Small revenue and distribution effects – Overall, slight tax revenue losses due to a period of low interest rates – Raising the final withholding tax rate to over 25 percent would result in moderate additional revenue Abolishing the final flat-rate 25 percent withholding tax on unearned income makes sense neither from a fiscal nor a distribution point of view as long as interest rates ...
Mr. Bach, to what extent could cutting the value-added tax rate relieve low- and middle-income earners? If you want to provide significant fiscal relief to lower and middle income groups, you should focus more on the valueadded tax and less on the income tax. The value-added tax puts the burden on consumption, and consumer spending accounts for a much higher proportion of lower incomes than higher ...
Completely eliminating the sharp rise in the tax rate for middle income households in Germany by changing personal income tax rates would mean estimated annual losses in tax revenue of 35 billion euros, or 1.1 percent of GDP. Taxpayers with high incomes would also benefit from this type of relief. The ten percent of the population with the highest income would have a relief of around 10.4 billion euros—over ...
Mr. Bach, there is growing criticism that the middle income segments are suffering from a tax and social contribution burden that is too heavy. Does the middle class pay a disproportionately high amount of income tax? Actually, the middle class has a relatively low income tax burden. This is because we use the basic personal exemption to shield the subsistence level from taxation, and a range of deductions ...
This paper utilises the discontinuities induced by earnings caps for social security contributions (SSC) in Germany to analyse the effect of SSC on gross labour earnings. Economic incidence is identified by exploiting an increase of a regional earnings cap of health and long-term care insurance as a natural experiment. Based on administrative data, difference-in-differences models are estimated. I ...
This paper provides evidence on the question of who bears the burden of social security contributions (SSC) in Germany over a long-term horizon. Following Alvaredo et al. (De Econ, 2017) we exploit kinks in the budget set generated by a drop in the marginal SSC rate at earnings caps for health and long-term care insurance. These concave kinks lead to discontinuities in the distributions of gross earnings, ...
This paper documents methodology underlying the construction of the integrated data base for our study on “Wer trägt die Steuerlast in Deutschland? - Verteilungswirkungen des deutschen Steuer- und Transfersystems” (Who bears the tax burden in Germany? – Distributional Analyses of the German tax and transfer system). Financial support from the Hans Böckler Stiftung for the project is gratefully acknowledged. ...
If the desire is to provide tax relief to households with lower and middle incomes in Germany, it is necessary to target the valueadded tax rather than the personal income tax. Lowering the standard value-added tax rate by one percentage point (from 19 to 18 percent) would mean relief worth 11 billion euro for consumers. The reduced value-added tax rate of seven percent should only be cut for food ...