Can you be a socialist and support income and consumption taxes? (user search)
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  Can you be a socialist and support income and consumption taxes? (search mode)
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Question: Well, can you?
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Yes
 
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No
 
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Total Voters: 22

Author Topic: Can you be a socialist and support income and consumption taxes?  (Read 533 times)
Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.
Nathan
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« on: October 25, 2021, 04:35:12 PM »

Of course. Only a very peculiar interpretation of Marxism that's very orthodox in some respects and very heterodox in others would come to the conclusion that income taxes are anti-socialist. In reality, a progressive income tax was one of the first demands of socialist parties as they formed across Europe, and remains one of the primary tools of advancing the material interests of the working class.

Now, consumption taxes are regressive and there's an argument to be made that socialists ought to oppose them, but I'm not necessarily sure I'd go that far.

If a government has an extremely expensive redistributive/welfare program that it wants to implement and the country's economy is service-based/post-industrial enough that consumer transactions are genuinely the biggest potential revenue base available, then I think consumption taxes as a primary means of revenue generation can be justified. Not so much situations in which a consumption tax (even in the relatively milquetoast "sales tax" form we have in the US) is levied instead of a perfectly good property tax or income tax increase because high-propensity UMC/PMCs grumble about it less. Or, as Shii Kazuo used to say:

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