Tax Policy: Past, Present, and Future by Richard M. Bird (1995).
“This article provides a personal overview of some of the major developments, theoretical and practical, in tax policy over the last few decades. It also offers some speculations about future directions in tax policy.
The first section of the article sets the stage with a brief account of the two major tax reform episodes in Canada. The first followed the Carter report of 1966 and culminated in the new income tax act of 1971, and the second occurred in the late 1980s and culminated in the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST) in 1991.
Against this background, the second section compares the conventional academic wisdom of 40 years ago with the very different wisdom about tax policy that the economic academy is dispensing today. Although the connection between what economists say and what policy makers do is tenuous, this brief tale may interest those who wonder why economists say some of the things they say, and why the things they say now are often very different from the things they said some years ago…”
The last section offers a few speculations about the extent to which the future of tax policy will look like, or differ from, its past. Tax theory may follow tax practice, or it may precede it, but as a rule both theory and practice reflect developments in the real world in which ideas are formulated and taxes are collected. The discussion singles out two such developments—globablization and computerization…”
