- Industry: Economy; Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 15233
- Number of blossaries: 1
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Creating financial instruments or transactions that allow the parties involved to exploit loopholes in or differences between their tax exposures, so that all involved pay less tax.
Industry:Economy
Doing everything possible within the law to reduce your tax bill. Learned Hand, an American judge, once said: “There is nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible … nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands. ” Contrast with tax evasion.
Industry:Economy
The thing or amount to which a tax rate applies. To collect income tax, for example, you need a meaningful definition of income. Definitions of the tax base can vary enormously, over time and among countries, especially when tax breaks are taken into account. As a result, a country with a comparatively high tax rate may not have a high tax burden if it has a more narrowly defined tax base than other countries. In recent years, the political unpopularity of high tax rates has lead many governments to lower rates and at the same time broaden the tax base, often leaving the tax burden unchanged.
Industry:Economy
Total tax paid in a period as a proportion of total income in that period. It can refer to personal, corporate or national income.
Industry:Economy
Low-tax policies pursued by some countries in the hope of attracting international businesses and capital. Economists usually favor competition in any form. But some say that tax competition is often a beggar-thy-neighbor policy, which can reduce another country’s tax base, or force it to change its mix of taxes, or stop it taxing in the way it would like. Economists who favor tax competition often cite a 1956 article by Charles Tiebout (1924–68) entitled "A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures". In it he argued that, faced with a choice of different combinations of tax and government services, taxpayers will choose to locate where they get closest to the mixture they want. Variations in tax rates among different countries are good, because they give taxpayers more choice and thus more chance of being satisfied. This also puts pressure on governments to be efficient. Thus measures to harmonize taxes are a bad idea. There is at least one big caveat to this theory. Tiebout assumed, crucially, that taxpayers are highly mobile and able to move to wherever their preferred combination of taxes and benefits is on offer. But many taxpayers, including the great majority of workers, are not able to move easily. Tax competition may make it harder to redistribute from rich to poor through the tax system by allowing the rich to move to where taxes are not redistributive.
Industry:Economy
From the point of view of the taxpayer, the way of undertaking an economic activity that results in the lowest (legitimate) tax bill.
Industry:Economy
Paying less tax than you are legally obliged to. Contrast with tax avoidance. There may be a thin line between the two, but as Denis Healey, a former British chancellor, once put it, “The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall. ”
Industry:Economy
A country or designated zone that has low or no taxes, or highly secretive banks, and often a warm climate and sandy beaches, which make it attractive to foreigners bent on tax avoidance or even tax evasion.
Industry:Economy
Where a tax really bites. Who ultimately pays a tax is often different from who the taxman collects the tax from, because the cost of the tax can be passed on. For example, by demanding higher wages if income tax rises, workers can transfer some of the tax burden to their employer’s customers or shareholders.
Industry:Economy
Prostitution may be the oldest profession, but tax collection was surely not far behind. In its early days, taxation did not always involve handing over money. The ancient Chinese paid with pressed tea, and Jivara tribesmen in Brazil stumped up shrunken heads. As the price of their citizenship, ancient Greeks and Romans could be called on to serve as soldiers and had to supply their own weapons. The origins of modern taxation can be traced to wealthy subjects paying money to their king in lieu of military service. The other early source of tax revenue was trade, with tolls and customs duties being collected from traveling merchants. The big advantage of these taxes was that they fell mostly on visitors rather than residents. Income tax, the biggest source of government funds today in most countries, is a comparatively recent invention, probably because the notion of annual income is itself a modern concept. Governments preferred to tax things that were easy to measure and on which it was thus easy to calculate the liability. This is why early taxes concentrated on tangible items such as land and property, physical goods, commodities and ships, as well as things such as the number of windows or fireplaces in a building. In the 20th century, particularly the second half, governments around the world took a growing share of their country’s national income in tax, mainly to pay for increasingly more expensive defense efforts and for a modern welfare state. Indirect taxation on consumption, such as value-added tax, has become increasingly important as direct taxation on income and wealth has become increasingly unpopular. But big differences among countries remain. One is the overall level of tax. For example, in United States tax revenue amounts to around one-third of its GDP, whereas in Sweden it is closer to half. Others are the preferred methods of collecting it (direct versus indirect), the rates at which it is levied and the definition of the tax base to which these rates are applied. Countries have different attitudes to progressive and regressive taxation. There are also big differences in the way responsibility for taxation is divided among different levels of government. Arguably, any tax is a bad tax. But public goods and other government activities have to be paid for somehow, and economists often have strong views on which methods of taxation are more or less efficient. Most economists agree that the best tax is one that has as little impact as possible on people’s decisions about whether to undertake a productive economic activity. High rates of tax on labor may discourage people from working, and so result in lower tax revenue than there would be if the tax rate were lower, an idea captured in the Laffer curve. Certainly, the marginal rate of tax may have a bigger effect on incentives than the overall tax burden. Land tax is regarded as the most efficient by some economists and tax on expenditure by others, as it does all the taking after the wealth creation is done. Some economists favor a neutral tax system that does not influence the sorts of economic activities that take place. Others favor using tax, and tax breaks, to guide economic activity in ways they favor, such as to minimize pollution and to increase the attractiveness of employing people rather than capital. Some economists argue that the tax system should be characterized by both horizontal equity and vertical equity, because this is fair, and because when the tax system is fair people may find it harder to justify tax avoidance and tax evasion. However, who ultimately pays (the tax incidence) may be different from who is initially charged, if that person can pass it on, say by adding the tax to the price he charges for his output. Taxes on companies, for example, are always paid in the end by humans, be they workers, customers or shareholders.
Industry:Economy
