Most people are taxed at source, meaning their taxes are deducted from their earnings before they receive their wages. If that’s you, the government knows exactly what you earned and if you think you’ve been taxed too much, you have to waste your time and money to reclaim it.
The wealthy usually earn their money differently and aren’t taxed at source. They tell the government how much they earn and also employ experts to justify them paying as little tax as possible. If the government thinks they’ve underpaid, the government has to spend their time and money fighting against expensive financial experts to prove the underpayment.
This is a system that makes it nearly impossible for the poor to avoid income taxes and relatively easy for the wealthy to avoid those taxes. And because it can be difficult and expensive for the government to prove bad behavior by the wealthy, it may often go unchallenged.
A tax at source system for the wealthy would level the playing field.
For example, the government could insist that all payments to banks, payment services and other financial institutions have tax deducted before the account holder receives it. This would ensure that the government knows exactly how much money the wealthy are earning and that they will always get the tax due.
It could also avoid the problem of international coporations making money in one country, but paying the tax on it in another country. All the payments received in each country would be taxed there before businesses received it.
Granted, this may be hard and complex, particularly when taxing large businesses in this way. But taxing the poor at source probably looked hard and complex too and lots of countries made that work. I’m sure they could work it out for the wealthy too. And yes, the wealthy may look to use crypto currencies to avoid such a system, but we can always just ban their use. They mainly only benefit the wealthy and criminally inclined anyway.
So, what’s not fair about a system that taxes the wealthy at source?
Download this post as a wallpaper
Save this post as wallpaper and share it in real life
What you just read? ☝ Shouldn't more people read it?
Share it now, before you forget
