The authors analyze several reasonable policy options for pay-as-you-go Social Security that might be adopted in response to a temporary demographic bulge. The bulge generation enters the economy, works, retires, andexits the economy. Three of the policies maintain a balanced budget. Under the...

Is a consumption tax equivalent to a wage tax? This article examines this question in a two-period life-cycle model with Cobb-Douglas production and utility functcons. Three taxes are compared: income, wage, and consumption. The article shows how equivalence depends crucially on government debt...

Abstract Analysts agree that designing a satisfactory tax rule for owner-occupied housingposes a senous challenge for the personal (cash flow) consumption tax that recently has been introduced in Congress by several senators. We compare tax rules for owner-occupied housing by performing...

This article presents an alternative approach to the welfare economics of taxes, and to the choice between an income, wage, and consumption tax. In contrast to standard efficiency analysis of taxes, and to much of the optimal growth literature, the central focus is on the welfare of different...

This article constructs a transitional protection rule-an “old-wealth deduction†-for conversion of the income tax to a personal consumption tax and tests it in four stylized life cycle economies (identical, pension, bequest, and spender) by performing numerical simulations. It is...