On Choosing a Flat-Rate Income Tax Schedule

Joel Slemrod and Shlomo Yitzhaki

No 1028, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper applies a numerical optimization technique using microunit tax data to the problem of choosing the parameters of a flat-rate tax system, should one be desired. Our approach is to first formulate explicit objectives that a flat-rate tax might reasonably be designed to meet, such as minimizing the extent of changes in households' tax burdens and minimizing the efficiency cost of the tax system. The next step uses an optimization algorithm to calculate the flat-rate schedule which comes closest to meeting the objectives,subject to the constraint that it raise the same revenue as the current incometax system. The calculations are carried out using a sample of 947 tax returns randomly drawn from the Treasury Tax File for 1977 which are updated to repro-duce the pattern of tax returns that would be filed in 1982.The analysis shows that the flat-rate system which minimizes the sum of the absolute deviations in tax liabilities features a marginal tax rate between 0.204 and 0.254, though a different definition of tax burden changes which puts more emphasis on reproducing the tax burdens of high-income households has an optimal marginal tax rate of 0.382. We also derive the optimal flat-rate schedules when another objective is to minimize the efficiency cost of the tax system.

Date: 1982-11
Note: PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as Slemrod, Joel and Shlomo Yitzhaki. "On Choosing a Flat-Rate Income Tax System." National Tax Journal, Vol. 36, No. 1, (March 1983), pp. 31-44.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w1028.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:1028

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w1028

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().