[had to return of rule and revenue by margaret levi]



The Keys to the Kingdom: Income Tax and the State

Evan Osborne

Wright State University

Department of Economics

3640 Col. Glenn Hwy.

Dayton, OH 45435

937 775 4599 (Phone)

937 775 2441 (Fax)

evan.osborne@wright.edu

May, 2002

"Congress will have to go slow in making appropriations unless the President is to be put in an embarrassing position. He will not want to increase the income tax, and if he had to do it would not hesitate ... to put the blame where it belonged. The provision will be a whip in the hands of the president to keep Congress toeing the mark of economy."

- From a Washington Post editorial supporting the imposition of an income tax, 1909 (?)

One of the most striking economic phenomenon of the last century has been the substantial growth, across a wide variety of jurisdictions, in the size of government. This phenomenon has of course not gone unobserved. What has become known as “Wagner’s law” states that all types of societies over time devote more resources to state activity. An extensive empirical literature has developed on this topic, for which the canonical paper is often said to be Peltzman (1980).

The focus of this literature has generally been to explain the rise of government spending through measures of outputs – generally, examining the size of government spending relative to the entire economy or population. However, thus far scholars have not paid attention to the means of the ever-expanding state. Which measures taken by governments to facilitate a more extensive public sector are the most effective enablers of this seldom-disputed outcome? Answering this question would help to better understand the precise dynamics of government growth, which would in turn enable citizens in a particular society to understand where they are on that timeline.

This paper examines the relation of one particular method of revenue extraction to such growth: the taxation of income. The widespread use of such taxation is relatively new, and yet its existence has coincided strikingly with the dramatic growth in government activity that occurred in the twentieth century. Despite this stylized coincidence (in the literal sense of the word), no study of this relationship has been conducted. To do so, this paper presents a brief history of income taxation in Section I. In order to illustrate the tradeoff in choosing taxation instruments, it then presents in Section II a model of endogenous taxation choice by a sovereign. Sections III and IV contain empirical investigation of the relation between government size and introduction of income taxation, and Section V interprets the results.

I. A (very) brief history of income taxation

The income tax has been, in the long span of history, a comparatively recent development. Seligman (1970, p. 41) argues that up until the Middle Ages income was not nearly as important an element of revenue as undefined “lucrative prerogatives of the feudal lord.” To the extent that it was used, it was mostly vicariously via taxation on the “faculty” of property, including human capital, corresponding to what economists today would call its present value in exchange. Although nominally a property tax, income earners paid what amounted to a tax of this sort on their productivity in market exchange, with the tax being assessed proportionately to their earned incomes. The first recorded instance of explicit income taxation occurred in several cities in northern Italy during the Renaissance. The increased commercial activity in Florence in particular, combined with the spread of more democratic governance, caused the government there in 1451 to change a portion of its tax assessment from one based on property to one based on income in the modern sense. More presciently than perhaps he knew at the time Seligman, who would without foreseeing the parallel help craft the initial U.S. income-tax laws a few years later, went on to observe:

“From the very outset, however, the political conditions were unfavorable to efficient administration. In the struggle with the Medici the assessment of the income tax became a favorite weapon of whatever party happened to be in power; and at no other time in the world’s history except, perhaps, in the later centuries of the decaying Roman Empire, was there such an orgy of corruption and maladministration. In order to ascertain the business profits, the books of the merchants were open to inspection, and the assessors had practically unlimited scope in deciding upon the amount of the levy. Individuals might compound with the officials in a lump sum, and the frauds were accordingly overwhelming in character. Everything was ruled by what as known as the arbitrio, that is, the arbitrary judgment of the authorities, and the income tax was utilized as the most potent engine of oppression or of favoritism.” (pp. 46-47)

Whether as a consequence of this evolution or not, the Florentine income tax thus lasted, along with all direct taxation on wealthier citizens, only until the return of more autocratic rule in the sixteenth century.

