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3. Chapter 3 Criteria for Tax Systems
3.1. The Committee's task raises a number of issues of broad principle which are reviewed in this and the next two chapters. The present chapter begins with an interpretation and amplification of the terms of reference. These are not only broad in scope, but so general in language that some interpretation is necessary to clarify discussion.
I. Terms of Reference and their Interpretation
3.2. Throughout and repeatedly in the terms of reference the phrase ‘taxation system’ is used. This way of regarding a collection of administratively distinct taxes is of fundamental importance. In a complex modern economy where government expenditure is at a high level it is impossible to raise all the revenue needed from any single tax. Each tax will have its own distinct merits and defects when judged by the various criteria commonly applied to taxation. When several taxes are used they have to be seen as supplementing each other and their interactions—and sometimes their conflicts—have to be reckoned with. Whatever their individual characteristics it is their combined impact that must primarily concern the policy-maker. The complete set has therefore to be looked at as an integrated whole, even though before this can be done it is necessary to examine the parts that have to be linked together.
3.3. The Committee is directed to carry out its review of the existing taxation system ‘in the light of the need to ensure a flow of revenue sufficient to meet the revenue requirements of the Commonwealth’. It was with this phrase in mind that the Committee, while drawing attention in paragraph 1.8 to the fiscal importance of the division between taxation and borrowing in the finance of government investment, refrained from offering views of its own on the merits of existing policies about this matter. It would certainly have lightened the load of the Committee's work if this proviso could have been taken to debar any discussion whatever of public expenditure. However, for at least two reasons this is impracticable.
3.4. Firstly, where tax stops and expenditure starts is often unclear. A tax concession to a particular area of spending in the private sector can as well be looked upon as an expenditure of revenue as a failure to collect it, and it is often an issue of importance to tax policy whether such concealed subsidies should not better be given overtly. Still more important is the point that cash transfers to individuals, the whole class of social service payments of every kind, are inextricably bound up with the equity of the taxation system. The Committee certainly does not regard itself as qualified to advise upon the details of the social services, and is aware of other inquiries at work in this area. But some consideration of cash grants, taxable or otherwise, is essential in the design of an optimal tax system. They constitute a fiscal technique to which some attention will be given later, especially in chapters 12 and 13.
3.5. These problems aside, however, once revenue requirements are set there is no scope at all for reducing total taxation:
the two are simply the same thing. By this phrase in its terms of reference the Committee is prohibited from suggesting
any general set of measures that would necessarily reduce total taxation below revenue needs. The Committee is uninformed,
and could not have been informed, of exact future requirements. Any proposal that, explicitly or implicitly, entails a
reduction of
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present taxation in any particular area has to be matched with proposals that, explicitly or
implicitly, approve increases in others. Though the great bulk of the submissions received by the Committee very naturally
contain suggestions for lowering present taxation in particular areas, it has been the Committee's task in assessing the
arguments offered to ask where the taxation forgone could be recouped more fairly, more simply and more efficiently. Only
in Chapter 6, in the context of inflation control, has the Committee sought to refer to tax cuts in a somewhat wider
setting.
3.6. The first of the more positive commands in the terms of reference bids the Committee to consider the effects of the taxation system ‘upon the social, economic and business organisation of the community’. This is a phrase with multiple connotations. It is probably helpful to separate these out and attach them to other rather more specific injunctions which follow. Thus, the Committee is to consider the effects of the system upon the ‘economic and efficient use of the resources of Australia’, the desirability that there should be a ‘fair distribution of the burden of taxation’, and that revenue-raising be ‘by means that are not unduly complex and do not involve the public or the administration in undue difficulty, inconvenience or expense’. For brevity, these aims may be referred to as efficiency, fairness and simplicity. However, each of the three when one seeks to define it closely proves to embrace several distinct qualities, and these qualities may conflict with each other in particular applications. Furthermore, each of the ‘big three’ criteria will often, in some respects, conflict with the others. In deciding the best overall tax system and in deciding between alternative provisions in particular taxes, the policy-maker comes repeatedly up against choices between simplicity and efficiency, or fairness and simplicity or fairness and efficiency. These are perhaps the hardest choices he has to make, or invite others to make. Hence it is convenient to give here fuller discussion of the meanings of these simple-seeming terms.
