Comments on John B. Shoven and John Whalley, 'Irving Fisher's Spendings (Consumption) Tax in Retrospect'

摘要

John Shoven and John Whalley are certainly correct in their two basic observations concerning Irving Fisher's contribution to the tax policy debate nearly six decades ago. First, Fisher was far ahead of his time substantively. His detailed treatment in his 1942 book Constructive Income Taxation of what we now call a personalized progressive consumption tax could have served as the blueprint for the "USA" ("unlimited savings allowance") tax (a progressive consumption tax) introduced in 1995 by Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA) and Pete Domenici (R-NM). Indeed, that tax would have avoided much complexity and many pitfalls had it simply followed Irving Fisher's recommendations of how to treat borrowing (Ginsburg 1995; Warren 1995). Second, Shoven and Whalley properly remind us that Irving Fisher's contribution in detailing how to implement a progressive tax on consumption has largely been lost. The intellectual history of this subject usually goes back only as far as Nicholas Kaldor's 1955 book The Expenditure Tax, even though, as Shoven and Whalley point out, Kaldor himself made extensive references to Fisher's work. In fact, neither William Andrews's influential work nor my own detailed article on implementing a progressive consumption tax refer to Fisher's contribution (Andrews 1974; Graetz 1979), although we all agree about the proper resolution of many of the issues Fisher discussed.