Income taxation was after this largely dormant until the nineteenth century. In the United Kingdom, the first income tax was instituted in 1799, during the Napoleonic Wars. This “temporary” income tax was finally reduced in 1842, but was never repealed. In fact, abetted by the marginalist revolution and the concept of diminishing marginal utility, the U.K. saw fit to introduce a progressive income tax in 1894 to pay for modern battleships. It was, however, sometime after the initial British institution of the tax before it spread permanently to the continent. The tumult of 1848 did lead to public pressure to impose such taxes, but they were all eventually repealed. However, by the end of the century governing sentiment had changed again, and so income taxation was permanently established in Germany in 1891, Holland in 1892, Italy in 1894, Austria in 1896, Sweden in 1897, Denmark in 1903, Norway in 1905, and France in 1909. Among the driving forces in this development were the increased need for arms spending after the Franco-Prussian war and the increased public pressure for state welfare spending (Webber and Wildavsky, 1986). Japan imposed income taxation in 1887, although it would be many years before it was a significant source of revenue.

In the United States, efforts to impose income taxation at the state (or colonial) level predate the Revolution. During the period of the Seven Years’ War, on nine occasions the lower house of the Maryland legislature passed measures taxing incomes. According to the official archives of the State of Maryland, these measures proposed taxation of the earnings of some or all of “public officials and beneficed clergymen, as well as upon the earnings of physicians, lawyers, clerks, and factors.” However, on all nine occasions the upper house of the legislature rejected these measures. A national income tax was first successfully approved at the federal level in 1861, to fund the Civil War effort. Annual incomes over $600 were taxed at a three percent rate, which was adjusted the next year to a five percent rate on incomes over $10,000. The tax was eliminated in 1872, but re-introduced in 1894, with a one percent tax levied on all incomes over $1000 (?), a threshold affecting a very tiny proportion of the U.S. population. However, in 1895, the U.S. Supreme Court, having upheld the Civil War tax in Springer v. United States[1], now held it unconstitutional as a direct tax that was not, as Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. constitution required, levied in proportion to population.[2] To remedy this, the sixteenth amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1913, and the income tax was permanently instituted in 1916. States had begun introducing income taxation in 1911 (Wisconsin), and it was gradually instituted in most states over much of the twentieth century. (See Table 1.) The Canadian federal income tax has a somewhat similar history. As in the U.S., the income tax was instituted at the central level (in this case for the first time) in 1917 to fund World War I efforts, although income taxation already existed in some provinces.

II. The choice of tax instruments for a predatory state

The choice to introduce an income tax can easily be analyzed within a rational-choice framework. Levi (1988) argues that a society’s tax structure is a function of bargaining power between the ruler and the various types of ruled, of the transaction costs of each type of tax (including collection costs and search costs for taxable property), and of the underlying production technology and exchange opportunities, which influence the revenue available from each taxation instrument. It is helpful to investigate this tradeoff more thoroughly.

The model of the state that is chosen is a variant of the budget-maximizing bureaucrat formulation of Niskanen (1971). In this case, the key decision-maker is not a civil servant but the sovereign. He must choose a tax structure so as to maximize revenue, knowing that those who are taxed will react rationally so as to optimally avoid taxation. A ruler facing such a constraint will thus choose different instruments (e.g., income and sales) to the degree that citizens find it costly to avoid payment. It will be simplest to assume that the sovereign can either tax money income earned in market exchange or impose an excise tax on purchases of a consumption good.

A. Citizen optimum

Assume that there is a representative citizen who has the twice-differentiable, strictly concave preferences u(x, e). x is a consumption good and e is leisure. x must be purchased out of the income earned from labor, and this income has no other value. The citizen has a time endowment of r, which must be allocated between labor and leisure.

In both his consumption and labor activities, the citizen has two choices: to participate in the legal market and pay the assessed taxes, or to avoid them by participating in the black market. Let the subscript 0 denote legally reported activity subject to taxation, which I will refer to as revealed activity, and 1 denote black-market activity. Revealed labor activity, before taxation, earns a return of w per unit, and black-market labor activity earns a return f(w, l1), where f is strictly concave, f(w, 0) = 0 and f(w, l1) < wl1 for all l1 > 0. Without an excise tax x can be purchased at a unit price of p. When x is purchased on the black market it comes at a cost of C(p, x1), which is a strictly convex function subject to similar restrictions, i.e. C(p, 0) = 0 and C(p, x1) > px1 for all x1 > 0.

