I don't think you could test taxation, for a number of reasons.
First, you don't have time to measure the effects of funding changes. How do people behave with the new services funded by the taxes, when you aren't collecting enough to provide them anyway? Does the government go bankrupt? No, because revenue was not changed significantly due to the small size of the test.
Second, sample populations are unlikely to exhibit the same behavioral traits of large-scale populations. For example, if you applied a tax increase to a limited segment of the population the first behavior change you would see is that people would try to escape the test group.
For something like a sales tax this is even more obvious. The overall rate of taxation matters much less than the rate relative to a competitor. It's a free competitive advantage and of course behavior will change-- the untaxed businesses will be more likely to thrive and grow while driving their competitors bankrupt. When everyone has the same tax rate they have to find real market advantages.
The whole point of taxes is that they are applied universally as much as possible. Everyone contributes a little bit so that the society can have things that benefit everyone but the market is unlikely to ever provide. NPR just discussed autopsies as an example of this. Understanding why people die is good for the public, yet only the most altruistic individuals are inclined to pay for an autopsy of their own loved ones.
While I suppose it is possible to design test runs of tax laws, I doubt it will ever be as simple as picking a "representative sample of 10,000." There are probably only certain kinds of laws that can be tested, and tax laws probably aren't among them.
First, you don't have time to measure the effects of funding changes. How do people behave with the new services funded by the taxes, when you aren't collecting enough to provide them anyway? Does the government go bankrupt? No, because revenue was not changed significantly due to the small size of the test.
Second, sample populations are unlikely to exhibit the same behavioral traits of large-scale populations. For example, if you applied a tax increase to a limited segment of the population the first behavior change you would see is that people would try to escape the test group.
For something like a sales tax this is even more obvious. The overall rate of taxation matters much less than the rate relative to a competitor. It's a free competitive advantage and of course behavior will change-- the untaxed businesses will be more likely to thrive and grow while driving their competitors bankrupt. When everyone has the same tax rate they have to find real market advantages.
The whole point of taxes is that they are applied universally as much as possible. Everyone contributes a little bit so that the society can have things that benefit everyone but the market is unlikely to ever provide. NPR just discussed autopsies as an example of this. Understanding why people die is good for the public, yet only the most altruistic individuals are inclined to pay for an autopsy of their own loved ones.
While I suppose it is possible to design test runs of tax laws, I doubt it will ever be as simple as picking a "representative sample of 10,000." There are probably only certain kinds of laws that can be tested, and tax laws probably aren't among them.