Phil Markey
What if governments stopped taxing the creation of wealth and instead concentrated taxation on its consumption?The Consumption Tax Economy develops a new economic model built around a simple proposition: progressively remove taxation from income, employment and the accumulation of productive capital, and shift the principal burden of taxation to final consumption.Britain provides the detailed real-world case study, allowing the proposal to be tested against an existing tax system, government expenditure, welfare state, healthcare system, public debt and international trading relationships. But the underlying model is not inherently British. The same principles can be examined in any developed economy capable of taxing final consumption while reducing taxation of production, employment and capital formation.The book asks what such a transition would actually do. Would removing taxes from work increase employment and productivity? Would greater retention of income accelerate saving, investment and capital formation? Could economic growth expand the consumption-tax base sufficiently to finance government? What would happen to prices, inflation, inequality, pensions, welfare and public services? How could international trade, tourism, border leakage and tax avoidance be managed?Rather than assuming favourable outcomes, the model is subjected to fiscal modelling, thirty-year projections, sensitivity analysis, sector analysis and explicit failure conditions. The transition is designed as an adaptive process in which tax changes depend upon measured economic and fiscal outcomes rather than predetermined assumptions.The result is both a policy proposal and a hypothesis open to examination: is taxing the creation of wealth economically less efficient than taxing wealth when it is ultimately consumed?Written for economists, policymakers, academics, students, businesspeople and readers interested in taxation and political economy, The Consumption Tax Economy invites its central proposition to be tested, challenged and, where necessary, broken.