Revealed and black-market purchases are thus perfect substitutes in consumption but imperfect ones in purchasing, and black-market and revealed labor are imperfect substitutes in the generation of income. The citizen must solve the following problem:

[pic] (1)

t and ( are the excise and income taxes, respectively, which are taken as given by the citizen. Constructing the Lagrangean and taking the first-order conditions yields:

[pic], (2a)

[pic], (2b)

[pic], (2c)

[pic], (2d)

along with the two constraints. The restrictions on C(.), u(.) and f(.) guarantee that an interior solution will occur for any positive level of taxation.

B. Sovereign optimum

The FOCs in the prior section define a pair of reaction functions l1((, w, p, r) and x1(t, w, p, r). By the implicit-function theorem and the concavity (convexity) of f (C), the citizen will supply less revealed labor and purchase fewer revealed goods as the tax rate on each increases. The task of the sovereign is to maximize revenue in light of these constraints. He will solve the unconstrained optimization problem

[pic] . (3)

gs(.) and gi(.) are the administrative costs associated with sales and income taxation, and are assumed to be strictly convex in the tax rates. The sovereign’s FOCs are

[pic], (4a)

[pic]. (4b)

(4) implies a unique optimum for both taxation levels. In each case, there is a tradeoff in setting it between a greater revenue intake per unit of revealed commerce (goods purchased or labor income earned) and a lower amount of revealed commerce. But unlike the conventional criticism commonly known as supply-side thinking, in which a greater tax rate on income leads to substitution toward leisure, here there is additional substitution toward black-market activity. The magnitude of that substitution from an infinitesimal change in the tax rate, i.e. [pic], depends by substitution using (2c) and (2d) on the responsiveness of black-market income to higher black-market labor. The more concave is f at the equilibrium, the more this black-market penalty from higher tax rates will be. In general, the sovereign will raise more money (in absolute terms) from income taxation as the productivity of black-market labor, i.e. the concavity of f(.) hence its departure from wl as l expands, is lower, and will raise more money from excise taxation as the cost of black-market purchases is farther removed from p.

C. Interpretation in light of U.S. tax structure

In the U.S. tax rates tax revenues are greater from income than sales taxation at the highest level of government. At the federal level in the U.S. there is no universal sales tax, although there are excise taxes. The latter are only imposed on select products, and in fixed monetary amounts rather than as percentages, but on some goods (especially tobacco and liquor) they may amount to substantial percentages of the product’s after-tax price. This is in contrast to federal income tax rates, which (according to the Tax Foundation) have a top marginal rate of 39.1 percent and yield an average tax rate for all who pay income tax of 14.4 percent. Sales tax rates in states are comparatively modest, with no combined state and local sales tax rates in excess of eleven percent as of 2001, roughly equivalent to income tax rates, which typically have multiple brackets, with no top rate higher than eleven percent.

As for tax revenue, for the U.S. federal government in 2000 income tax revenues were over 58 percent of total tax revenue, while excise taxes were less than four percent. At the state level, according to the Tax Foundation, in 1999 income taxes were 40.6 percent of all state tax revenue, while sales taxes were 33.2 percent. This is the combined sum for all fifty states, including the five that have no sales tax and the five that have no income tax. Of the remaining 40 states and the District of Columbia, 33 of them derive more revenue from income than sales taxes. State income and sales tax rates are listed in Table 2, and the revenue from each type of taxation is listed in Table 3.

There are thus two patterns worthy of note. First, the federal government and most states rely on income taxes as the largest source of revenue. Second, the federal government, which in some sense has first claim on tax design under the U.S. federal structure, is the level of government at which this reliance is most pronounced. Together, these findings provide at least an inference that income taxation may be the most lucrative source of revenue for a taxing government, at least in the U.S.

