Taxing Future Consumption

The Economic Council’s Road Map for Tax Reform laid the groundwork for a greater discussion of the consumption tax principle as a basis for taxation in Canada. In his paper, Jack M. Mintz continues this discussion by setting out the case for and against a consumption tax. He argues that the tax treatment of savings is likely to become a more central policy focus for the medium term. More practically, he cites three possible evolutionary changes that could lead to a greater reliance on consumption taxes: a sharp increase in sales tax revenues (sales and excise) to reduce reliance on income taxes; a major expansion of RRSP and pension limits to allow for greater accumulation of wealth to meet future contingencies of various sorts; and the introduction of an exempt-yield tax savings plan (with restrictions on contributed amounts) that would encourage saving by individuals expecting increases in future tax rates. More fundamentally, Mintz observes that the income tax could even be replaced with an expenditure tax system with continuing reliance on the other indirect forms of consumption taxation (sales taxes). Even though Mintz believes that the adoption of a consumption tax would certainly set Canada apart from other countries, including the United States, he holds that the technical issues, including implementation and transition issues, are not insurmountable if promoting future consumption is the key to Canada’s overall development.Consumption Tax, Expenditure Tax, Efficiency, Taxation, Consumption, Savings, Equity

Josh Mintz, Trumpet

Josh Mintz, Trumpet Accompanist name (Eric Jenkins) November 11th, 2023 4:30pm, Music Building 109https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/musicprograms/2715/thumbnail.jp

The Changing Structure of Tax Policies for Foreign Direct Investment in Developing Countries

Developing countries keen to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) have typically used various preferential tax policies to be competitive. Tax holidays have been especially prevalent in the 1980s (Mintz [1990] and Shah [1995]) since they provide new foreign investors a low-tax regime for a qualifying period on the presumption that a company needs time to establish good levels of profitability.Working Paper Number 04-46

Investigation of models for large-scale meteorological prediction experiments

Studies are reported of the long term responses of the model atmosphere to anomalies in snow cover and sea surface temperature. An abstract of a previously issued report on the computed response to surface anomalies in a global atmospheric model is presented, and the experiments on the effects of transient sea surface temperature on the Mintz-Arakawa atmospheric model are reported

Lusotopy as Ecumene

In order to avoid the sociocentric proclivity to identify language with culture and nation, thus echoing the language of empire, this paper follows the suggestions of Kroeber, Hannerz, and Mintz in taking recourse to the concept of ecumene. It aims to show that the concept can be applied profitably to the spaces and moments that integrate the vastly differentiated worldwide network of relations resulting from the historical expansion of the Portuguese. To that extent, Lusotopy is a space of human cohabitation structured by amity

Stephanie Aleong: A Brief Recollection and Tribute

Joel Mintz, Stephanie Aleong: A Brief Recollection and Tribute, 34 Nova Law Review 587 (2010)

USA v. Mintz

United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvani

Family-Personalized Dietary Planning with Temporal Dynamics

Poor diet and nutrition in the United States has immense financial and health costs, and development of new tools for diet planning could help families better balance their financial and temporal constraints with the quality of their diet and meals. This paper formulates a novel model for dietary planning that incorporates two types of temporal constraints (i.e., dynamics on the perishability of raw ingredients over time, and constraints on the time required to prepare meals) by explicitly incorporating the relationship between raw ingredients and selected food recipes. Our formulation is a diet planning model with integer-valued decision variables, and so we study the problem of designing approximation algorithms (i.e, algorithms with polynomial-time computation and guarantees on the quality of the computed solution) for our dietary model. We develop a deterministic approximation algorithm that is based on a deterministic variant of randomized rounding, and then evaluate our deterministic approximation algorithm with numerical experiments of dietary planning using a database of about 2000 food recipes and 150 raw ingredients

Design Features for the Social Web: The Architecture of Deme

We characterize the "social Web" and argue for several features that are desirable for users of socially oriented web applications. We describe the architecture of Deme, a web content management system (WCMS) and extensible framework, and show how it implements these desired features. We then compare Deme on our desiderata with other web technologies: traditional HTML, previous open source WCMSs (illustrated by Drupal), commercial Web 2.0 applications, and open-source, object-oriented web application frameworks. The analysis suggests that a WCMS can be well suited to building social websites if it makes more of the features of object-oriented programming, such as polymorphism, and class inheritance, available to non-programmers in an accessible vocabulary.Comment: Appeared in Luis Olsina, Oscar Pastor, Daniel Schwabe, Gustavo Rossi, and Marco Winckler (Editors), Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Web-Oriented Software Technologies (IWWOST 2009), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Volume 493, August 2009, pp. 40-51; 12 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl

Taxes, Efficiency and Economic Growth

In the third paper on taxation, Jack M. Mintz and Thomas A. Wilson consider the best way to allocate the “fiscal dividend”. This is the amount available to the government that can be used for tax cuts or expenditure increases within the framework of a balanced budget. In their view, although the current growth recession will reduce the potential surplus somewhat, the medium-term outlook is still for increasing surpluses. Concerned about lagging economic growth and emphasizing the importance of efficiency and productivity growth, they argue that priority should be given to debt reduction and tax cuts designed to stimulate investment and potential growth. Mintz and Wilson make the case that a large part of the remaining fiscal dividend should be allocated towards reducing the relatively large personal income tax burden faced by many Canadian families and individuals. But they also stress that it is important to steadily reduce payroll and business taxes as well. This case is supported by extensive international comparisons of taxes in Canada with other countries that show that the burden of taxation is higher in Canada than in many other industrialized countries. It is also bolstered by the results of simulations, using the FOCUS macroeconometric model, of a fiscal package containing significant debt reduction, modest spending increases and cuts in personal, business and payroll taxes. These simulations show such a fiscal package should have favourable supply-side effects on output, employment and productivity over the medium term. In addition, since their analysis reveals that there are still important issues of tax structure that need to be addressed, they recommend that the government establish a task force to review personal income taxes and to consider the need for additional tax cuts. Finally, Mintz and Wilson also remind us that while planned debt reduction is an important component of a growth-oriented fiscal policy, in the short run the size of the surplus should be allowed to vary with the level of economic activity. Otherwise fiscal policy will exacerbate the slowdown that is currently underway.FOCUS, Taxation, Simulation, Forecast, Efficiency, Growth, Debt Reduction