The new health and social care levy is a good case study in how necessary compromises and trade-offs result in a less coherent tax system, writes David Gauke (Macfarlanes).
All policies involve trade-offs. This is never more true than when it comes to tax policy. The perfect tax policy will raise lots of revenue not create any economic distortions be popular with MPs and the public be administratively easy to pay and collect and not add to the complexity of the tax system.
No tax policy will ever meet these requirements. There is bound to be a tension between some of these objectives. In the unlikely event that there ever was a tax policy that satisfactorily met these objectives a previous government would have already implemented the policy and subsequent governments would have sought to raise more and more revenue that we would have reached the...
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The new health and social care levy is a good case study in how necessary compromises and trade-offs result in a less coherent tax system, writes David Gauke (Macfarlanes).
All policies involve trade-offs. This is never more true than when it comes to tax policy. The perfect tax policy will raise lots of revenue not create any economic distortions be popular with MPs and the public be administratively easy to pay and collect and not add to the complexity of the tax system.
No tax policy will ever meet these requirements. There is bound to be a tension between some of these objectives. In the unlikely event that there ever was a tax policy that satisfactorily met these objectives a previous government would have already implemented the policy and subsequent governments would have sought to raise more and more revenue that we would have reached the...
If you or your firm subscribes to Taxjournal.com, please click the login box below:
If you do not subscribe but are a registered user, please enter your details in the following boxes:
