Josh Barro, Columnist

Five Taxes We Should Raise. Really.

September 28, 2012 at 8:30 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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Some taxes work better than others. Good taxes do little damage to the economy and are difficult for taxpayers to avoid by changing their behavior. And if you look at America's long-term budget projections, we're going to need more taxes in the future, so we should be extra sure that we're choosing good ones.

This morning, I wrote that estate taxes and capital gains taxes are both inherently troubled: They encourage taxpayers to jump through hoops to avoid taxable transfers. But if we can't rely on these sorts of taxes, which ones should we rely on?