These are slides from a presentation to the President's Advisory Panel on Tax Reform, given in Washington D.C. on May 11, 2005, updated, with additional slides, and sources at the end. The principal goal is to summarize the mechanics and analytics of a consumed or cash-flow income tax, a...

Everyone knows that the current tax system is unfair. Some of the richest people in America pay no tax, while a huge share of the tax burden falls on the rest of us. A mere glance at the tax code confirms that it is far too complex, with volumes of rules that no ordinary person could possibly...

The last 20 years have seen a significant evolution in the literature on horizontal inequity (HI) and have generated two major and 'rival' methodological strands, namely, classical HI and reranking. We propose in this paper a class of ethically flexible tools that integrate these two strands....

It is common knowledge that mobile individuals are difficult to tax. Governments accommodate these difficulties by granting special tax reductions to mobile individuals as it is expedient to get some tax revenue from these individuals rather than to lose them as tax payers completely. Taxing...

There is clear evidence that fairness plays a role in redistribution. Individuals want to compensate others for their misfortune, while they allow them to enjoy the fruits of their effort. This paper introduces fairness in a tax-benefit scheme that is based on several characteristics in order to...

We study fair and efficient tax-benefi t schemes based on income and non-income factors under partial control. Partial control means that each factor is a speci fic mixture of unobserved ability (randomly drawn by nature) and effort (chosen by individuals who differ in tastes). Factors differ in...

We characterize a measure of social welfare for linear production economies in which individuals differ in productive skills and preferences. The key feature of our measure is that it aggregates fairness gaps, defined as the difference between the money-metric utility that the individual...