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Wealth and Want | |||||||
... because democracy alone is not enough to produce widely shared prosperity. | |||||||
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Stability
Bill Batt: Painless Taxation
Bill Batt: How Our Towns Got That Way (1996 speech)
Stability refers to the ability of a tax to
produce revenue in the face of changing economic
circumstances. Income and sales taxes, for example, vary
greatly according to phases in the economic cycle; the
property tax, in contrast, is highly stable regardless of
the state of the economy. Followers of economist John
Maynard Keynes believe that revenues should be inverse to
the cycles of the economy; i.e., that the government
should be used to stabilize or boost the economy as
occasions require. I should add as an aside that
there are some theorists who believe
that, were revenue sources completely based on land
value, economic cycles would disappear.
In assessing the value of a tax it is
also important, of course, to understand its potential to
bring in revenue for the purposes of government. This is
usually deemed revenue sufficiency. Income, sales and
property taxes, along with corporation taxes to a lesser
extent, have come to be regarded as the workhorses of the
American revenue structure. But, as anti-tax politicians
are quick to note, the higher these taxes are, the more
they impose a drag on the economy. This is why one should
ponder whether to consider raising taxes which have
demonstrable distorting effects. In contrast, if you take
the time to look at a tax on land value alone, it measures
up so well that it looks like the perfect tax!... read the whole
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