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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Age Debate: The tax of all taxes

Age Debate: The tax of all taxes

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published Published on Nov 25, 2016   modified Modified on Nov 25, 2016
-The Asian Age

Replacing income-tax with a banking transaction tax is an unworkable idea.

The poor will end up paying a lot more: Subhanil Chowdhury

The idea that all taxes in India should be abolished, except import duty, and replaced by a bank transaction tax (BTT) is a deeply flawed one for a number of reasons. First, there are only few countries in the world that do not have income-tax — oil rich countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain or tax havens like Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Bahamas, etc., fall in this category. India does not have a revenue source like the oil-rich Gulf countries nor can it afford to be a tax haven given its huge population and welfare commitments. Do we want to convert India into an emirate or a tax haven and become a global centre for money-laundering?

In the advanced capitalist countries within the OECD group, the average tax-GDP ratio is 34 per cent (in 2014), with Denmark (50.9 per cent) topping the list, followed by France (45.2 per cent) and Belgium (44.7 per cent). The US, which is the largest free market economy in the world, has a tax-GDP ratio of 26 per cent. In contrast, the tax-GDP ratio in India (Central and state taxes combined) was only 16.6 per cent in 2015-16.

When the tax-GDP ratio in India is so low, the emphasis of tax reforms should be on widening the direct tax base and effectively taxing corporations and the rich by doing away with myriad exemptions and avenues for tax evasion. The proposed BTT militates against this objective because it proposes a total switch from taxing income and profits to taxing expenditure, and that too through banking transactions. This goes against the very principle on which modern taxation systems have been based — the ability to pay. The BTT would levy the same rate of taxes on transactions, irrespective of whether the transaction is being conducted by the rich or the poor. This is highly regressive because the consumption propensity of the poor is much higher and hence the poor would end up paying more taxes than the rich.

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The Asian Age, 24 November, 2016, http://www.asianage.com/opinion/oped/241116/age-debate-the-tax-of-all-taxes.html


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