Taxation

Every time you walk into a national park, library, museum, have you ever wondered who is maintaining this huge establishment cost? Every time NASA announces some path-breaking space mission, who is behind the massive funding? The Nation's security needs to be organized with state of art precision weapons-who will pay for that? The answer is simple, we all, the dependable tax payers.

A tax is a levy or financial charge which is imposed by the government or a legal entity by a state, on an individual. Administrative wings like local governments or provinces, municipal bodies, counties, etc can also impose tax. Partial payment or non-payment of tax leads to civil and criminal penalties.The rules and regulations guiding the taxation and finance differ from one country to another. An American citizen might happen to pay taxes to four separate government tiers.

Purpose of taxation

The Purpose of Taxation to the respective authorities can be classified into four ideas:

Revenue:

We all need good and cleaner roads to ply, better education, and health-care options like hospitals and clinics. Tax collected from us will act as the source of revenue for any government or legal authorities like municipalities.

Redistribution:

This is a very debatable yet arguably an important purpose of taxation. It aims at properly distributing the wealth among all sections-the well to do and not so well offs. It is a common practice in any democratic nation, but the way and the proportion it is done varies form nation to nation, government to government.

Repricing:

With global warming as a threatening issue we have all heard that some activists and governments are in favor of imposing taxes on industries emitting toxic carbons. This example illustrates the fact that taxes can be levied to address certain externalities too.

Representation:

Another debatable purpose is this representation of the common people in politics and government, or asking for the accountability for the peoples' money. The phraseology 'Taxes are imposed upon people without their consent' might have acted as rhetoric during the American Revolution, to make them shout 'No taxation without representation'. These days some times less importance is given to this fact.

Keywords:

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