III. Income taxation and federal government spending in the United States

Several time series illustrate the remarkable change in U.S. federal-government revenue after the implementation of the income tax. Table 4 shows the percentage of total federal government revenues derived from customs, excise, employment and individual and corporate income taxes since 1792. Once introduced, income taxes soared immediately, before being modestly dislodged in share terms by the growth of employment-based taxes in the 1950s and 1960s, mostly to fund Social Security and later Medicare. Individual income taxes in particular now account for almost half of federal-government revenue, and individual and corporate income taxes are almost sixty percent.

Figure 1 depicts the growth in the logarithm of real per capita federal government spending from 1850-2000. Also included is the trend line derived from conducting a naïve regression, i.e. one measuring only the relation between spending and elapsed time, of this value on the years 1850-1916. The estimated equation for this period is

LOGG = 3.36627 + 0.01444 t, (5)

where t is the years elapsed since 1850 (2 = 0.2652) . This implies that, even ignoring the other factors that might account for government growth, per capita spending has a natural momentum of growth of roughly 1.44 percent prior to the introduction of the income tax. As can be readily seen from the figure, growth in government spending after 1916 is greater than before. In fact, running the same regression for the period 1917-2000 yields

LOGG = 5.38516 + 0.04199 t, (6)

with 2 = 0.8210. Thus, particularly in the period in which income taxation exists, the naïve model performs surprisingly well in explaining the growth of government spending. (6) implies an annual growth rate of government spending of roughly 4.20 percent, roughly three times as high as the rate without an income tax. A Chow test performed with sub-samples of 1850-1916 and 1917-2000 yields a test statistic for a structural break at this time of F = 43.20292 (p < 0.01).

Defense and non-defense spending

However, the fact that the income tax was introduced in 1916 means there is one powerful contrary hypothesis for the differential growth rate that must be considered. 1917 was the year the U.S. entered the First World War, and a case can certainly be made that this conflict was a watershed event with respect to the U.S.’s role in the world. While the American colonial experience, and hence engagement with the larger world, went back at least to the taking of Spanish colonies during the Spanish-American war, it was the Great War that first drew American soldiers overseas to fight a war that had begun without them, and which launched a long ongoing era in which U.S. national interests were defined around events all over the world. If Versailles set the stage for World War II, which in turn set the stage for the Cold War, with its concomitant massive projection of U.S. military might around the world, then perhaps the rise in government spending after 1916 was primarily a function of the wider role the U.S. began to take in the world after that time. Perhaps the income tax was even seen as necessary to support the imminent entry into the war.[3]

To assess this possibility, Figures 2 and 3 show the same growth rate for the logarithms of both real per capita defense and non-defense spending for the same period. In fact, the structural break in 1917 is far more pronounced for non-defense than for defense spending. In Figure 2, defense spending, the naïve model estimated for 1850-1916 and applied to 1917-2000 is again depicted, along with actual logarithmic per capita defense spending. Figure 3 depicts the same data and result for non-defense spending, exclusive of interest on the national debt. For defense spending the estimations for 1850-1916 and 1917-2000, respectively, are

LOGGDEF = 2.35425 + 0.01202 t, (1850-1616, 2 = 0.1102) (7a)

LOGGDEF = 4.25697 + 0.04198t. (1917-2000, 2 = 0.5483) (7b)

For non-defense spending, the results are

LOGGNON = 2.17585 + 0.02543t, (1850-1916, 2 = 0.5962) (8a)

LOGGNON = 4.50194 + 0.04698t. (1917-2000, 2 = 0.9165) (8b)

Only in the case of non-defense spending before 1917, when the permanent defense establishment was much smaller, is the adjusted R2 low. Otherwise, the naïve model does strikingly well both in explaining spending growth and in demonstrating a difference between the period before and after 1916. The rise in the rate of growth in spending is substantial for both defense and non-defense spending. In both cases, the introduction of the income tax is associated with a rise in annual spending to in excess of four percent. The simple test does not allow refutation of the idea that the increase in U.S. defense spending is caused by considerations external to the introduction of the income tax (e.g., exogenous historical events such as the rise of fascism and communism), but the corresponding rise in non-defense spending suggests that even if this hypothesis is true income taxation nonetheless precedes a higher rise in domestic spending for reasons, presumably, unrelated to such external geopolitical considerations.

