Exam 20: Public Finance: Expenditures and Taxes

The fact that high-income earners tend to earn a higher percentage of their incomes from rent and dividends, in contrast to low-income earners, makes the payroll taxes

Which of the following taxes is most likely to be shifted?

Transfer payments are "exhaustive" in that they directly absorb resources, whereas government purchases are "nonexhaustive."

Which of the following statements about specific excise taxes is true?

When Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated, "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization," he meant that

A tax is regressive if it

The efficiency loss of a tax is

The ability-to-pay principle of taxation

A progressive tax takes relatively more from the rich than it does from the poor.

Public finance is the subdiscipline of economics that studies the various ways in which

Which is the most important source of tax revenue for local governments?

With respect to state finance, for most states

When the government is doing "deficit spending," it will be increasing its total debt.

The U.S. tax-transfer system (as distinct from the tax system alone) is

Tax incidence may be defined as the

The efficiency loss of a tax is the tax revenue collected by government minus the value of the public goods financed through the tax.

If the taxes by state and local governments were combined with the federal tax system, the overall tax structure in the U.S. would best be characterized as

Which of the following taxes is least likely to be shifted?

As a proportion of domestic output, taxes in the United States

Excise taxes of the federal government include the following items, except a(n)