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The trouble with tax
Taxation affects the economy, because it affects our behaviour. Is that impossible to avoid?
Taxes are generally considered to be an inevitability, as the words of Benjamin Franklin, written in 1789, remind us: “…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Governments need money to fund a wide variety of stuff, and discussions about taxation are mostly not about whether to tax, but about what to tax and how much.
It should be straightforward, really. You decide what thing you’re going to tax, you work out how much of that thing there is, you set a taxation rate, and by simply multiplying these two figures, you know what your revenue is going to be.
Of windows and geese
Say you’re the ruler of a country, and you toy with the idea of taxing windows. Sounds like a clever thing to do: everyone needs windows and they’re hard to hide, so evasion is going to be minimal. It is even a fair tax: bigger houses have more windows, so people who can afford to live in a mansion will pay more than people who live in a small cottage. Count the number of windows in your fiefdom, multiply that by the tax you’re planning to levy on each window, and hey presto, you know what will hit your coffers.
