I have no reason to diverge from the general view on this, namely that income taxes are borne by land, labor, and capital, depending on the income being taxed. Payroll taxes are borne by the worker; sales taxes by consumers, etc. On the property tax, I lean more to it being paid by capital, rather than renters (the popular left or liberal view).
As the article I sent to you indicates, the one blooper I think the profession has committed is on the incidence of a general consumption tax, which we don't have in the U.S.
> (On this question, it is my more than humble opinion that in the long run,
> the corporate income tax is shifted to consumers and/or workers. The
You could be right, though there isn't much evidence of it. I don't know that anybody has tried hard to find any evidence. Musgrave was the great exception, believing it to be borne by consumers.
More recently, Harberger links the increased mobility of capital to an incidence on labor. This points to a kind of left-right coalescence: the right says you can't tax capital because it can always run away; some lefts concur, present company excepted, perhaps to fortify a hopelessness in sub-apocalyptic politics.
> exception is where profits are on scarcity rents received on raw material
> extraction. But in that case, there are lots of tax breaks, so again the
> corpos don't pay the tax. I think the left's obsession with the corp.
> profits tax is just that, an obsession.)
Whatever the breaks may be, there was enough tax base left to yield over $200 billion this past year, or between 1/4 and 1/3rd (don't have my stats with me) of what the personal income tax yields.
Incidently, if you're right the waning of the corporate tax since the 1950's is not necessarily bad news for overall tax incidence.
You are on more solid ground with the state corporate income tax, since for multi-state firms the firm's taxable income is usually defined by means of a formula based on the firm's payroll, sales, and property. (Since such a firm's profits are not well-defined for a given state in which it operates.)
> Another question: if we're going to talk about tax incidence, we have to
> bring in the role of the state and local governments. Since the relative
> role of those gov'ts has increased, so has the relative role of their
> (relatively) regressive taxes. I don't have data, but there's a good case
> that this has contributed to increasing regressivity of the overall tax
> system.
The state-local sector's tax take has increased since 1980, but by about one percent of GDP. The Fed share currently is at the top of its historic range. The actual extent of the shift from Federal to state, thus far, has been overplayed.
State tax systems are more regressive, but one component of the increase noted in the previous graph is increased use of income taxes. The other is more user fees (probably regressive).
Cheers,
Max