Fairness
3.7. As a quality of a tax or a tax system everyone demands fairness, or equity (the terms will be used interchangeably). But, in tax matters as in law and ethics, it is an ideal exceedingly difficult to define and harder still to measure. It is customary to distinguish the two dimensions of ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ equity: the notions that it is fair that persons in the same situation should be equally treated, and those in different situations differently treated, with those more favourably placed being required to pay more. Both expressions will have to be frequently employed in this report. They reflect the ‘ability to pay’ principle and as such tend to embody the idea that taxation is no more nor less than a sacrifice. As the Committee will record later, this is an idea that needs qualification if it is not to mislead. An alternative principle used in much recent academic discussion is that of ‘benefit’, which relates taxes to the benefits individuals are estimated to receive from government-provided goods and services. Except in a small number of cases where taxes take the form of fees or prices for the direct use of publicly-provided services by particular individuals (e.g. postal facilities), this principle is prohibitively hard to apply. In any case it abstracts altogether from notions of fairness, or implicitly embodies an interpretation of ability to pay that may not be socially acceptable. Hence the Committee argues in this report in terms of ability to pay, though the benefit principle has its place in the discussion of the Australian-origin income of non-residents (Chapter 17) and the taxation of goods and services (Chapter 27).
3.8. When we say that persons in equal situations should pay the same tax we probably say so because we think of the
tax as a sacrifice levied upon some kind of private
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‘economic well-being’. But the ‘economic well-being’ is
a sequence of barely describable psychological states of a thoroughly immeasurable kind. For purposes of practical
discussion and decision-making, both the ‘sacrifice’ by way of tax and the ‘well-being’ upon which the tax is levied
have to be measured in money terms. Many of the most difficult questions in tax policy stem from the arbitrariness and
convention that must be accepted when making this leap from the immeasurable to the measurable, from levels of
‘well-being’ to the choice and exact definition of the tax base.
3.9. It is usually taken for granted that the best available measure of an individual's ‘well-being’ is his income. The ‘burden of taxation’ is thought of primarily in terms of the proportion of a man's income that goes in paying taxes, whether they be taxes levied formally on that income or indirectly by elements of tax in the price of the goods and services he buys. Horizontal equity is then taken to require that two persons with the same income pay the same taxes (at least in the first place and ‘other things being equal’), while vertical equity would require that, of two individuals with different incomes, the one with the larger should pay more by some correct amount.
3.10. Even when income is so regarded, there remain very great difficulties in finding an exact and workable definition of it for tax purposes, as the length of the Income Tax Assessment Act and its frequent amendment testify. The most important of these difficulties are surveyed in later chapters. There is evidently some discrepancy between the legal approach to this problem, which seeks to extend and refine the everyday meaning of ‘income’, and the more abstract approach adopted by many economists which generates a very much wider meaning.
3.11. A further problem arises over the question of the appropriate unit for tax purposes. Many would argue, for example, that in a family the ‘economic well-being’ of individual members is likely to be measured better either by the average or by the total income of the family members than by their separate incomes. Whether or not this is so is an extremely vexed question and is discussed in Chapter 10.
3.12. Irrespective of whether individual or family income is accepted as the appropriate starting-point, it is recognised that this cannot be the end of the matter. Further argument is required before it can be concluded that two individuals should pay identical taxes simply because their incomes are the same. They will certainly be dissimilar in a great many other respects. Some of these differences would be considered irrelevant for tax purposes by almost everyone (for example, sex, race, religion, and many other personal characteristics), but others (such as health and size of family) are widely felt to be very relevant indeed. But to decide which differences are which, and how much allowance for such things should be given in calculating tax liabilities must involve much nice judgment and many decisions of an arbitrary kind. The main problems are examined in Chapter 12.
3.13. Yet other problems arise because taxes are, in most cases, calculated and levied on the basis of annual
magnitudes. This is of course necessary for the administration of the public sector, but the period of a year is
arbitrary from the viewpoint of fairness. Those with incomes that vary from year to year will over several years pay
more tax under a progressive system than others earning the same total income in an even stream. This aspect of a very
fundamental issue is widely recognised, and opportunities for ‘averaging’ are already provided for some groups for
whom fluctuations are especially marked and unavoidable. But the deeper issues that arise here are not often thought
about in explicit terms. In the Committee's view most people would agree on reflection that fairness mainly requires
that taxation be the same for
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individuals whose total ‘well-beings’ are likely to be the same over their
whole lifetimes and that too much importance should not be attached to temporal differences in the way ‘well-being’ is
distributed, by choice or necessity, over adult years. Indeed, more than a single lifetime is relevant when the
fairness of taxation upon an individual's capacity to do his duty to his heirs is considered. This lifetime
perspective is not, of course, a practicable basis for taxation, but it has its implications for the structure of an
inevitably annual system.
