Comparing Tax Burdens

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 457.

One way to compare tax burdens is to examine taxes over time in the same country; another is to compare taxes in different countries at the same time. By comparing taxes over time in the United States, we find that the tax burden of U.S. citizens has indeed been growing. For the average family, the percentage of income that goes to all federal, state, and local taxes doubled to 23 percent between 1953 and 1980. During the same period, the taxes of wealthy families increased by two-thirds, to 33 percent of their income.

However, neither the federal government nor the federal income tax accounts for the bulk of that increase. First, national taxes as a percentage of the gross national product have changed very little over the last thirty years; it is the state and local tax burden that has doubled in size. Second, the income tax has not been the major culprit in the increasing tax bite at the federal level; the proportion of federal budget receipts contributed by income tax has remained fairly constant since the end of World War II. The largest increases have come in social security taxes, which have risen steadily to pay for the government's largest single social welfare program, aid to the elderly.

Another way of comparing tax burdens is to examine tax rates in different countries. Americans' taxes are quite low compared with those in twenty-one other democratic nations.

(from “The Challenge of Democracy”)

Tasks:

do the phonetic reading and written literary translation of the fifth and the sixth passages

put 12 questions to the text;

give the summary of the text;

retell the text as if you were:

1) a moderately rich person;

2) a person with the average income;

3) a private entrepreneur of small business;

4) an owner of a large enterprise;

5) a government member trying to eliminate the black market;

6) a chief accountant seeking some loopholes in taxation;

7) a foreign investor.