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Obama to Venture Capitalists: Drop Dead!
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The costs associated with taxation extend far beyond the amount of tax collected. First, there are significant incentive-based costs, which are generally referred to as efficiency costs. These costs emerge because taxes alter relative prices and thus the incentives for productive behavior and affect a wide range of decisions regarding savings, investment, effort, and entrepreneurship. These costs vary widely by the type of tax.

One main method for quantifying these costs is referred to as the marginal efficiency cost (MEC). It calculates the cost of raising one additional dollar of tax revenue using different types of taxes. Estimates of the marginal efficiency costs of both American and Canadian taxes indicate that consumption and payroll (wage and salary) taxes are much less costly (and thus more efficient) than taxes on capital or the return to capital. For example, a study by the Department of Finance for the OECD (1997) concluded that corporate income taxes imposed a marginal cost of $1.55 (MEC) for one additional dollar of revenue compared to $0.17 for an additional dollar of revenue raised through consumption taxes.

Similarly, one of the most widely cited calculations of marginal efficiency costs (MEC) is that by Harvard Professor Dale Jorgensen and his colleague Kun-Young Yun (1991). Their estimates of the MEC of select US taxes indicate significant variation in the economic costs of different taxes and support the Canadian findings. Specifically, capital-based taxes (MEC = $0.92) and corporate income taxes (MEC = $0.84) were shown to impose much higher costs than other, more efficient types of taxes such as the sales tax (MEC = $0.26)....