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June 14, 2004

Where will the taxes come from?

The e-government Work Programme of the European Commission (EC) may wish to look at Value Mapping, if it can help identify a sustainable new source of taxation. As European population stagnates, its asset wealth grows - relatively untaxed.
British consultant in geo-data policy Chris Corbin attended a recent EC workshop and reported:
"As the European Society has very small growth in population and hence the work force size is static or reducing due to the ageing effect then there is a need to redeploy people from the public sector into the new areas that are expected to fuel the Information Society and Knowledge Economy. Where will the taxes come from to sustain such investment especially in an environment where taxes are being slowly moved from direct to indirect? Research was needed in this area."

My research shows that Value Maps are almost always a spin-off from modern property tax systems, yet inate conservatism among tax administration professionals makes them unlikely to lead calls for modernisation, especially in mature societies. Property taxes tend to be unpopular with older voters, who prefer to load taxes onto younger wealth-creators.
Debate on UK local government finance has led me to submit evidence to my own UK Parliament's Enquiry on the subject, in which I claim (on the basis of my recent research) that a...
"‘Tax Shift’ could be completed within 7-10 years, at no net cost, on the back of existing e-government initiatives" and...
"Taxing land values can be seen as a natural consequence of the need to monitor land values: the ‘barometer’ of sustainable land-use management. Value Maps make the results of such monitoring accessible to government at all levels – and to citizens."
My complete submission to the Parliamentary Enquiry will be published by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's (ODPM) Committee of Parliament in July, at about the same time as Government itself reports on what it intends to do about local government finance. Meanwhile I am not allowed to upload the whole document to my website. I will post news of the report's publication in due course.
Terms of reference of the ODPM Committee Enquiry


Posted by Tony Vickers at June 14, 2004 3:01 PM
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