How well does the flat tax work?

The debate about introducing a flat tax regularly flares up, but rarely is it based on a serious case study. The problem is that this debate is overly politicized and camps are formed on ideological lines, not an actual evaluation of the flat tax. Yet, there is data out there, as a flat tax has been introduced in Russia in 2001 and subsequently in six other Eastern European countries. The flat

Public pensions vs. public investment

While being civil servant does not pay much in current wages (usually), it typically pays off handsomely in other benefits: stabily of job and pay, health care benefits and especially retirement benefits. This can be viewed as a long-term contract, where the state gives less now for the the peace of mind and future incomes. Few private firms offer this kind of benefit, one likely reason is that

Patriotism and tax compliance

Nobody likes paying taxes, especially when one disagrees what is done with them. But one can suspect that the more one identifies with the taxing state, the less one would want to evade taxes. While this hypothesis makes intuitively sense, the real question is whether this effect is economically relevant.Kai A Konrad and Salmai Qari test this using data on the size of shadow economies and a