Tax Salience: How Requiring Transparency Affects the Price of Equality
Less-salient taxes can ease the classic equality-efficiency trade-off by making people respond less to taxation. But deliberately obscuring taxes may be viewed as dishonest. This creates a three-way trade-off between equality, efficiency, and honesty. We analyze this trade-off in a simple setting with a linear income tax. We define and characterize the morally efficient frontier, trading off utilitarian welfare against honesty or transparency. Complete honesty is Pareto inefficient but not morally inefficient. More generally, any increase in honesty reduces utilitarian welfare. When utilitarian welfare is decomposed into equality and efficiency, the cost of honesty falls most robustly on equality: higher salience always reduces equality, while the effect on efficiency is ambiguous. This asymmetry is explained by the fact that salience increases the price of equality, which is the efficiency cost of a marginal increase in equality. Our approach could be applied to other settings in which utilitarian and procedural or deontological values conflict.