Abstract

The Interpersonal and the Structural Adjustment of Tax Burden

Fiscal theorists take it for granted that all citizens of a country should bear an equal share of the tax burden. Yet this maxim, based on traditional individualistic reasoning, has been generally understood in a narrow interpersonal sense. This applies also to the versions of the sacrifice principle whose advocates have, in addition, embarked on perennial analytical disputes. Their deficiencies also persist if combined with the rules of welfare economics. All those authors ignore the more general problem of tax distribution: how to adjust its scheme from a structural point of view, that means, how to harmonize tax distribution with the changing goals of economic and social policy by differentiating the burden between the social and economic groups. From this broader structural point of view, the traditional maxim applies only to tax distribution within each group