IV. The income tax in American states

It is also possible to examine the effect of the introduction of the income tax in a cross-sectional/time-series environment. Such an analysis is possible because states introduced income taxes at different times, as noted in Table 1.

Accordingly, the relation of state-government spending both to the presence of income taxation and to several variables important in the literature on the growth of government is examined. The variables are for the years 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991. There are assumed to be fixed effects throughout, so that ordinary least squares provides a BLUE estimator. The left-hand panel of Table 5 contains the results for the estimation of the following equation:

LOGTE = a + b INCOME + c POP + d TAX + e URBAN

LOGTE is the natural logarithm of total expenditure by the state government, net of revenue received from the federal government. INCOME is personal income, which has universally been found to be correlated with higher government spending as a share of gross national products in cross-national studies (e.g., Erlich and Lui, 1999; Peltzman, 1980), and URBAN is the percentage of the state’s population that lives in urban areas, as defined by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. This variable has at least once been found to be a significant explanatory variable for national-government spending (Kau and Rubin, 1981). These variables all come from the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. (various years). Finally, TAX is a dummy variable that takes a value of one if the state has any income tax, corporate or individual, in effect at the time of the observation.[4]

Per capita income is positively related at a highly significant level to the amount of government spending, a result that is in agreement with the growth-of-government literature. Population is of course positive at a highly significant level, a result that would be in agreement with almost any theory of endogenous government. The urban population is also significant. However, the presence of income taxation also yields, with a high degree of confidence, faster growth in government spending independently of these factors.

The results for total revenue collected by state governments, depicted in the right-hand column of Table 5, are similar. The dependent variable is the natural logarithm of revenue collected by state governments. The results are all the same in terms of signs and statistical significance for coefficients, but the overall performance of the model, as measured by adjusted R2, is slightly better. Thus, the results clearly suggest that the presence of income taxation at the state level does promote a greater degree of government spending and revenue. The next section explores some reasons why this might be true.

V. The power of income taxation

Why does income taxation appear to be such an effective stimulus to the growth of government spending? The model suggests that the key question is the relative balance between the concavity of f(.), the returns to black-market labor, the convexity of C(.), the cost of purchasing the consumption good in the black market, and the administrative costs of each system. If income taxation opens the door to substantially more government spending, then citizens must have less room to maneuver around an income tax than a sales tax.

At first glance the balance would seem to favor sales or excise taxation. While under an income-taxation citizen each citizen must be monitored, in a sales-tax system only the points of sale need be. However, there are several reasons why the income tax might be more efficient in terms of minimizing tax evasion. First, while each person carries out large numbers of purchases at multiple retail establishments, because of the gains to specialization most people earn their wage income from a small number of sources, often only one. Since many firms are employers of significant numbers of people economies of scale may thus obtain. Still, there is no obvious candidate from the available data. The U.S. Small Business Administration estimates there are between 13 million and 16 million businesses in the U.S., most of which would presumably be required to participate in a general federal sales tax. Only 5.4 million of these have employees, and so administering an income-based tax is perhaps less burdensome from that point of view. On the other hand, there are many sources of income other than wages, and so over time the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has found it necessary to begin monitoring the payment of dividend and interest income, which presumably raises administrative costs significantly.

