Taxing Investment

"In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was an economist at the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation, my boss and tax policy mentor, the late Norman Ture, had a favorite saying: “People aren’t taxed. Activities are.” It is this proposition, that taxation of any kind always has the effect of penalizing some activities relative to others, that lies at the heart of the economic analysis of taxation."