3.14. The custom of using income as the tax base is not inconsistent with this lifetime view of things. Over any short period, say a year, an individual's consumption undoubtedly reflects his ‘economic well-being’ better than does income. A man can, by consuming out of past savings or by borrowing against future income, achieve levels of ‘economic well-being’ much greater than his current income. For many, over a lifetime, total income and total consumption will be the same. In this sense, lifetime income will be a fairly good measure of an individual's ‘well-being’, whichever base is felt to be the fairer.
3.15. But a tax on income is not at all the same as a tax on consumption, even in lifetime terms. When a tax is levied on income, it falls on savings as well as consumption; and when income is earned from those savings in later years, that income too is taxed. This means that the effective tax rate imposed on consumption which is postponed is greater than the rate imposed on current consumption: income tax falls more heavily than consumption taxes on those who prefer to save a high proportion of their incomes and do more of their consumption later in their lives. But individuals may save for reasons other than to supplement consumption in later years: because they wish to bequeath to their heirs, or because the process of accumulating wealth yields ‘satisfactions’ which contribute to ‘well-being’ directly (and independently of any income wealth may bring in). Such motives for saving will be more significant at the upper end of the income scale; but certainly at the bottom end people will primarily save in order that they may consume more in future years (specifically in their old age). For the latter persons, taxation based on consumption is probably fairer than income taxation because it does not discriminate between individuals according to how they spread their consumption over their lifetimes. Higher up, horizontal equity may well be held to require not only taxation of income but taxation of capital as well, and this quite apart from any desire to make the system fairer in a vertical sense.
3.16. Questions of equity are complicated by inflation, as is so much else. The discussion of equity starts from the idea that taxation is a sacrifice of ‘real’ private satisfactions (however much this may be offset by the satisfactions that public expenditure may simultaneously create). But taxes have to be levied in money terms. In the case of incomes from current effort, the distinction may not much matter since incomes and prices may go up simultaneously and tax rates can be adjusted to maintain the same underlying rate structure. However, a serious difficulty arises with property incomes. The real value and the real return on assets with variable money returns may indeed be maintained by rises in their money capital value and their money returns. But the real return on fixed-interest assets declines and their real capital values fall; until redemption is near, their money capital values also fall. With an income tax this latter fall is inadequately reflected in the tax liability. There is a consequent inequity of a horizontal kind; and since fixed-interest securities are often the main financial assets of lower income groups, there may be vertical inequities too. These inequities do not arise so conspicuously—if at all—under consumption taxation.
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3.17. There are good reasons, therefore, why consumption might be preferred to income as the primary index of ability to pay. Some economists, notably Lord Kaldor, have found the reasons sufficiently compelling to justify abandoning personal income tax altogether and substituting a progressive expenditure tax. The Committee is not prepared to go this far, recognising as it does that an expenditure tax would probably be even more difficult to administer than personal income tax. But the philosophy underlying an expenditure tax has much to recommend it, and the Committee has allowed itself to be influenced by this philosophy in certain of its proposals, including those bearing on the tax treatment of income-protection insurance premiums (Chapter 7), investment income (Chapter 9), and superannuation and life insurance (Chapter 21).
3.18 The issues just mentioned relate primarily to horizontal equity. Problems of an equally intractable kind arise with vertical equity. Indeed, establishing the ‘right’ degree of progressivity by reference to the criterion of equity is so fundamental to tax policy, as regards both the set of taxes to be chosen and their rates, that it will need to be explored at length in the next chapter.
Simplicity
3.19 After equity, simplicity is perhaps the next most universally sought after of qualities in individual taxes and tax systems as a whole: like fairness it is a word that, in this context, points to a complex of ideas.
