Provides a conceptual framework (similar to that used to justify tax base and rate structure choices) for assessing complexity, compliance and enforcement costs of incremental reforms and fundamental restructuring of the tax system.

Compares traditional definitions and recently offered indexes of horizontal equity. Assesses the extent to which the persuasive force often thought to support more recent invocations of horizontal equity in the context of tax reform can be understood better in the traditional social welfare...

Argues that the normative principles of utilitarianism should guide tax policy assessment. Arguments to the contrary (based on concerns about equity, income distribution, and incentive problems caused by redistributive taxation) are inconsistent with the Pareto principle, which states that any...

Analysis of the interaction between a range of proportional taxes and risk taking finds a wage tax to have the same behavioral effect as a consumption tax, and that a proportional income tax absorbs no investment risk and yields certain revenue.

In my original paper, I demonstrated that, under standard simplifying assumptions, it is possible to finance a public good in a manner such that a Pareto improvement results whenever the simple cost-benefit test is satisfied-that is, without any adjustment for the "marginal cost of funds." In...