Toward Simplicity in the Teaching of Commodity Tax Shifting

Common teaching practice and test explanation, especially at the introductory course level, is to graphically show a commodity tax as only partially shifted forward to buyers in the form of higher price, with the non-shifted portion of the tax borne by the sellers.' The basic error in this presentation is omission of long-run adjustments that cause selling price to eventually increase by essentially the absolute amount of the tax.