This paper provides a summary of the conclusions and recommendations of the Mirrlees Review of the UK tax system. The characteristics that a good tax system should possess are described and used to assess the current UK system. A package of reforms for the UK system which will move it closer to the ideal is proposed. Issues related to transition and to practical implementation of the reform package are discussed.
Based on the best available theory and evidence, the Mirrlees Review sets out a comprehensive set of proposals for tax reform. While focused on the UK, its analysis and conclusions bear directly on the policy debate in other developed countries. The Review proposes a move to a more neutral tax system. Key ingredients include adjusting the personal tax and welfare system to achieve redistribution more effi ciently, imposing VAT on a broader base of consumption at a single rate, targeting environmental externalities more accurately, and aligning tax rates across all income sources while exempting the normal return to saving from tax, and introducing an allowance for corporate equity into the corporate tax system.
This paper asks when a wealth tax would in principle be a desirable part of the tax system, setting aside the practicalities and politics that would be crucial in reality. The case for a one-off wealth tax is simple. If it were unexpected and credibly one-off -a major challenge in practice -this would be an efficient way to raise revenue and could be used to address existing wealth inequality. Whether such a tax is desirable hinges on whether it is considered fair, about which reasonable people will differ. Making the case for an annual wealth tax, which would affect future wealth accumulation as well as existing wealth, is less straightforward. It requires explaining why it is better to tax the same wealth every year -penalising those who saverather than raising the same revenue by taxing all sources of wealth once when they are received (and/or when they are spent). Such a case can be made based on subtle arguments for why taxing wealth might help to ease the trade-off between redistribution and work incentives; and a wealth tax might also be justified if holding onto wealth, rather than spending it, benefits the holder or harms others. These theoretical arguments probably justify some taxation of wealth in principle, though we have little basis for judging the appropriate level, so only part of the theoretical benefit could be attained. It is questionable whether the achievable benefits outweigh the costs of an imperfect wealth tax in practice.There are strong reasons to radically reform how we currently tax the sources/uses of wealth; this includes reforming capital income taxes in order to properly tax high returns. An annual wealth tax would be a poor substitute for doing that. But to the extent that taxes remain imperfect and that responses to a wealth tax would not affect revenue from other taxes (such as on income, expenditure and bequests), there may be a benefit to adding a wealth tax in order to diversify sources of revenue and prevent any one tax getting too high -though that must be weighed against the extra administrative burdens of having another tax.
We exploit variation in National Insurance contributions (NICs) -the UK's system of social security contributions -and a large panel dataset to examine the effects of 35 years of employee and employer NICs reforms on labour cost (gross earnings plus employer NICs), hours of work and labour cost per hour, both immediately (0-6 months) after reforms are implemented and in the slightly longer term (12-18 months). We consider assumptions under which the estimated coefficients on net-of-marginal and net-of-average tax rates in a panel regression can be interpreted as behavioural elasticities or as reflecting incidence. We find a compensated elasticity of taxable earnings with respect to the marginal rate of employee NICs of about 0.2-0.3, operating largely through hours of work, while that with respect to the marginal rate of employer NICs is not statistically significantly different from zero. We also find that labour cost falls by a much larger amount when the average rate of employer NICs is reduced than when the average rate of employee NICs is reduced, which is consistent with the economic incidence of NICs being strongly affected by its formal legal incidence. Estimates from the hours and hourly labour cost regressions provide further support to this interpretation of the findings, and also suggest the presence of substantial income effects -though also, after 1999, a puzzling effect of average employer NICs rates on hours of work. Each of these results remains true after 12-18 months (if anything, coefficients on lagged changes in NICs rates strengthen these findings), implying that any shifting of employer NICs changes to the individual employees concerned (and vice versa for employee NICs) does not begin over this time horizon. These results are similar to those found by Lehmann et al. (2013) for France but represent an extension of that work by considering hours as well as labour cost responses and second-year as well as immediate effects.
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