Marginal excess burden, defined as the change in deadweight loss for an additional dollar of tax revenue, has been measured for labor taxes, output taxes, and capital taxes generally. This paper points out that there is no we1 1-defined way to raise capital taxes in general, because the taxation of income from capital depends on many different policy instruments including the statutory corporate income tax rate, the investment tax credit rate, depreciation lifetimes, declining balance rates for depreciation allowances, and personal tax rates on noncorporate income, interest receipts, dividends, and capital gains. Marginal excess burden is measured for each of these different capital tax instruments, using a general equilibrium model that encompasses distortions in the allocation of real resources over time, among industries, between the corporate and noncorporate sectors, and among diverse types of equipment, structures, inventories, and land. Although numerical results are sensitive to specifications for key substitution elasticity parameters, important qualitative results are not. We find that an increase in the corporate rate has the highest marginal excess burden, because it distorts intersectoral and interasset decisions as well as intertemporal decisions. At the other extreme, an investment tax credit reduction has negative marginal excess burden because it raises revenue while reducing interasset distortions more than it increases intertemporal distortions. In general, we find that marginal excess burdens of different capital tax instruments vary significantly. They can be more or less than the marginal excess burden of the payroll tax or the progressive personal income tax.

Introduction -- Taxation of income from capital -- The U.S. tax system -- Effective tax rates -- Summary and conclusion.

Feldstein shows how systems of taxation influence the rate and nature of capital formation--key to the development of any economy. His identification of important economic and policy questions, adroit use of modeling and new data, and careful attention to dynamics make this book a powerful addition to the literature.

JCS-5-05. Joint Committee Print. Provides an explanation of tax legislation enacted in the 108th Congress. Arranged in chronological order by the date each piece of legislation was signed into law. This document, prepared by the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation in consultation with the staffs of the House Committee on Ways and Means and the Senate Committee on Finance, provides an explanation of tax legislation enacted in the 108th Congress. The explanation follows the chronological order of the tax legislation as signed into law. For each provision, the document includes a description of present law, explanation of the provision, and effective date. Present law describes the law in effect immediately prior to enactment. It does not reflect changes to the law made by the provision or subsequent to the enactment of the provision. For many provisions, the reasons for change are also included. In some instances, provisions included in legislation enacted in the 108th Congress were not reported out of committee before enactment. For example, in some cases, the provisions enacted were included in bills that went directly to the House and Senate floors. As a result, the legislative history of such provisions does not include the reasons for change normally included in a committee report. In the case of such provisions, no reasons for change are included with the explanation of the provision in this document. In some cases, there is no legislative history for enacted provisions. For such provisions, this document includes a description of present law, explanation of the provision, and effective date, as prepared by the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation. In some cases, contemporaneous technical explanations of certain bills were prepared and published by the staff of the Joint Committee. In those cases, this document follows the technical explanations. Section references are to the Internal Revenue Code unless otherwise indicated.

Tax distortions are likely to have encouraged excessive leveraging and other financial market problems evident in the crisis. These effects have been little explored, but are potentially macro-relevant. Taxation can result, for example, in a net subsidy to borrowing of hundreds of basis points, raising debt-equity ratios and vulnerabilities from capital inflows. This paper reviews key channels by which tax distortions can significantly affect financial markets, drawing implications for tax design once the crisis has passed.