The Tax Working Group also raised the issue of the declining tax base. The largest slice of tax income each year, equating to 40 per cent of the total, comes from individual income tax – the stuff that comes out of your wages. Of the OECD countries, only a handful of national tax takes have a greater proportion of income tax payments. He suggested a way of avoiding complexity around valuations while also taxing wealth would be to go for a straight land tax. “What we have is land, what’s untaxed is land.” A land tax would be relatively more easy to implement as land values were independently calculated for rating purposes.

Source: Stuff June 29, 2020 08:03 UTC