However, income taxation has one virtue that sales taxation does not: withholding. Twight (1995) describes the efforts to sell withholding to a reluctant public. The policy was adopted in 1943, as World War II raged, and was sold as a way for citizens to pay their taxes “promptly” (rather than, as might be more accurately said, “early”). The need to move to withholding was acute because the expansion of the income range subject to the tax meant that returns were pouring in to the federal government, substantially raising administrative costs along with worries about compliance. To ease the way, Congress was during the debate on the legislation very concerned about terminology. Representative Willis A. Robertson (D-VA) objection to the prevailing term “forced savings,” saying that “the word ‘forced’ is not a euphonious name,” and suggesting that it “would be much better if we should call it ‘Victory savings,’ or something of that kind” (U.S. House Hearings 1942 Vol. 1: 108). The term “war tax” was also tossed around approvingly.

In any event, withholding was adopted, and there are a variety of reasons for supposing that the system greases the skids for an expansion of income taxation, most of which have to do with the voluminous literature on framing effects (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky, 1990). Withholding creates a framework in which, for most taxpayers, money is received as a “refund” in the middle of the year, instead of being paid out in its entirety as an “expense” on the date the taxes are due. While the responsiveness of agents in economic and psychological experiments to such framing considerations has been amply documented, no one has carried out such work in the income-tax context. And yet, the reliance of most governments that rely heavily on income taxation is suggestive in this regard. Still, the power of income taxation relative to other tax bases has yet to be adequately tackled.

Conclusion

The evidence linking the introduction of income taxation to a larger government is significant. However, the analysis has several deficiencies that should be overcome in future work. The most substantial is that the analysis is only performed within the U.S., owing primarily to the absence of long time series on government spending in other countries. While the strength of the empirical tests conducted in an environment of comparatively fine gradations of government expenditure within the U.S. (as opposed to across a wide variety of countries) is in some sense a measure of the findings’ robustness, it would be nonetheless certainly be worthwhile to come up with other ways to compare the response of state size to the introduction of income taxation in an international context. It seems to be a stylized fact that the reliance on income taxes is proportionally less in Europe, owing primarily to the widespread use there of value-added taxation. At the same time, the U.S. is famed internationally for its relatively low rate of income-tax evasion. In a number of countries in Europe and Latin America (indeed, throughout the developing world), in contrast, tax evasion is something of a national pastime.[5] This empirical regularity suggests two further avenues of inquiry. First, it raises the question of whether changes in tax structure can be explained, at least at the point of adoption, as endogenous responses to differences in the technology of tax evasion, as suggested in the model. Second, there is also a possibility of a path-dependence effect, in which the marginal benefit to the sovereign of changing the tax structure depends on the existing tax-enforcement apparatus. In such a more sophisticated environment, the tax structure that might be revenue-maximizing if it could be costlessly adopted at the moment is not because of the precommitment to the existing tax structure, with all of the costs already sunk into the existing enforcement techniques. Finally, some more thought about the advantages of a particular tax base for a revenue-maximizing government deserve thought.

References

Crowe, Rev. Martin T. The Moral Obligation of Paying Just Taxes. Catholic University of America Studies in Sacred Theology No. 84 (1944).

Davis, Henry. Moral and Pastoral Theology (7th edition). New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958.

Erlich, Isaac and Lui, Francis T. “Bureaucratic Corruption and Endogenous Economic Growth.” Journal of Political Economy 107 (1999): S270-S293.

Kahneman, Daniel and Tversky, Amos. “Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions.” In Margaret Levi, ed., The Limits of Rationality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, 60-89.

Kau, James B. and Rubin, Paul H. “The Size of Government.” Public Choice 37 (1981): 261-274.

Levi, Margaret. Of Rule and Revenue. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Mcgee, Robert W. “When Is Tax Evasion Unethical?”. In Robert W. Mcgee, ed., The Ethics of Tax Evasion. South Orange, N.J.: Dumont Institute for Public Policy Research, 1998, 5-35.

Niskanen, William A. Jr. Bureaucracy and Representative Government. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971.

Peltzman, Sam. “The Growth of Government.” Journal of Law and Economics 23 (), Oct. 1980, 209-287.

Seligman, Edwin R.A. The Income Tax: A Study of the History, Theory and Practice of Income Taxation at Home and Abroad. New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1970.

