Wise taxation
Media
Part of Panorama
- Title
- Wise taxation
- Language
- English
- Year
- 1939
- Subject
- Taxation
- Rights
-
- Fulltext
- ^Suggested tax reform— WISE TAXATION HISTORY bears no record of any people who did not become ex pert tax dodgers when the shoe pinched. Taxation destroyed the later Roman Empire. The American Revolution began with a sales tax. Small wonder that from time to time in the long course of history statesmen have arisen to call a halt to the theory that people exist for the tax collector. Some two thousand years ago the Hindu Manu observed that taxes * ‘should press lightly on the people. There should be a graduated and flexible scale of taxation. Taxes must be levied in kind so that the state gets a good share when the people are prosperous, and its taxes do not press so heavily when there is a depression." Centuries earlier than the Manu's words of wisdom, a certain wise Jewish gentleman named Joseph became prime minister of Egypt and reorgan ized the Pharaoh's tax system. His policy was to save in the fat years against the coming lean years and to collect a def inite share of the crops and in dustrial production and a def inite period of public work from laborers for the benefit of the community. His system worked so well that the wealth of Egypt came to be one of the wonders of the world. Those principles are as ap plicable today as they ever were. The Mormons took up the old idea of the tithe—the tax in kind—and applied it to mod ern agriculture and industry. As a result, they made the Utah desert blossom like the rose. What farmer in America would be affronted if you of fered to take a fifth or even a third of all he produces instead of rent, mortgage dues, and taxes? What worker would object if he could escape all of his in direct taxes by one day's un paid work a month? What in dustry would object to turning over a tenth of its output in the place of all its present heavy taxes? What salaried man but would feel vastly relieved if one tenth or one twelfth of his income were deducted at the pay roll, leaving him otherwise tax-free? How could all this be done in modern America? One way has been suggested by what is called the Social Credit idea. This suggestion may not be en tirely practical. Yet we must eventually come to some system 2 Panorama as painless as this one is in theory if we are to escape either being bled white or developing into expert tax dodgers. We have let ourselves become hypnotized by the money an gle of taxation. We still think the way to reform is by still higher taxes and by punishing the people with big incomes at the same time we make it nec essary for them to earn those incomes in order to pay the taxes we have levied on them. The time to take a slice of their 1939 incomes is in 1939, not 1940. Otherwise we simply push them on to get richer still, as in fact they have been doing. There are people today who, with these considerations in mind, are advocating a type of taxation which, they contend, has worked well whenever it has been tried. They are for collecting from people the goods and services that people produce, instead of the money that our banks use as a means of ex changing goods and services. They warn that, unless something of this sort is done, against his will the taxpayer will be forced to take part in the growing tax strike—Jay Frank lin, condensed from Liberty. February, 1939 3