3.20 Two of these are explicitly stated in the Committee's terms of reference. A tax will be called simple, relatively to others, if for each dollar raised by it the cost of official administration is small, and if the ‘compliance costs’, the costs in money and effort of all kinds to the taxpayer, are also small. These two ideas are of course connected, and add up to much the same as the ancient canon of certainty. Both costs will be the less if assessor and assessed can each establish with certainty what is due: uncertainty entails the costs of consultation with experts and sometimes the yet greater costs of litigation. Both kinds of cost are increased, and certainty is endangered, when a tax, whether in the interests of equity or of efficiency, requires the drawing of fine distinctions between what is and what is not liable, and when these distinctions involve such uncertain ideas as ‘purpose’ or ‘value to the recipient’. Then the legal definitions get longer and longer and beyond the comprehension of those untrained in the law, and the relevant facts in particular cases become more and more disputable.
3.21. Two further aspects of simplicity require specific mention here. First, when (as is often unavoidable) a quite complex operation is needed before the administrators can make the assessment or the taxpayer can ascertain his liability, it is desirable that the tax be such that the taxpayer, for private purposes unconnected with tax, already needs to perform such operations. A tax on company income may be fairly regarded as a simple tax if the company already calculates its income or profits on the same or very similar basis. A tax on personal income is not a simple tax if it be so structured that many taxpayers who would not otherwise wish (or without hired help be able) to keep accounts at all, have to preserve many records and learn sophisticated accounting. The point, though obvious, is often forgotten.
3.22. A second observation is perhaps even more obvious and even more frequently forgotten. The fewer, per million dollars raised, are the individuals or organisations from whom tax is collected the simpler is a taxation system. The sheikdom that can raise all the revenue it requires (and maybe much more) from a single tax on a single oil company has what is unquestionably the simplest tax system of all.
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Efficiency
3.23. The ‘economic and efficient’ use of national resources is of course a longstanding and by now almost conventional objective of public policy: the phrase was long central to the terms of reference of the Tariff Board and is now in those of the Industries Assistance Commission.
3.24. Narrowly interpreted, efficiency requires that the resources available for public use be as nearly as possible equal to the resources withdrawn from the private sector: that is, that the process by which resources are transferred involve minimal ‘waste’. One example of such waste has already been mentioned in the context of simplicity objectives: the cost of administering and complying with the tax law is a ‘deadweight’ cost to the community and ought to be minimised. Waste can however also arise where the tax system is such as to encourage individuals to substitute things they value less for things they value more, or business to continue to use or to substitute productive processes that are technically less efficient for productive processes that are more efficient. In so far as it can be presumed that, left to their own devices, individuals will spend their incomes wisely, and business will choose the most efficient means of production, the minimisation of waste requires that the tax system should not influence individual and business choices. This is the requirement that the tax system should be neutral. Thus the tax system should not interfere with the manner in which an individual spends his income by changing the relative prices of the goods he buys; it should not alter the relative rewards of the different types of work between which he has to choose, or the relative attractions of work and leisure, or the relative returns from different modes of investment; it should not alter the relative attractiveness of different types of business organisation, or the relative prices of productive resources; and it should not discriminate between different types of production.
3.25. But it cannot always be presumed that consumers will spend their incomes wisely; and even when they do, consumers and producers alike may fail to take adequate account of the effects that their activities have on others, of what economists have come to call ‘externalities’. The efficiency of the use of available resources can sometimes be improved by departures from neutrality, by government interventions to alter what would otherwise have been the outcome of private market operations. There are many such interventions by government through, for instance, tariffs, subsidies, monetary control and marketing organisations. But the tax system is an alternative instrument. Tax concessions may aim at increasing the output or consumption of goods and services the government wants to encourage. Similarly, taxes can be used to discourage the output, or increase the prices to consumers, of commodities whose unrestricted production or consumption might otherwise have harmful effects, for example on health or urban development. Taxes can also be employed to charge the users of facilities, such as roads, on the use of which it is otherwise difficult to impose a price. Discriminatory taxes of these kinds will here be called ‘efficiency taxes’.
3.26. The Committee is persuaded that neutrality should be the general aim when efficiency is under consideration.
Departures should be made only in a deliberate and explicit way for proven, explicit and quantified purposes and after
it had been shown that other approaches (such as regulation and subsidy) are likely to be less effective for the end
chosen. In the Committee's view, when there are circumstances warranting encouragement for a field of activity by
means of a reduction in tax, any such
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reductions should be granted only for a specified purpose and a
limited period, thereby ensuring periodical review.
Other Objectives
3.27. Equity, simplicity and efficiency seem to the Committee the three dominant tests of merit for individual taxes and for the tax system as a whole. There are others, however. In particular, flexibility in the taxation system is a characteristic of obvious importance to economic management. Economic management or ‘stabilisation’ requires, firstly, that there be at least some taxes in the total package the rates of which can be easily raised or lowered in the light of short-run fluctuations in the level of economic activity. Secondly, it requires that these taxes be such as to operate very quickly in altering revenue yields and influencing individuals’ and firms' behaviour. Thirdly, in so far as smaller rate changes are politically more acceptable than larger ones (particularly when rate increases are called for), the taxes available should have as large an impact as possible on the level of economic activity per dollar of revenue change.
3.28. Economic growth is another objective that, in the view of some, should be deliberately and distinctly pursued in taxation policy. As a general purpose of public economic policy it has, of course, been long accepted as important, though its interpretation can be the subject of much controversy. In the context of taxation its encouragement is often taken as implying that the overall level of taxation should be kept lower than it would be otherwise—a prescription upon which its terms of reference make the Committee unable to comment. It is also however taken to indicate that, in the interests of greater investment, savings should certainly not be discouraged under the tax system and perhaps even be taxed less than considerations of equity and neutrality alone would suggest. This is an argument that will need mention in the next chapter in connection with the general question of progressivity.
II. Appraisal of Particular Taxes
3.29. It is convenient next to appraise the main kinds of tax that already exist in or might be introduced into Australia, by reference to these dominant criteria. They are all taxes that will have to be surveyed in more detail later, but a short summary here will help towards a preliminary discussion in the next section of alternative kinds of tax system.
3.30. Personal income tax. If income can be accepted as the primary feature in comparisons between the ability to pay of individuals, it follows that, if the problems of definition and information-collection can be solved, a personal income tax is an admirable vehicle for fairness. An almost limitless range of provisions for horizontal equity can be introduced into it. Any degree of progressivity can be enacted. It is indeed the only tax currently in the tax system that is capable of raising large revenues and into the structure of which a refined set of progressive provisions can be incorporated. To the extent, however, that consumption represents a superior measure of ‘economic well-being’, at least for some income groups, it might still be less fair than a progressive consumption tax, were such a thing practicable. But on the whole personal income tax scores highly in terms of equity.
3.31. By contrast, and again comparing it only with potentially large taxes, it must rank lowest for simplicity. Complexity
is introduced when many allowances are believed to be called for by horizontal equity; and more when, with a highly
progressive scale, measures have to be taken to prevent or control the transfer of incomes from
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persons in high
tax ranges to those lower down. As a main revenue-raiser it must fall on almost every person with income, many of whom
have little taste for or skill at form-filling and many of whom, but for income tax, would have no need to keep financial
records. The definition of what taxable income is to include is a matter of the greatest difficulty. It is a tax on which
the administrators must perpetually compromise between the expense and intrusiveness of a rigorous administration and the
losses of revenue suffered when administration is comfortably trustful. It is one too that presents the largest number of
citizens with annual temptations to evade and avoid and to suspect misbehaviour in others.
3.32. As regards resource efficiency, personal income can certainly be made the vehicle for deliberate non-neutralities. Considered as a neutral tax, faults can be found with it. Since it must, in large measure, be a tax on the proceeds of work, it is not neutral between work and not working though it shares this defect with almost every tax. Nor, as noted already, is any general tax on income neutral between current consumption and savings. This makes the income tax rather discouraging to growth.
3.33. Company income tax. This is a most difficult tax to appraise, especially with respect to equity, not least because in this area the international aspects of tax are of the highest importance. Equity is essentially a matter of comparative justice between individuals. Any tax on corporations may (or may not) be fair to its owners, its employees or the purchasers of its products; but it cannot be said either to be fair or unfair to the corporation as such. When the tax is held to fall upon the income rights of the proprietors, its fairness will turn upon whether the sum paid is equal to what would be paid were the income in question simply added to the other income of these individual proprietors. Neither in Australia nor elsewhere is this in fact often the case.
