The Continuing Search for a Popular Tax
探讨联邦税收政策与赤字削减的紧密关联，分析经济学家对所得税改革的影响，并指出政策制定者需面对公民对政府支出意愿降低或支付意愿提高的新挑战。
For the next few years, perhaps for a longer time, federal tax policy will be inseparably intertwined with deficit-reduction policy. As a result, tax decisions will be more closely related to spending decisions and attention will shift to new kinds of taxes. For decades, federal tax policy debates have been quite separate from debates over what these taxes are supposed to finance. Federal tax controversy has focused heavily on the major general revenue sources, the individual and corporate income taxes. Economists have analyzed the effects of these levies on economic behavior and on the distribution of income, and this analysis has played a considerable role in policy formulation. The substantial reduction in marginal tax rates, as well as base broadening, indexing, and changes in the treatment of depreciation and consumer interest, were greatly influenced by the views of economists. The frequency of recent changes in the income tax rules, capped by the surprisingly comprehensive tax reform legislation of 1986, have left both politicians and tax reformers with little appetite for further tinkering with the income taxes. Moreover, the continuing large deficits in the federal budget, only partially offset by growing surpluses in the Social Security trust fund, have forced policymakers to focus on a new aspect of an old problem: how to get citizens to want less from their federal government or be willing to pay more for it.