Clothing Exemptions and Sales Tax Regressivity: Note
扩展了Schaefer的研究，利用美国消费者支出调查数据，计算全美城市及城乡地区排除服装的销售税的累进性指数，发现服装免税反而加剧累退性。
In a recent article in this Review, Jeffrey Schaefer reports an important discovery that runs counter to currently accepted views. He finds that clothing exemptions in the New Jersey tax law actually reduce sales tax progressivity.' It would be of great value if Schaefer's results could be generalized to a wider geographical area. Other state legislatures considering adopting or revising the sales tax, for example, could be spared the mistake of exempting clothing in the belief that such an exemption pushes the sales tax toward progressivity if, in fact, the opposite is true. This comment extends Schaefer's analysis to the whole of the United States. We derive progressivity-regressivity indexes for a sales tax which excludes clothing from taxation for 1) all urban areas in the United States, and 2) all urban and rural areas combined. The empirical information for these areas comes from the most recent survey of consumer expenditures and income for the United States by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (1964 and 1966). Following Schaefer's definitions, a sales tax is considered to be progressive if the effective rate of taxation increases as the ability to pay increases. If the effective tax rate declines as the ability to pay increases, the tax is regressive; and if the rate remains approximately constant as ability to pay changes, the tax is proportional. An effective way to test whether a sales tax is progressive or not is to derive the elasticity of the tax base with respect to the measure of ability to pay. We can use Schaefer's regression equation to derive the progressivity-regressivity index of alternative sales tax bases: