Economic and Political Foundations of Tax Structure: Comment
The paper by Walter Hettich and Stanley Winer (1988) on the economic and political structure of tax analysis is an important contribution, introducing a refreshingly positive approach into an analytical tradition where normative judgments have long been overly important. But Hettich and Winer pursue the logic of their approach only part of the way. In this comment, I would like to extend the Hettich-Winer (HW) positive approach to what I consider to be its logical conclusion, which should allow for a more complete analysis that avoids some possible methodological and ethical biases. The HW model features voter support of a government where support is based positively upon the services received from a pure public good and negatively by tax costs including deadweight loss. Tax costs are affected by the choice of tax base, and different tax bases may involve different behavior responses (to avoid taxes) by different voters. The government wishes to maximize expected support, written as
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