Abstract
Retail consumption taxes may be levied at the national, state or local level. In the USA, a retail sales tax is levied on the sale of products (but not services) in nearly all the states. So far, the national government has not seen fit to assess a similar tax at the national level, although there has been talk of instituting such a national tax as a supplement to or as a replacement for the income tax.
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NOTES
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Taxing Consumption 68–69 (1988).
Id., at 99-101.
This phenomenon is discussed in Timothy Brown, Interjurisdictional Tax Competition: An Economic Perspective, Nebraska Law Review 68: 652-71 (1989). Secession is a related way to restrain governments from raising taxes to excessive levels. For more on the use of secession as a restraint on taxes, see Robert W. McGee, Secession as a Tool for Limiting the Growth of State and Municipal Governments and Making It More Responsive: A Constitutional Proposal, Western State University Law Review 21: 499–513 (Spring, 1994)
4 Thomas Moran, N.Y. Tax Collectors Staking Out Malls: Want Payback on N.J. Shopping Deals, The (Bergen County, NJ) Record, December 10, 1992, at A1.
Some people still cling to the outmoded belief that graduated tax rates are desirable. For discussions on the graduated income tax, see Walter J. Blum and Harry Kalven, Jr., The Uneasy Case for Progressive Taxation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953; F.A. Hayek, The Case Against Progressive Income Taxes, The Freeman 229-232 (1953).
Mark Skousen makes this point at 168 in Economics on Trial, Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1991.
7 Mark Skousen, Economics on Trial 169 (1991).
The USA is being used as an example here, but the same rules apply to any country that has an income tax.
Title 26, U.S.C.
Three different federal court systems hear tax cases in the USA. Cases can be initiated in the Tax Court, the District Court or the Claims Court. Appeals from these courts go to the federal appellate court, and then, perhaps to the Supreme Court. And the various courts sometimes reach diametrically opposed conclusions about similar or identical fact situations, which makes the system more complicated and less certain, not to mention expensive and time-consuming. All this could be eliminated if the income tax were abolished.
IRS has more than 120,000 employees.
IRS audits about 1 million tax returns a year, or slightly less than 1% of the income tax returns filed in the USA.
For a treatise on IRS abuse, see David Burnham, A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics and the IRS, New York: Random House, 1989)
14 James Bovard gives some examples in Shakedown: How the Government Screws You from A to Z, New York: Penguin, 1995, pp. 63–66.
For more on this point, see Henry Hazlitt, The Failure of the “New Economics”, Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1959, pp. 98–134, especially 113-15.
Id, at 113.
Alvin H. Hansen, A Guide to Keynes, New York: McGraw Hill, 1953, p. 75.
Mushtaq Ahmad, Business Ethics in Islam 123 (1995).
Id. The ethics of tax evasion according to Islam is discussed in Athar Murtuza and S.M. Ghazanfar, Taxation as a Form of Worship: Exploring the Nature of Zakat, in The Ethics of Tax Evasion 190–212 (Robert W. McGee, editor 1998) and also in this book.
The numerous books on privatization that have been published in the last few decades provide hundreds of examples of how the private sector can do just about everything cheaper and better than government. Perhaps the best single source of information on privatization is the Reason Foundation, [www.privatization.org].
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McGee, R.W. (2004). The Retail Consumption Tax. In: The Philosophy of Taxation and Public Finance. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9140-9_25
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