Flat tax bites the dust

Posted on

News from Latvia:

Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis announced Tuesday that his government would ditch the country's flat-rate tax system in favour of a form of progressive tax.

We support progressive income taxes: that is, taxes based on the ability to pay. Flat taxes, as it happens, produces regressive tax systems (that is, the poor pay a higher share of their incomes) because, among other reasons, when combined with consumption taxes like VAT, where the poor tend to pay a far higher share of their incomes in this form of tax than the rich do since the spend a larger share of their incomes on the things that incur consumption taxes). Flat taxes are a nonsense.

People such as Daniel Mitchell of the Center for Freedom of Prosperity have touted Latvia as prime exhibits in their global crusade for anti-poor flat taxes. So how has Latvia been doing, with its flat tax system? As it happens, the FT has a story about this today by the world-famous economist Nouriel Roubini, entitled, "Latvia’s currency crisis is a rerun of Argentina’s". The basic message is that Latvia is screwed:

At this point, a currency and financial crisis is pretty much unavoidable; the issue is how to minimise the domestic and international costs of the needed change in the policy regime. As the experience with Argentina suggests, procrastinating will make the unavoidable crash — and the regional contagion — even more dramatic and costly.

The same Dan Mitchell also made the same kind of claim for flat taxes in Iceland, with results that would be hilarious if the outcome wasn't so serious.

As an aside, flat tax theorists relied heavily on the now thoroughly discredited efficient markets hypothesis. As it also happens, a book review is also out today, looking at just that. Here's an excerpt:

Financiers built ever more on foundations that should no longer have been trusted. Last year’s events in capital markets were a definitive refutation of the theory.

And the original Latvia story points out, more hopefully now:

With both Estonia and Lithuania also struggling to cut budgets and increase revenues, attention will now turn to whether they will be forced to join Latvia and abandon flat-rate tax.

We say to flat taxes: roll 'em back, and good riddance.

It’s good to see my own case on this issue exonerated.

And what is also abundantly clear is this: all those wild claims about the Laffer curve were wrong.

Reproduced with permission from the Tax Justice Network blog with minor changes.


Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:

You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.

And if you would like to support this blog you can, here: