Friday, April 11, 2014

The Philosophy of Taxation, and Implementing the Single Tax in the United States

Although all taxes discourage the behavior which is taxed, taxation is not intrinsically bad. Certain taxation proposals are harmful only when they effectively discourage behaviors which are good and necessary for people to survive and thrive. The solution is simply to tax only behaviors which you intend to discourage; offering a tax incentive not to commit crimes and defraud people.

Therefore the least harmful tax is the Single Tax on the undeveloped value of land, as opposed to improvements to land, which includes earnings / income, sales / trade / consumption, and savings (behaviors necessary for people to survive and thrive).

Conservatives and Republicans tend to support sales taxation as a complement to land taxes, while liberals and Democrats tend to support individual income taxation to complement land taxes. The first steps towards implementing the Single Tax involve eliminating the general sales tax (as mostly liberal states Oregon, Montana, New Hampshire, and Delaware have done) and eliminating the general individual income tax (as more or less conservative states Washington, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, and Florida have done).

New Hampshire has fully eliminated the general sales tax, but not the individual income tax. However, its state and local governments combined have some of the lowest percentage of revenues from individual income taxes in the country. Considering that the state's total revenues from landed property taxation is now around 60%, this means that states could feasibly double or even triple their total percentage of revenues from land taxation in order to make unnecessary general taxes on sales and income.

From there, the only major task in the way of enacting the Single Tax is deciding whether, when, how, and in what order government should next seek to abolish - and make unconstitutional - the remaining types of taxes (which include selective sales and luxury taxes, and corporate income and capital gains taxes).

For more entries on land, land reform, and land taxation, please visit:

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1 comment:

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