given point, for any given incremental consumer, is now less and the producer surplus is less. The excess of what they're getting for each hamburger versus their opportunity cost is now less. The producer surplus has now been shrunken back to this area right over here and these are curves here, so we can't just do simple geometry to figure out the area of triangles. We would actually have to do a little calculus to figure out the area of these curves. Then the consumer surplus has been pushed back to this area above the orange right over here. You see, governments, for the most part, have to do some type of taxation in order to get revenue and it could be income tax or it could be a sales tax, like this right over here, but when they do it, it gets us into a non-efficient state and it does cause some, depending on how these curves are shaped, it does cause some dead weight loss. Some benefit in excess of what had to be paid, some of that disappears, but it allows, at least, the government to get revenue, depending on whether you think that's a good thing or not. How is the deadweight loss of a tax related to the elasticity of the demand and supply curves?The amount of the deadweight loss varies with both demand elasticity and supply elasticity. When either demand or supply is inelastic, then the deadweight loss of taxation is smaller, because the quantity bought or sold varies less with price. With perfect inelasticity, there is no deadweight loss.
How and why do the elasticities of supply and demand affect the deadweight loss of a tax policy?We have seen that elasticities of supply and demand determine how the burden of a tax is distributed between buyer and seller. These elasticities also influence the size of the dead-weight loss caused by the tax because they determine the total reduction in the quantity of exchange.
Does elasticity increase deadweight loss?Policy Burdens and Elasticity. We have determined that the more elastic a market is, all else equal, the market will have a greater deadweight loss.
What is the relationship between elasticity and a tax?The tax incidence depends on the relative price elasticity of supply and demand. When supply is more elastic than demand, buyers bear most of the tax burden. When demand is more elastic than supply, producers bear most of the cost of the tax. Tax revenue is larger the more inelastic the demand and supply are.
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How is the deadweight loss of a tax is related to the elasticity of demand and supply?
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