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The Sufficiency of Single Tax Revenue:
Author(s) -
Buurman Gary B.
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
american journal of economics and sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.199
H-Index - 38
eISSN - 1536-7150
pISSN - 0002-9246
DOI - 10.1111/j.1536-7150.1990.tb02477.x
Subject(s) - george (robot) , counterfactual thinking , revenue , economics , public economics , tax revenue , government (linguistics) , indirect tax , tax reform , microeconomics , finance , computer science , philosophy , linguistics , epistemology , artificial intelligence
A bstract . Statements claiming that the single tax would raise insufficient revenue to support modern governments have been damaging to Henry George's proposal to tax the rent of land. It is argued that these claims are a misleading way of assessing George's proposal. Firstly, it is shown that estimates of rent usually understate the revenue that would have been raised under the single tax. Secondly, the idea of a counterfactual proposition is used to show that government expenditure would have been lower subsequently had George's proposal been adopted. The conclusion is that there are generally errors of omission in estimating the sufficiency of single tax revenue.