The Citizens and the Taxes that Comes Up

The ability to pay of citizens, whose surest clue is income, is what offers a concrete measure for the distribution of taxes. This theory has the great merit of indicating the relationship between state and taxpayer as it really manifests itself in modern public life, but perhaps it is not even perfect in the cause of a certain indeterminacy, because when he states what source of the tax must be the income, he expresses an exact concept for himself, but does not yet tell us whether it is necessary to take into account the various sources from which the income comes, its extent and of the varying intensity and extent of the needs that it must satisfy.

The Other Options

On the other hand, according to the theory of relative utility or collective value the tax would be only that part of private wealth that citizens voluntarily and spontaneously turn, to the extent for each class indicated by the hedonistic principle, to the satisfaction of public needs. But this theory cannot be fully accepted, because it represents the relations between citizens and the state not as they are, but as they should ideally be. Here the role played by the tax calculator is importantly about the people.

What Kind of Resistance Theories are There in tax

And the point of least resistance of this theory lies in the fact that it does not demonstrate how, from the individual evaluation that each citizen makes of the relationship between the tax he pays and the utility of the service he receives, that objective evaluation is formed that is imposed on the ruler as the norm of its action. E. Sax who was the first and most authoritative advocate of this theory, he says that the ruler averages all individual evaluations and follows this average as his norm for the production of public goods and services.

  • This media concept is not convincing. Why, or is it about needs; that is, ideals or interests that are common to all (such as public security, justice, health, education), and in this case it is not an average of the various needs, but a general need; or they are needs that are felt by some but not by others, and it is not possible to make an average between two conflicting wills, as Fr. ex. the one in favor of a colonial enterprise and the one inclined to the extension of workers’ insurance. In this case it is the government that decides, inspired by the social principles prevailing in a given society.

Minimum Sacrifice

The theory of minimum sacrifice , expounded by Bro. I. Edgeworth in 1897, argues that, in order to have a just distribution of taxes, it is necessary to choose those which least hinder production and least alter the previous distribution of wealth. But this too falls short of indicating rather a goal to be achieved than a positive criterion capable of regulating the distribution of taxes.