3.34. For simplicity it will rate higher than personal income tax. The problem of ascertaining the income of a company is, in principle, no different than in the case of personal income, but the necessary accounting procedures are likely to be, if anything, more readily available, more fully required already for the company's own purposes. Furthermore, though the vast majority of companies are not large, in Australia as elsewhere a comparatively small number among them produce the bulk of the substantial revenue this tax yields.
3.35. The efficiency of company income tax is also hard to judge. It is adaptable to deliberate non-neutralities—almost too conveniently so. But even when neutrality is sought there are ways in which it will probably fail: there is likely to be some discrimination between companies and other types of legal organisation.
3.36. Capital gains taxes. The pros and cons of capital gains taxes are discussed at some length in Chapter 23. The fundamental case for such a tax rests upon equity. It is almost universally agreed that capital gains (when ‘real’ and not simply the result of inflation) are so closely akin to income in its everyday sense that equity requires that they be taxed if income is. By the test of fairness, therefore, a capital gains tax has merit, in principle, as a supplement to personal income tax. On the other hand it must be a tax of great complexity, and efforts to bring it within the bounds of administrative practicability must lead to some evaporation of its equitable advantages. It is a tax not without attractions in terms of resource efficiency. When capital gains are untaxed but income gains are, investments in the kinds of asset on which the returns come (or can be arranged to come) in the form of capital appreciation will be made relatively the more profitable. A misallocation of resources is therefore likely which the tax serves to correct.
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3.37. Estate and gift duties. These taxes may be taken together, since (as will be argued in Chapter 24) they lead into a tangle of inequities and avoidances without even the merit of producing large revenues unless they be integrated and tightly administered. As a supplement to income tax—or even to a consumption tax—an estate duty ranks high for equity. It taxes those assets the income from which could only with difficulty be ‘imputed’ for income tax purposes. It can also bear specifically upon inherited wealth if equity is believed to require a special levy upon it.
3.38. Estates and gift duties, and such variants as inheritance and accession duties, must however be very complex taxes. They cause less continuous trouble to those concerned than annual taxes—and this gains one good mark for simplicity—but their provisions need to be elaborate. However, if it be possible to confine them to large fortunes, they will be simple in the sense of not affecting the majority of the population. They need not be inimical to resources efficiency. They inevitably contain a nonneutrality in terms of their discouragement of accumulation for the benefit of heirs, in the same way as a progressive income tax may contain a more general discouragement to savings. But in both cases the conflict is between distinct ultimate ends and has to be resolved by judgment.
3.39. Wealth taxes. Wealth taxes are discussed in Chapter 26. Here they can be briefly disposed of. They have some of the advantages of estate and gift duties in terms of equity and all their disadvantages in terms of simplicity—and more, since they will be so much more frequently levied.
3.40. Taxes on goods and services. A distinction must be made here between ‘narrow-based’ taxes falling upon only a few consumption goods and services (even though they be ones that absorb quite a significant proportion of total expenditure) and ‘broad-based’ taxes levied on very large ranges of goods and services even if not quite all consumption. The Australian sales and excise taxes are an obvious example of the former category; the British and Continental value-added taxes belong to the latter. They are described in Chapter 27.
3.41. Narrow-based taxes rank badly for equity. They discriminate between persons with the same incomes but different tastes. It may perhaps be desirable to levy a heavier burden on the smoker and the drinker than on other people but if so it will be on the grounds of efficiency rather than equity and even then it has to be remembered that the real sacrifice may well be borne by the families of those on whom it is intended to lay the impost. Nor can such taxes be made in any way effectively progressive in terms either of consumption or income. They are however taxes of extreme simplicity. Exceptionally few enterprises have the legal responsibility for payment; they will have the machinery for calculating their liability as part of their normal activities; generally their assessment can quickly be settled with the official administration. In terms of resource efficiency it is obvious that these are non-neutral taxes. They rank well for efficiency only when they are deliberately tailored to fit some desired non-neutrality, and they can be made fees for particular government services rather than taxes required for general revenue.
3.42. Various forms of broad-based taxes are discussed in Chapter 27. The choice between them chiefly turns on points of technical detail. What is more relevant here are the qualities such taxes have when at high uniform level and when very widely based.
