If you want to raise revenues through tax, learn accountability

The expatriate comes from a country where taxes and other means of revenue collection are heavily debated.

If from the USA, the assumption is that whichever of the major parties you support – the Democrats or the Republicans – your instinct must be to never raise taxes. You must loathe them with every beat of your cold heart.

In that peculiar system – and let’s hope it remains one aspect of America’s ‘exceptionalism’ – taxes are oddly thought to be something that undermines ‘the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution’, something that removes a person’s liberty and that inevitably leads to ‘Big Government’. This is an American issue.

Such an attitude isn’t universal, even amongst America’s allies and fellow democracies. Much of Western Europe, whether led by Liberals or Social Democrats, has always understood the need for taxes.

Some have gone beyond grudging acceptance and actively celebrate taxes and the work these democratically-gathered monies can do for the health and wealth of a population. All successful post-War countries in Western Europe gathered taxes to either improve or create their Welfare State – that is, the support mechanisms that ensure help for the disadvantaged, but which also support national cohesion.

Take Sweden in the decades after the War, prior to the failed neo-Liberal experiment of Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s: Sweden managed something like an 100% agreement throughout the country that taxes needed to be extracted from a large proportion of people’s salaries for the sake of fairness and justice, and Sweden became rich in all manner of ways, with a strong economy and an unbelievably fantastic Welfare State. 

It was the shining example of how left-of-centre politics can work in the modern world, even as aspects of Capitalism work within and around it.

But of course what Sweden did was not only COLLECT taxes. It did three other things: a) it ensured that while it heavily employed people, it didn’t overemploy and it didn’t pay excessively large salaries or perks to certain groups who elsewhere became the ‘superrich’; b) it eradicated corruption; c) it ensured that the taxes genuinely paid for universal health care, education, pensions and other benefits while simultaneously encouraging a culture of working for others.

In the UK, the shift to right-wing politics is evident not only in the new, nationalistic racism against immigrants, but also in the fact that no party of any persuasion feels able to raise taxes.

Indeed, all parties vying in the coming election are pretty much pledging to raise revenue only through solving the problem of tax evasion. And in Kenya, following the current budget and the coming Finance Act, there are complaints that the new and increased taxes are unaffordable for many, in part because the benefits promise to be invisible for many while possible tax rises on staple foods and the like ARE very tangible.

And some worry that points a, b and c, achieved by Sweden and other countries, are not evident here.  But taxes aren’t essentially evil; they can be quite the opposite.