A Comprehensive Wealth Tax

A Comprehensive Retail Sales Tax as a Single Tax

A well-crafted retail sales tax on all goods and services could replace all 36 other state-level taxes in Kansas— including the personal and corporate income taxes. The tax rate could be eight percent (8%) or less, after the state government makes budget adjustments related to the recent recession-driven revenue shortfalls. Such a bold move holds the promise of making Kansas one of the most gro...

Updating Techniques for Estimating Wealth from Federal Estate Tax Returns

The Statistics of Income Division (SOI) of the IRS, utilizing an estimation methodology first introduced ninety years ago in Great Britain, produces estimates of personal wealth for an important segment of the U.S. population from tax returns filed for wealthy decedents. Federal estate tax returns provide a rich source of financial and demographic data on the nation’s wealthiest individuals. Us...

Adoption of a Comprehensive Web-Based Wealth Management Service

The design of electronic financial services differ crucially from that of conventional services due to their inability to adjust sporadically to the needs and wants of consumers, as adaptability is strongly associated with the human component of services production. In this regard, identification of the motives driving adoption and consumption is the precondition for successful implementation o...

Behavioral Responses to an Annual Wealth Tax: Evidence from Sweden

This paper addresses the behavioral effects of an annual wealth tax. I use Swedish tax records over the period 2000-2006 to estimate bunching at kink points in the progressive tax schedule and find significant estimates of the implied elasticity of taxable net wealth in the range [0.1, 0.3]. I decompose the effects into a reporting response and a real saving response. Using asset-level data on ...

Inflation and the Comprehensive Tax Base