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Taxation
Did you know that taxation can be many items like sales taxes, income tax, gift tax, but it can also be a pain because of taxation without representation? “ Mark Twain once said that there were only two things in life that were as certain as the dawn; death and taxes.” (Taxation, par. 1)
Taxation without representation can be a pain because it is tyranny. “It started out as a slogan in the Revolutionary War. At that time, people were not able to choose representatives to parliament in London, which passed the laws under which they were taxed.”( Taxation without representation is tyranny, Par. 1) To be taxed without the consent of one’s representative in Parliament was a particularly cherished right of the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century. Each additional tax caused fresh resentment among the colonists. In addition, the Americans held to the view of actual representation, meaning in order to be taxed by Parliament, the right should have actual legislators sealed and voting in London. “The British, on the other hand,
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supported the concept of virtual representation, which was based on the belief that a member of Parliament represented every person in the empire and there was no need for a specific representative.” (No Taxation without Representation, par. 3) For example, a member must display the contempt felt by many in the body towards the American arguments. What makes a good tax, it is believed that they should be fair and impartial. Although there is a disagreement on the level of equity of a tax. Some people believe that they are only fair if everyone pays the same amount or a flat tax. Some argue that it is only fair if the higher income families pay more than the lower income families or a progressive tax, but they mostly argue over the equity of tax loopholes seeing as they allow some people to get out of paying the certain taxes. The second standard for a good tax is its simplicity. The tax laws should be intelligible manner so that the taxpayer and tax collector can easily understand them. Although it is not an easy task, people tend to pay their taxes if they understand them. The final principle of a good tax is the efficiency. The tax should be easy to administer and to gain income from. An example would be income tax, which makes other taxes less efficient. Efficiency means that the tax should raise enough revenue to be beneficial. If it does not or hurt it, hurts the economy, it has little value. There are three different types of taxes, they are proportional, progressive, and regressive.
Proportional taxes are taxes that impose the same percentage of taxation on everyone, regardless of the income. If the percentage and average tax rate are constant, regardless of the income the person’s income goes up, but the percentage of total income paid does not change. The second tax is the progressive tax. It imposes a higher percentage rate of taxation on the higher income families. Progressive taxes use a marginal tax rate that increases as the number of taxable income increases. Therefore, the percentage of income paid in tax increase as income goes up. The final tax is the regressive tax. This tax imposes a higher percentage rate of taxation on low incomes than on high incomes. An example would be if the state sales tax were 5% the person with the lower income would pay a greater percentage of their total income in sales
tax.
Taxation can be many different forms. The most common taxes as we know are income tax and sales tax. Income taxes are the taxes that get withheld from your paycheck and then at the end of the year when you file your taxes you get part or all of what your employer withheld. Sales taxes are your taxes the government puts on your goods and services. For example, the sales tax in Georgia is seven. Four percent of that is a state tax, three percent is a county tax to equal seven percent.
Work Cited
Josephson, Amelia. “What Are Income Taxes?” SmartAsset, SmartAsset, 27 Feb. 2018, www.smartasset.com/taxes/what-are-income-taxes.
Jackson, Bill. “Taxation.” 18th And 19th Amendments, www.socialstudieshelp.com/eco_taxation.htm.
“No Taxation without Representation.” Depression-Era Soup Kitchens, www.u-s-history.com/pages/h640.html.
"taxation without representation is tyranny". The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. 8 May. 2018.
Taxes. We hate to love them and love to hate them. The mere mention of the word can stir heated debates and has done so for centuries. None were more prevalent than during colonial times. During this time, with the British Parliament on one side and the colonists on the other, both argued, either verbally or in written text, about which side did or did not have the right to tax the colonies. Soame Jenyns was one of these men who sided with the mother country in the tax debate.
When the colonies were being formed, many colonists came from England to escape the restrictions placed upon them by the crown. Britain had laws for regulating trade and collecting taxes, but they were generally not enforced. The colonists had gotten used to being able to govern themselves. However, Britain sooned changed it’s colonial policy because of the piling debt due to four wars the British got into with the French and the Spanish. The most notable of these, the French and Indian War (or the Seven Years’ War), had immediate effects on the relationship between the colonies and Great Britain, leading to the concept of no taxation without representation becoming the motivating force for the American revolutionary movement and a great symbol for democracy amongst the colonies, as Britain tried to tighten their hold on the colonies through various acts and measures.
Self-governance was a primary idea of the settlers in North America. Once English settlers began to come to the new world in the 1600s, they knew they needed to have their own freedom for themselves, after all that is why they left Great Britain in many cases. Self-governance is most notable in the earliest form of the Mayflower Compact in 1620 for Virginia. Great Britain began to deteriorate the self-governing nature of the colonies in the mid-1700s through various acts it deemed to be necessary. The enforcement of these acts caused the colonists to be unhappy with the actions Great Britain was taking and so the phrase “taxation without representation is tyranny” came.