The Tax Foundation, .

Twight, Charlotte. “Evolution of Federal Income Tax Withholding: The Machinery of Institutional Change.” Cato Journal 14 (3), Winter 1995,

Webber, Carolyn, and Wildavsky, Aaron. A History of Taxation and Expenditures in the Western World. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.

[pic]

[pic]

[pic]

Table 1

Date of introduction of state income taxes

State Individual Corporate State Individual Corporate

Alabama 1933 1933 Texas none none

Alaska 1959 1959 Utah 1931 1931

Arizona 1933 1933 Vermont 1931 1931

Arkansas 1929 1929 Virginia 1961 1915

California 1935 1937 Washington none none

Colorado 1937 1937 West Virginia 1961 1967

Connecticut 1992 1915 Wisconsin 1911 1911

Delaware 1917 1957 Wyoming none none

Florida none 1971

Georgia 1929 1929

Hawaii 1959 1959

Idaho 1931 1931

Illinois 1969 1969

Indiana 1963 1963

Iowa 1934 1934

Kansas 1933 1933

Kentucky 1936 1936

Louisiana 1934 1934

Maine 1969 1969

Maryland 1937 1937

Massachusetts 1916 19191

Michigan 1967 1967

Minnesota 1933 1933

Mississippi 1912 1921

Missouri 1917 1917

Montana 1933 1917

Nebraska 1967 1967

New None 1971

Hampshire

New Jersey 1976 1958

New Mexico 1933 1933

New York 1919 1917

North Carolina 1921 1921

North Dakota 1919 1919

Ohio 1971 1971

Oklahoma 1915 1931

Oregon 1939 1955

Pennsylvania 1971 1951

Rhode Island 1971 1947

South Carolina 1922 1922

South Dakota none none

Tennessee none 1923

TN and NH tax dividends only; coded as zero. Michigan has “single business tax, ” a value-added tax. This tax is coded as a 1. It was enacted in 1976 to consolidate several business taxes, including a corporate income tax.

Table 2

State tax rates (percent, as of Jan. 1, 2001)

State Ind. Income Sales State Ind. Income Sales

Alabama 2.0-5.0 4.0 South Dakota None 4.0

Alaska None None Tennessee None 6.0

Arizona 2.87-5.04 5.0 Texas None 6.25

Arkansas 1.0-7.0 5.125 Utah 2.3-7.0 4.75

California 1.0-9.3 7.0 Vermont 24.01 5.0

Colorado 4.63 2.9 Virginia 2.0-5.75 4.5

Delaware 2.2-5.95 None Washington None 6.5

Florida None 6.0 West Virginia 3.0-6.5 6.0

Georgia 1.0-6.0 4.0 Wisconsin 4.6-6.75 5.0

Hawaii 1.5-8.5 4.0 Wyoming None 4.0

Idaho 2.0-8.2 5.0

Illinois 3.0 6.25

Indiana 3.4 5.0

Iowa 0.36-8.98 5.0

Kansas 3.5-6.45 4.9

Kentucky 2.0-6.0 6.0

Louisiana 2.0-6.0 4.0

Maine 2.0-8.5 5.0

Maryland 2.0-4.8 5.0

Massachusetts 5.6 5.0

Michigan 4.2 6.0

Minnesota 5.35-7.85 6.5

Mississippi 3.0-5.0 7.0

Missouri 1.5-6.0 4.225

Montana 2.0-11.0 None

Nebraska 2.51-6.68 5.0

Nevada None 6.5

New Hampshire None None

New Jersey 1.4-6.37 6.0%

New Mexico 1.7-8.2 5.0

New York 4.0-6.85 4.0

North Carolina 6.0-7.75 4.0

North Dakota 2.67-12.0 5.0

Ohio 0.691-6.98 5.0

Oklahoma 0.5-6.75 4.5

Oregon 5.0-9.0 None

Pennsylvania 2.8 6.0

Rhode Island 25.51 7.0

South Carolina 2.5-7.0 5.0

1. Percentage of federal tax liability.

Table 3

Revenue from Sales and Income Taxation (Percent, Fiscal Year 2000)

