Excerpt
Excerpt
Revisiting the Classical View of Benefit-Based Taxation. Matthew C. Weinzierl, March 13, 2014, Paper. "This paper explores how the persistently popular "classical" logic of benefit-based taxation, in which an individual's benefit from public goods is tied to his or her income-earning ability, can be incorporated into modern optimal tax theory. If Lindahl's methods are applied to that view of benefits, first-best optimal policy can be characterized analytically as depending on a few potentially estimable statistics, in particular the coefficient of complementarity between public goods and innate talent..."