Taxation: Paying for Policy

Abstract

We can pay for our social policy proposals through philanthropy, some kind of user pays arrangement or through taxation. For most of the last century, we have increasingly relied on taxation as the method of financing our expanding welfare state and our growing expectations of citizenship rights. But taxation, as one of the most coercive areas of government activities (Eccleston 2004), is also one of the most contested, with differences of ideology and values affecting how taxation levels and different types of taxes are seen, and with differences in power influencing the tax policies that are adopted. For many, tax is a burden that has to be endured — a necessary evil — with the relationship between the taxes people pay and the services they expect from government frequently opaque and unclear, and the expectation of tax cuts regularly revisited.