State Sales Income

Alabama 32.2 42.0 South Dakota 52.6 4.9

Alaska None 30.8 Tennessee 57.4 6.2

Arizona 44.8 34.8 Texas 51.1 0

Arkansas 35.0 35.1 Utah 35.8 45.9

California 28.0 55.1 Vermont 14.6 32.4

Colorado 26.1 56.1 Virginia 19.5 58.5

Delaware 0.0 45.7 Washington 61.6 0

Florida 60.5 4.8 West Virginia 27.4 35.4

Georgia 34.3 52.4 Wisconsin 27.7 51.7

Hawaii 46.1 34.2 Wyoming 38.3 0

Idaho 31.4 45.9

Illinois 28.1 43.4

Indiana 35.4 46.3

Iowa 33.2 40.6

Kansas 35.8 43.9

Kentucky 28.2 39.1

Louisiana 31.6 27.7

Maine 31.8 46.1

Maryland 24.1 48.8

Massachusetts 22.1 64.1

Michigan 33.7 42.1

Minnesota 27.9 47.6

Mississippi 49.5 26.2

Missouri 32.5 44.5

Montana 0 36.6

Nebraska 34.5 44.1

Nevada 52.2 0

New Hampshire 0 3.9

New Jersey 30.4 47.1

New Mexico 40.1 27.8

New York 20.5 62.2

North Carolina 22.1 53.1

North Dakota 28.2 23.6

Ohio 31.8 45.1

Oklahoma 24.6 39.8

Oregon 0 68.9

Pennsylvania 31.4 37.7

Rhode Island 30.5 44.0

South Carolina 38.5 41.9

Source:

Table 4

Federal revenue from various sources, 1792-2000 (percent)

Year Customs Ind. income Corp. income Total income Excise

1792 93.8 0 0 0 0

1800 83.7 0 0 0 0

1820 83.9 0 0 0 0

1840 69.3 0 0 0 0

1860 94.8 0 0 0 0

1880 55.9 0 0 0 36.1

1900 41.1 0 0 0 50.1

1920 4.8 7.0 7.0 14.0 13.5

1940 6.7 19.1 22.3 41.4 36.6

1960 1.2 44 23.2 67.2 12.5

1980 1.4 47.2 12.5 59.7 4.7

2000 01 48.6 9.8 58.5 3.5

1. Less than 0.1 percent.

Table 5

State regression results

State expenditures State revenues

Variable Coefficient Coefficient

INTERCEPT 19.52552*** 19.64908***

(75.32927) (93.84031)

INCOME 0.00546*** 0.008913***

(3.984535) (7.827386)

POP 1.8E-07*** 1.7E-07***

(16.02303) (18.0513)

TAX 0.371788** 0.10311**

(2.916188) (3.267808)

URBAN 0.924589* 0.643841*

(2.356536) (2.011754)

2 = 0.701968 2 = 0.770249

F = 116.4118*** F = 166.5239***

N = 197 N = 199

Note: *** denotes significance at 0.1-percent level.

** denotes significance at one-percent level.

* denotes significance at five-percent level.

Note: Figures in parentheses are t statistics.

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[1]. 102 US 586 (1881).

[2]. Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. 158 US 601 (1895) (Rehearing)

[3]. Of course, it might also be possible that the U.S. refrained from becoming involved in European affairs until the income tax was in place.

[4]. A separate regression was run with a dummy variable for the existence of individual income taxes rather than any income taxes at all. It too was highly significant with the same sign. (Details available upon request.)

[5]. Webber and Wildavsky note in their analysis of tax evasion in “Latin nations” (p. 549) that L’Osservatore Romano had at one point declared that tax evasion was not a sin. The theologian Henry Davis (1958) makes a prisoners’ dilemma argument against declaring evasion sinful, and numerous other such theological arguments are found in Martin T. Crowe (1944). The general theology of tax evasion is summarized in Mcgee (1998).

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