3.43. A broad-based tax serves horizontal equity by not discriminating between savings and consumption; but by itself it
cannot be adapted to the varying situations of
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individuals. Nor is it, by itself, suitable for vertical equity.
It is essentially a proportionate consumption tax, and actually regressive as a tax on income since the proportion of
consumption to income normally falls as income increases. It stands high by the test of simplicity, certainly far higher
than personal income tax when both are compared as major revenue-raisers. Whatever its form it would be levied on far
fewer persons or enterprises. A much higher proportion of them would have little difficulty with the paper work, much of
which would be only a small addition to ordinary commercial recording. This latter advantage would be greatly diminished
if the rate were not uniform. Such taxes certainly have problems of definition at their edges, even though uniformity
within the boundary avoids them there, and the higher the rate the more acute they will be. However, it seems unlikely
that these would ever reach the scale of those encountered in income tax. A broad-based tax at a uniform rate is
inherently neutral within its ambit. Were all savings made solely for the purpose of savers’ own future consumption, it
would also be neutral between consumption and savings; but to the extent that other motives enter into savings, this would
not be so.
3.44. Grants. As noted earlier in this chapter cash grants by the State need to be brought into the overall assessment of taxation systems. As will become clearer in Chapter 12 they provide an alternative to concessional deductions in the personal income tax as a technique for achieving horizontal equity. Most social service grants to the needy may also be quite naturally viewed as instruments of vertical equity at the lower end of the income scale. Whether taxed or not they will, when at a flat rate, somewhat increase the net progressivity of the tax system. Since they will constitute an ever smaller proportion of the incomes of their recipients as one moves up the income scale, they serve to make the distribution of income less unequal. They are also, when free of means test, simple since their eligibility is determined by such tests as age, parenthood, sickness, unemployment. In general too they are neutral. Unless the benefits are very large it is unlikely that child endowment could be much of an incentive to parenthood or that well-administered sickness or unemployment benefits increase the incidence of illness or unemployment to any significant extent.
III. Alternative Tax Systems
3.45. This brief survey is a reminder that when any body of advisers is invited to formulate proposals for improving the taxation system, ‘either by way of making changes in the present system, abolishing any existing form of taxation or introducing new forms of taxation’, a singularly wide range of options is laid open for review. To raise a given revenue any of a great many permutations and combinations of distinct taxes can be used, and when one combination has been selected their relative weights can be varied and the choice of detailed provisions in each is enormous. There are legions of taxation systems to choose from when the problem is considered in a longterm context.
3.46. The short assessments just given of the principal taxes among which the choice lies assist in the classification of the options. It becomes evident that different systems or ‘tax packages’ will serve the different aims of equity, simplicity and efficiency to differing extents. Because there are unavoidable conflicts between these aims, it is essential to assess their extent, and to arrive at the preferred system after a conscious effort to weigh, or give relative values to, these ultimate aims.
3.47. In general it does not appear that, in practice, the conflict between simplicity and efficiency need be very great.
Certainly when the latter can be interpreted as
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mainly requiring neutrality, reliance upon a very simple tax, a
broad-based tax at uniform rates on all goods and services used in consumption, would produce a taxation system that was
simple and efficient. Though efficiency may undoubtedly require additional special taxes for special purposes it need not
require many if policy instruments other than taxation are also being actively directed to this aim.
3.48. The potential conflict between the ideals of simplicity and equity, by contrast, is apparently very great indeed. The taxes most obviously adapted to the requirements of equity, those technically capable of being adapted to vary the levy upon individuals in accordance with a multitude of differences in their situations considered relevant to equity, are the most complex of taxes: income tax, capital gains tax, gift and estate duties, wealth tax. Hence it appears that a country may have a simple and efficient taxation system or an equitable one but not both.
3.49. The dilemma is not however so stark as that, for two reasons. One is that, as has just been noticed, quite simple measures on the side of expenditure can to some extent be used to offset the inequities created by the indiscriminate impact of simple taxes. The other is more important yet. A great deal turns upon the precise quantitative interpretation that is put upon the ideal of vertical equity and how the application of this quantitative judgment works out in the particular circumstances of the economy being considered. These are quite cardinal issues in the consideration of taxation policy, and they will be examined at length in the next chapter. When that discussion is completed it will be possible to return in Chapter 5 to the problem of defining the alternative types of tax system that are there for Australia's choice.