Isolation effects and the neglect of indirect effects of fiscal policies

People tend to focus on salient cues, ignoring others. We demonstrate such isolation effects in situations involving taxes and public finance, through experiments conducted on the World Wide Web. In general, subjects minimized or ignored the longer‐term or indirect effects of tax policies, such as price increases from business taxes. Subjects preferred “hidden” taxes to transparent ones, failing to think through who would ultimately pay. The preference for hidden taxes was greater when it was uncertain who would pay. When subjects were prompted to think about indirect effects, their preference for hidden taxes was reduced but not eliminated. These observations are symptoms of general tendencies not to think ahead about the effects of public policies. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Justice,Wealth, Taxes

A story of rabbinic poverty relief serves as the fulcrum of this presentation of a rabbinic perspective on wealth and taxes. The rabbinic move, from biblical to Mishnaic law, places the obligation of poverty relief on the city and suggests that the institutions of the polis are the only way to achieve justice on this scale. However, the city must be aware of the individual Other in making policy. In essence the story suggests that when policies ignore the face of an individual stranger, they do not fulfill the demands of justice. This is the rabbinic attempt at threading the needle by walking in the tension between the obsessive asymmetry of the obligation towards the other person and the need for a larger more equitable system of justice which must (by definition) include others.     

管仲财税思想的现代观点分析

管仲的财税思想在治国方略、财政收入政策、财政支出政策上的应用,既保证了充足的财政收入,又深得民心,为齐桓公称霸中原打下了良好的经济基础,对于今天中国财税政策的制定和实施,也有很重要的现实意义。