Imagine living in a country where no citizen has a say in the government’s actions. Envision a nation where the ruler can tax people without permission and the common people are forced to obey without question. That was life in The Colonies before the year of 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was created. Great Britain passed laws whether it benefited the people or not. Before the Declaration of Independence was composed, a plethora of unnecessary taxes were approved. These taxes sent many colonists into debt. According to “The Declaration of Independence, 1776,” published on Office of the Historian, a famous tax called the Stamp Act was passed by Parliament. This tax forced colonists to purchase stamps for every paper product
After the Great War for Empire, the British parliament began carrying out taxes on the colonists to help pay for the war. It was not long from the war that salutary neglect was brought on the colonies for an amount of time that gave the colonists a sense of independence and identity. A farmer had even wrote once: “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world” (Doc H). They recognized themselves as different than the British, so when parliament began passing bills to tax without representation there was an outcry of mistreatment. Edmund Burke, a man from parliament, sympathized with the colonists: “Govern America as you govern an English town which happens not to be represented in Parl...
The war had been enormously expensive, and the British government’s attempts to impose taxes on colonists to help cover these expenses resulted in chaos. English leaders, were not satisfied with the financial and military help they had received from the colonists during the war. In a desperate attempt to gain control over the colonies as well as the additional revenue to pay off the war debt, Britain began to force taxes on the colonies. Which resulted in The Stamp Act, passed by parliament and signed by the king in March 1765. The Stamp Act created an excise tax on legal documents, custom papers, newspapers, almanacs, college diplomas, playing cards, and even dice. Obviously the colonist resented the Stamp Act and the assumption that parliament could tax them whenever and however they could without their direct representation in parliament. Most colonials believed that taxation without their consent was a violation of their constitutional rights as Englishmen. Which is where the slogan “No Taxation without Representation” comes
One of the many repercussions of the French and Indian war was that Great Britain had accumulated an enormous amount of war debt. The British needed to pay this off and thought it would only be fair if the Colonies repaid the war debt. The settlers in the Colonies were the ones who had caused the war and were the ones who benefited from it the most so the decision to implement taxes on the people of the colonies was completely justified. These taxes not only helped repay the war debt but also protect the Colonies from the deleterious natives who often attacked settlers moving west. The colonists were simply not ready for change because for much of the past the Colonies acted as sovereign nations, each with its own individual rules and taxes. The colonists had grown to love the lack of regulation that England had not placed upon them for many years prior. So much so that when Parliament did enforce new laws the colonists became extremely angry because all of the benefits from the lack of regulation and taxes were soon going to be gone. The purpose of the Colonies was to benefit Great...
Reid, John Phillip. Constitutional History of the American Revolution / the Authority to Tax. Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin, 1987. 33. Print.
Taxation without representation is still used today as the moto for Washington D.C. because Washington D.C. has no representation in Congress but its residents are still taxed by the government, much like the colonist were by the British. This has caused certain problems in Washington D.C., like how it caused problems between the colonists and British just to a much lesser extent. The difference in the situation with Washington D.C. is that the United States government was willing to compromise. In order for Washington D.C. to have a representative they would need to become a state and while congress cannot currently do that without conflicting with the principles of federalism, the national government allowed Washington D.C. to have a local government instead in turn for taxing them with no representation. This is a significant difference from what was happening between the colonies and Great Britain because Great Britain was unwilling to compromise. Great Britain took greater control over the colonies economically and politically through increased taxes, acts, and proclamations because of a gigantic influx in debt that needed to be paid as a result in Great Britain’s intervention in the Seven Years’ war because the colonists were failing to win. This
without representation.” That meant the king was taxing them without a person they elected to
What would you do if you were being taxed a lot of money from the powerful government and your opinion meant nothing to them? Well this is the situation the American colonists faced before the American Revolutionary war. The French and Indian war in the 1760s. The British government needed money to pay for the war, so King George III passed the laws to tax all the colonists. The colonists became very mad and then began the American War. Two British actions that the colonist thought were unfair were the high taxes without colonist representation in the British parliament and the quartering of the British soldiers in colonial buildings. The two ations the colonists took to resist the British was The Boston Tea Party and boycotting British goods.
After the British signed the Quartering Act, anger filled the colonists: The British were taxing goods without the colonists’ input. “No taxation without representation,” became a common slogan for the colonists (Lukes 10). Stephen Johnson, an angry colonist, said, “Why not tax us for the light of the sun, the air we breathe and the ground we are buried in?” (Lukes 35).
Taxation has always been a major controversy. Just like any major corporation, the government is constantly looking to raise revenue. The easiest and fairest way to do this is by taxing the people. However, how the people will be taxed is always an issue.
The system that government uses to raise money, to finance the country and to fund their activities for serving the public is called the Taxation. Taxation system has different types such as: the proportional tax, the progressive tax and the regressive tax. This research paper focus on the advantages of progressive tax system in which we believe that it is the best way of solution with respect to setting tax among families because this type of taxation obliges only a specific rate for every income tax bracket instead of the proportional tax system which uses latter’s fixed rate.
Justice. Based on this principle, the tax should be determined by the overall objective of the rules which society recognizes as the most fair and reasonable. Everyone has to give the state the "right share." One of the taxation principles of justice requires that the taxes should be paid for those who use public services. According to another specter of justice taxation...