Showing posts with label Amilcare Puviani. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amilcare Puviani. Show all posts

Sunday, May 21, 2023

The ‘Khaldun Curve’ | Nima Sanandaji

Ideas change the world. A good example of this is how the global view of taxation quietly began shifting one afternoon in 1974. That afternoon, the American economist Arthur Laffer met with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who both were working for the Nixon-Ford Administration at the time. The topic at hand was taxes, a pressing matter at a time when the highest marginal tax rate in the US was fully 70 per cent.
 

During the meeting, Laffer explained that the relationship between the tax revenues and the tax rate was not as simple as one would expect. Doubling the tax rate, for example, does not double the tax revenues, because higher taxes disincentives people from working. To illustrate his point, Laffer famously sketched a curve on a napkin. It showed that both a tax rate at zero per cent and one at hundred per cent would yield no tax revenues.
 

 
A tax rate of zero per cent would logically mean zero revenues, and one at 100 per cent would disincentives people completely from working, which also means zero revenues. The implication, Laffer noted, is that somewhere between zero and hundred per cent, there is a tipping point. Above this point, raising the tax rates would actually lead to such a damaging effect on economic incentives, that the collected taxes would actually be lower after the tax rate was raised.
 
[...] The funny thing is that Arthur Laffer’s theory was far from new. He was rediscovering a concept that had been acknowledged during the Islamic Golden Age period of free market policy. Laffer has himself explained that he didn’t invent the curve, but took it from Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century Muslim, North African philosopher. Indeed, many of the ideas we today associate with Western free-market thinkers originated in the Islamic world.

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Eleven Fiscal Commandments for Modern Governance | Amilcare Puviani

Financial Theory of Illusion (1903) by Prof. Amilcare Puviani (1854 - 1907)

Answering to the question: “If a government were trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of a population, what would it do?", Italian economist Amilcare Puviani elaborated the following canon of eleven fiscal commandments for modern governance
  1. The use of indirect rather than direct taxes, so that the tax is hidden in the price of goods.
  2. Inflation, by which the state reduces the value of everyone else's currency.
  3. Borrowing, so as to postpone the necessary taxation. 
  4. Gift and luxury taxes, where the tax accompanies the receipt or purchase of something special, lessening the annoyance of the tax. 
  5. "Temporary” taxes, which somehow never get repealed when the emergency passes. 
  6. Taxes that exploit social conflict, by placing higher taxes on unpopular groups. 
  7. The threat of social collapse or withholding monopoly government services if taxes are reduced. 
  8. Collection of the total tax burden in relatively small increments over time, rather than in a yearly lump sum. 
  9. Taxes whose exact incidence cannot be predicted in advance, thus keeping the taxpayer unaware of just how much he is paying. 
  10. Extraordinary budget complexity to hide the budget process from public understanding. 
  11. The use of generalized expenditure categories to make it difficult for outsiders to assess the individual components of the budget.”