美國最強稅收？美擬向富人征70％稅，專家稱窮人或將更苦

U.S. Economy: Ocasio-Cortez』s 70% Tax Idea Isn』t Very Radical

美國經濟: 奧卡西奧-科特茲70%的稅收方案並不激進

素材來源：彭博社 翻譯：世界播

The other day, freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines (yet again) with a bold proposal — a 70 percent marginal tax rate on income of more than $10 million a year. This tax, Ocasio-Cortez declared, would fund her so-called Green New Deal, a still-developing plan to eliminate fossil-fuel energy by 2030 and lower inequality.

幾天前，國會新議員亞歷山大?奧卡西奧-科特茲提出了一項大膽的建議，即對年收入超過1000萬美元的人徵收70%的邊際稅率。奧卡西奧-科特茲宣稱，這項稅收將為她所謂的「綠色新政」提供資金。「綠色新政」是一項仍在制定中的計劃，旨在到2030年消除化石燃料能源，減少不平等。

「Call me a radical,」 she declared. Let"s hope she was being tongue-in-cheek, because the plan isn』t really that radical. The top marginal tax rate was 73 percent in 1920, more than 90 percent during the 1950s, and 69 percent in 1981:

她宣稱:「叫我激進分子吧」。我們希望她是在開玩笑，因為這個計劃並沒有那麼激進。1920年的最高邊際稅率為73%，20世紀50年代為90%以上，1981年為69%:

Back to the "80s?

回到80年代?

Ocasio-Cortez』s plan would thus be a return to the 20th century norm — in fact, not even that, because the cutoffs for those very high tax brackets were often much lower than $10 million, even after adjusting for inflation.

因此，奧卡西奧-科特茲的計劃將回歸到20世紀的標準——事實上，甚至不是這樣，因為即使為通貨膨脹因素進行了調整，那些非常高的稅級的上限通常也遠低於1000萬美元。

Conservatives and anti-tax activists, naturally, were quick to condemn her idea. But as Paul Krugman pointed out, the plan would be unlikely to cause much damage to the economy.

當然，保守派和反稅收活動人士很快就譴責了她的想法。但正如保羅?克魯格曼所指出的那樣，該計劃不太可能對經濟造成太大損害。

Theoretically, high taxes can make people work less — if a well-to-do person takes home only $5,000 an hour instead of $7,000, he might cut back on the number of hours he works. But in real life the effect is probably very small. First of all, this cohort tends to have full-time salaried jobs. They don』t get paid by the hour — their reward for an extra hour of work is advancement for themselves or the entities for which they work. Higher taxes are unlikely to reduce those incentives much. And they』re also unlikely to discourage people from wanting to be leaders in the first place.

從理論上講，高稅收可能會減少人們的工作——如果一個富人每小時只拿回家5000美元，而不是7000美元，他可能會減少工作時間。但在現實生活中，這種影響可能很小。首先，這一群體往往有全職的帶薪工作。他們不按小時計酬——他們額外工作一小時的報酬是為自己或為其工作的單位創收的利益。提高稅收不太可能大幅降低這些激勵。它們也不太可能從一開始就阻止人們成為領導者。

Economics research bears this out. Income taxes in general discourage people from working only a little bit. For the well-off, the effect is probably even less substantial. Economists Christina Romer and David Romer looked at top tax rates during the 1920s and 1930s, and found that although the big changes in top tax rates did lower pretax income for high-earners a bit, the effect was quite small. For this reason, economists Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez (the former of whom is a Nobel laureate) calculate that in order to maximize social welfare, the optimal top tax rate for incomes higher than $300,000 — a much lower cutoff than the one proposed by Ocasio-Cortez — should be about 73 percent. That calculation relies on the idea that an additional dollar of income is more meaningful for the poor than for the well-to-do.

經濟學研究證實了這一點。一般情況下，所得稅只會使人們減少一點工作的積極性。對於富裕的人來說，其影響可能就更小了。經濟學家克里斯蒂娜?羅默和大衛?羅默研究了20世紀20年代和30年代的最高稅率，發現儘管最高稅率的大幅變化確實降低了高收入者的稅前收入，但影響相當小。出於這個原因，經濟學家彼得?戴蒙德和艾曼紐爾?賽茲 (前者是諾貝爾獎得主)計算出，為了最大限度地提高社會福利，高於30萬美元的收入的最佳最高稅率-遠低於奧卡西奧-科特茲提議的稅率-應該是73%左右。這一計算所依據的理念是，增加一美元的收入對窮人比對富人更有意義。

So Ocasio-Cortez』s tax plan isn』t radical at all, and almost certainly won』t damage the economy in any significant way. But those who expect the plan to yield a bounty of tax revenue for a Green New Deal or other major spending programs are likely to be disappointed, because the proposed tax hike by itself wouldn』t raise much revenue.

因此，奧卡西奧-科特茲的稅收計劃根本不激進，幾乎可以肯定不會對經濟造成任何重大損害。但那些希望該計劃將為綠色新政或其他重大支出計劃帶來大量稅收收入的人可能會失望，因為擬議中的增稅本身不會帶來多少收入。

If you simply calculate the amount of money the tax would raise if the wealthy paid all of the tax, it would yield roughly $72 billion a year. That would increase federal tax revenue by about 3.6 percent — more than nothing, but not a huge amount either. It would certainly not be nearly enough to pay for Ocasio-Cortez』s Green New Deal, which could easily cost more than 13 times that amount. Wealthy people have eye-popping incomes, but there really aren』t that many of them.

如果你簡單地計算一下，如果富人繳納了全部稅款，稅收將會增加多少，那麼每年將會產生大約720億美元的收益。這將使聯邦稅收增加大約3.6%，雖然比什麼增加都沒有強多了，但也不是一個很大的數字。當然，這還不足以支付奧卡西奧-科特茲的「綠色新政」政策，這筆交易的成本很容易成為前者的13倍以上。富人的收入令人瞠目結舌，但實際上這些稅收對他們而言只是九牛一毛。

The actual amount of revenue raised would almost certainly be much smaller. This is because the well-off have many ways to avoid paying income taxes, using loopholes that we should think about closing up. Many of these loopholes involve changing ordinary income to capital gains, which are taxed at much lower rates, so raising the capital gains tax will be crucial.

幾乎可以肯定，實際籌集的收入要少得多。這是因為富人有很多方法可以避免繳納所得稅，比如利用漏洞，所以我們應該考慮堵塞這些漏洞。其中許多漏洞涉及將普通收入轉變為資本利得，而資本利得的稅率要低得多，因此提高資本利得稅將至關重要。

What』s more, history demonstrates how hard it is to raise tax revenue with high top-bracket tax rates. Even in the days of extremely high marginal tax rates on income brackets much broader than what Ocasio-Cortez proposed (as well as higher taxes on corporations and capital gains), the share of the nation』s income that went to federal taxes was about the same as it is now.

更重要的是，歷史證明，在高稅率的情況下提高稅收是多麼困難。即使在收入等級的邊際稅率比奧卡西奧-科特茲提議的要高得多的時期(以及對公司和資本利得徵收更高的稅)，國家收入中用於聯邦稅收的份額也和現在差不多。

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