Cheating death
Benjamin Franklin reminded us that death and taxes were life’s only certainties. Franklin was plain wrong. It is easy to avoid most taxes. If you don’t want to pay sales taxes, don’t buy things. If you don’t want to pay income tax, don’t earn money. If you’d rather avoid tax on petrol, ride a bike.
Typically the result of this perfectly legal tax dodging is what we economists call “deadweight loss” and what normal people might call a pointless waste. If you’re willing to pay ￡8.50 for a T-shirt but not ￡10, VAT will tip the balance between you buying and not buying. Because of the tax, you don’t get the shirt you wanted, the shop owner doesn’t collect the money she wanted - and, of course, the taxman doesn’t collect any revenue either. Everybody is worse off.
This is just another example of a favourite economic maxim: “People respond to incentives.” It’s cute, and true, but not always helpful. We need to know how much, and in which direction. Sometimes the question has huge policy weight. For instance, there’s an enthusiastic movement in the US that believes income tax cuts can raise revenue because they stimulate more work and more income and take a smaller slice of a much bigger pie. This view is implausible at anything other than very high tax rates. Cut taxes from 30 per cent to 25 per cent, and the economy needs to expand by a fifth before total revenues recover. That is an implausibly large expansion. In fact, it’s not even obvious that income tax cuts stimulate more work. They might indeed encourage people to work overtime knowing that they will keep more of the proceeds. They might equally encourage people to slack off: with take-home pay rising, why work so hard?
Still, it is unwise to underestimate the power of taxes to alter behaviour. Perhaps following Franklin, Margaret Mitchell commented in Gone with the Wind, “Death, taxes and childbirth! There’s never a convenient time for any of them.” She should have seen the economic research emerging from Australia. It turns out that death, taxes and childbirth can be and are rescheduled to suit the needs of Australian bank accounts.
The economists who realised this are Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, who have been publishing a series of papers and notes showing some suspicious patterns in Australian birth and death rates. Australia passed legislation to abolish estate taxes in 1978, meaning that anyone who died on or after July 1 1979 was entirely exempt, but anyone dying before that date would be fully subject to the inheritance tax, paid by about one in 10 of the departed. The fall in the death rate in late June of that year is quite striking, as is the sudden rise in early July. Gans and Leigh estimated that one in 20 likely deaths in the last week of June were postponed long enough to escape inheritance tax. With 90 per cent of estates too small for tax anyway, this suggests that fully half the likely taxpayers managed to escape death long enough to escape the tax too.
A happier example of the same phenomenon came in the summer of 2004. The Australian government announced in May that it would pay a “baby bonus” of A$3,000, about ￡1,250, to each family of a child born on or after July 1. The effect was unsurprising, at least to an economist: the number of happy events on July 1 was an all-time record, and twice as many as on June 30.
I shall bear this in mind. The Harford family is due to expand in September - or possibly October. We shall have to see what the incentives are before we decide
让死神等待的税务奇闻
本
杰明?富兰克林(Benjamin Franklin)提醒我们，人生中唯死亡与纳税不可避免。显然，富兰克林错了。多数税收可以轻易避免。如果你不想缴纳销售税，就别买东西。如果你不想纳所得税，那就别挣钱。如果你还想避掉汽油税，那就骑自行车。
一般来说，我们经济学家将这种完全合法避税的结果称为“无谓损失”，而一般人称之为无意义的浪费。如果你愿意为一件T恤付8.5英镑而不是10英镑，那么增值税将打破买与不买之间的平衡。由于税收的存在，你买不到想要的衬衫，店主收不到她想得到的钱，当然税务局也不会收到税。所有人都遭受了损失。
这只是“人们会对激励做出反应”这条深得人心的经济学格言的另一个例子。它精妙而正确，但并不总是有用。我们需要了解激励的程度和方向。这个问题有时在政策制定中具有重大意义。举例来说，美国出现了一种狂热的趋势，认为降低所得税税率可以增加税收收入，因为减税可以激励人们多工作、创造更多的收入，因此尽管分得蛋糕的比例有所降低，但由于蛋糕变大了，总量还是会增加。这种观点只有在所得税税率很高的情况下才正确。将税率从30%削减至25%，经济需要以超过20%的速度扩张，总税收收入才会出现增长。这个扩张速度令人难以置信。
实际上，削减所得税并不能显著地刺激人们做更多工作。减税可能确实鼓励人们加班，因为他们明白，自己将得到更大比例的收入。减税也同样可能鼓励人们偷懒：拿回家的工钱上升了，为什么还要这么卖力地干活呢？
但低估税收调节行为的力量，也是不明智的。也许继富兰克林之后，玛格丽特?米切尔(Margaret Mitchell)又在《飘》(Gone with the Wind)中说道，“死亡，纳税，生孩子！这三件事，哪一件也没有合适的时间容你选择的。”她要是看到澳大利亚的一些经济研究就好了。事实表明，死亡、纳税和分娩可以、也确实在被重新计划，以迎合澳大利亚人的银行账户。
明白这个道理的经济学家是乔舒亚?甘斯(Joshua Gans)和安德鲁?利(Andrew Leigh)，两人发表了一系列论文与报告，显示出澳大利亚出生率与死亡率的某些可疑模式。澳大利亚于1978年通过立法废除遗产税，这意味着任何死于1979年7月1日或之后的人可获得全额免税，而任何死于这一日期之前的人，需要全额交纳遗产税，约有十分之一的死者需要交纳这种税。当年6月底的死亡率降幅相当惊人，同样惊人的是7月初死亡率的突然上升。甘斯和利估计，6月份最后一周，每20起可能死亡中，就有一起被推迟，让死者逃脱遗产税。由于90%的死者遗产数额不大，不到起征点，这表明有整整一半可能需要纳税的人成功地推迟了死亡，从而逃脱了遗产税。
2004年夏季出现了同一现象更让人乐见的实例。澳大利亚政府5月份宣布，如果一个家庭在7月1日或以后生下一个孩子，政府将给予3000澳元“宝宝奖”。其效果并不令人意外，至少对经济学家来说如此：7月1日喜得宝宝的数量创下历史纪录，比6月30日整整高出一倍。
我得记住这一点。我们哈福德家9月份――或许10月份也将添丁。我们倒想看看，我们决定生下孩子前，会有些什么激励措施。
