Taxation

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Last year I visited Scotland for my vacation. It is a lovely part of the world and with a very interesting history. One of the days I was in Edinburgh, I went on a walking tour with a whole bunch of fellow travelers. I distinctly recall the tour guide explaining that in historic Edinburgh, that the bigger the size of the window of your house the higher the owner was taxed. Intrigued by that statement, I asked why that was so. He, a history student, responded with "Governments can only tax what they can control".

When reading this article, I was immediately taken back to that conversation. Taxation is a reality of life, and if you live in a country, like I do, that has taken part in Quantitative Easing (QE) of some sort, taxes are a very likely reality. What shape or form they take remains to be seen.

An excerpt follows...

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Because governments are limited in their ability to tax the mobile, they will tax the static. As noted above, property is already highly taxed in Britain and America (and may be years away from another boom). So consumption taxes are the more likely answer. They are hard to avoid and fairly stable, since spending patterns do not change sharply from year to year. But they tend to fall more heavily on the poor than the rich. A crisis created by investment bankers will be paid for by shop assistants and office cleaners.