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The Hall–Rabushka flat tax is a fully developed flat tax on consumption designed by American economists Robert Halland Alvin Rabushka at the Hoover Institution. Loosely speaking, Hall–Rabushka accomplishes this by taxing incomeand then excluding investment. An individual could file a Hall–Rabushka tax return on a postcard. The Hall–Rabushka flat tax may include an exemption, which allows the tax to preserve progressivity.
In the United States, extensive tax reform has not taken place since the Tax Reform Act of 1986, and like other tax reform, the flat tax has not advanced far in the U.S. political process. However, Eastern Europe has enthusiastically embraced the flat tax after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Hall and Rubushka have consulted extensively in designing these flat taxes.

"Hall and Rabushka present a remarkably lucid and persuasive analysis of what is wrong with our present tax system and offer a radical, yet thoroughly practicable alternative. Substitution of their simple flat-rate tax for our present incredibly complicated tax system would be a major step forward toward revitalizing the U. S. economy."
—Milton Friedman, Noble laureate in economics


"Published in 1985 and being revised, it remains the flat-tax bible."
—Forbes magazine


"Hall and Rabushka clearly explain issues like the double tax on saving, the negative effects on high marginal tax rates, and the distributional consequences of the current labyrinth of deductions and exemptions. The Hall-Rabushka proposal is a good one and this book explains it in clear simple terms. Anyone interested in the issue of tax reform will surely find The Flat Tax to be worthwhile reading."
—Wall Street Review of Books

Robert E. Hall

Robert Ernest "Bob" Hall (13 August 1943, Palo Alto, California) is an American economist and a Robert and Carole McNeil Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is generally considered a macroeconomist, but he describes himself as an "applied economist".
Bob Hall received a BA in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in Economics from MIT for thesis titled Essays on the Theory of Wealth under the supervision of Robert Solow. He is a member of the Hoover Institution, the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow at both American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and a member of the NBER, where he is the program director of the business cycle dating committee. Hall served as President of the American Economic Association in 2010.

Hall has a broad range of interest, including technology, competition, employment, policy and the such.

Hall is perhaps most famous for co-originating the flat tax with Alvin Rabushka. They co-authored a book with the same name. Hall and Rabuska often act as advisors to countries in Eastern Europe that wish to adopt the flat tax.

In 1978, Hall changed the direction of research on consumption by showing that under rational expectations, consumption should be a martingale. Prior to this time, influenced by Milton Friedman's permanent income hypothesis under adaptive expectations, economists had expected past income to affect current consumption by altering individuals' expectations about their permanent income. Instead, Hall's theory pointed to a relation between current consumption and expected future income, which implied that consumption should only change when there is surprising news about income. This, in turn, implies that changes in consumption should be unpredictable (which is called the 'martingale' property in statistics). Hall surprised the macroeconomic profession by providing evidence that consumption was, in fact, unpredictable. Subsequent evidence has shown that consumption is more predictable than he claimed, but ever since Hall's paper most empirical research on consumption has taken the martingale case as the baseline and focused on what mechanisms could cause deviations from martingale consumption.

In describing if marginal cost is procyclical, Hall argued that the key is knowing the productivity shocks in real business cycle theory are actually the result of monopoly power. Because monopolies can sell where their price exceeds marginal cost, they tend to have excess capacity. Thus, as demand increases, the excess capacity shrinks and marginal cost approaches price and in that way it is procyclical. This idea captures the distinction between real productivity and productivity growth; while there is greater productivity (less is being wasted), workers aren't becoming more productive.

To explain sticky wages, Hall emphasizes the importance of costs born by the employer. Firms benefit when times are good but are penalized when times are slim (because wages are usually fixed) and they pay for searching for a good employee/employer match. Thus, employers are more risk averse in hiring and have less incentive to engage in search. Hence employers simply do not hire in downtimes. This idea is reinforced because workers cannot collectively signal that they would work for less in downtimes, wages have a tendency to stick upwards.

Личен сайт: http://www.stanford.edu/~rehall/

Alvin Rabushka

Alvin Rabushka (born May 15, 1940) is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He is the author or coauthor of numerous books in the areas of race and ethnicity, aging, taxation, state and local government finances, and economic development. His books include Politics in Plural Societies (originally published in 1972 and reissued in 2008 with a foreword and epilogue); A Theory of Racial Harmony; The Urban Elderly Poor; Old Folks at Home; The Tax Revolt; The Flat Tax; From Adam Smith to the Wealth of America; Hong Kong: A Study in Economic Freedom; and the New China. Rabushka’s most recent publication is Taxation in Colonial America, which received Special Recognition as a 2009 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award.

He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and in national newspapers. He has consulted for, and testified before, a number of congressional committees. In 1980, he served on President Ronald Reagan's Tax Policy Task Force.

Rabushka's books and articles on the flat tax (with Robert E. Hall) provided the intellectual foundation for numerous flat tax bills that were introduced in Congress during the 1980s and 1990s and the proposals of several presidential candidates in 1996 and 2000. He was recognized in Money magazine's twentieth-anniversary issue "Money Hall of Fame" for the importance of his flat tax proposal in bringing about passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986. His pioneering work on the flat tax contributed to the adoption of the flat tax in Jamaica, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Mongolia, Mauritius, Montenegro, Macedonia, Albania, Kygyzstan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Trinidad and Tobago, Pridnestrovie (Transdniestra), several Swiss Cantons, and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He has also drafted flat tax plans for Austria, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Canada, and Slovenia.

Rabushka received his AB in Far Eastern studies from Washington University (St. Louis) in 1962, followed by his MA and PhD degrees in political science from Washington University in 1966 and 1968. In 2007, he was honored as a distinguished alumnus of the School of Arts and Sciences at Washington University.

Личен сайт: http://www.stanford.edu/~rabushka/