In a message dated 1/16/03 3:31:01 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << > Given democracy, one (adult) person, one vote, a strong case can be made > for a "neutral" poll tax. > Tom Grey
Fred writes: <<The poll tax is what got Maggie Thatcher thrown out of office in the UK. <<The problem is that different people benefit differently from government services, and so the poll tax is not well correlated with benefits. <<The poll tax also amounts to forced labor. The poll tax is how the colonial governments in Africa got the natives to work in the fields. So the poll tax is not really neutral: 1) it is not related to benefits, hence it subsidizes some and penalizes others. 2) it forces workers to work extra to pay the tax in order to get some amount of net income. Fred Foldvary >> It seems to me that we have a problem with the meaning of "neutrality" here. Tom seems to see it as meaning that we each pay the same amount regardless of circumstances, while Fred seems to see it as meaning that people in different circumstances should not pay the same amount. If I've come close with the apparent definitions here, it seems to me that Fred's meaning contains a value taken from Progressive thinking, which I find rather surprising. In colonial and early republican America, some colonies/states imposed poll taxes, and some made paying the poll tax a requirement for voting. I'm not sure what, if any, other penalties the states had for failure to pay the poll tax. Even though I've been relatively poor (by American standards) most of my adult life and yet have always voted, I find some appeal in the notion of having to pay some small poll tax in order to vote. If every adult had to pay a quarterly federal poll tax of merely $25, (an assuming for the sake of argument that most of them paid), the federal government would raise roughly $15 billion dollars. While that's only a percent of annual federal spending, it's still a sizable chunk of change (which I'd be happy to take if everybody else thinks it's too small). I couldn't replace the income tax of course, but it could be the keystone to a different, lighter federal tax system. Frankly I don't want to see the federal government take a third of the nation's income by any method. I do like the idea, however, that to vote for who runs the legal system you have to contribute at least something to the running of the system. I'm not sure that such a small tax would actually discourage net beneficiaries of government benefits from voting themselves more of other peoples' incomes, but it might discourage some of the core supports of socialist programs not to bother voting at all. It would also allow the libertarians (and independents) who don't want to vote to op out of paying for at least a share of the system they don't support (assuming no other penalty for non-payment besides not being able to vote). As I understand it, Thatcher allowed the local governments in the UK to impose the poll tax in the ways that they saw fit, and with Labour stronger in many of the local governments, they ensured that the poll tax got imposed in the nastiest possible way in order to discredit Thatcher. I do think, however, that the notion of poll taxes at least used to have a powerful negative connotation in American politics so that it might easily be a loser politically here, and of course if a Republican proposed it no doubt the Democrats and their allies in the news media would castigate it as another attempt to tax and disenfranchise the poor, etc. I think though that decades of liberal-dominated public education has so vitiated the historical education of most American students that by now almost nobody under the age of 40 even knows what a poll tax is, much less that, for instance, Southern racists once used it to disenfranchise blacks, so it might not receive as chilly a reception as it would have 20 or 25 years ago. Still, as an intellectual participating in a discussion with other intellectual I have some expectation that someone will bash me for saying I find some merit the idea of poll taxes; as a politician running for office I'd avoid it like the plague. :) David B. Levenstam
