Ad the great Dr Gregory House puts it: “Everybody lies.” ... One explanation of this is the simple fact of human selfishness – we all want other people to pay for things.
It was refreshing to hear it being said so loud and clear: tax is good. Hooray for tax. Speaker after speaker made the same basic point. Taxation is not something imposed by some external alien “them” on some hard-done-by “us”. Taxation is all about the us: it is the way we organise ourselves as a society, it is the support we owe to each other – a tick in the box for the common good. So we ought to be proud of paying tax rather than being proud of the clever ways we invent of getting round it. But what political party had the guts to say such things? Has the Labour party finally found its bottle? Of course not. It wasn’t politicians at all. It was collection of vicars, NGO-types and an ex-archbishop at the launch of Christian Aid’s new report on taxation and morality. I know: Central Casting do-gooders, you might think. Easy for them to say. Forget bible tax collectors are heroes of democracy
US IRS Commissioner Koskinen’s view of the revolving door:
It was refreshing to hear it being said so loud and clear: tax is good. Hooray for tax. Speaker after speaker made the same basic point. Taxation is not something imposed by some external alien “them” on some hard-done-by “us”. Taxation is all about the us: it is the way we organise ourselves as a society, it is the support we owe to each other – a tick in the box for the common good. So we ought to be proud of paying tax rather than being proud of the clever ways we invent of getting round it. But what political party had the guts to say such things? Has the Labour party finally found its bottle? Of course not. It wasn’t politicians at all. It was collection of vicars, NGO-types and an ex-archbishop at the launch of Christian Aid’s new report on taxation and morality. I know: Central Casting do-gooders, you might think. Easy for them to say. Forget bible tax collectors are heroes of democracy
US IRS Commissioner Koskinen’s view of the revolving door:
So I’ve always said the best testimonial to a good place to work is people are forever coming in and trying to steal your people. And so I would be delighted to have young people come here for two or three years and some of them get recruited away because they were so good and the training is so good, because the more of that that happens, the more people are going to stand in line to get here. And as I say, the experience is, because it would be a great place to work, is the capture rate would be terrific.
Howard Gleckman, Why Tax Lawyers and Tax Economists Can’t Communicate
Note a 2011 essay in the American Sociological Review, by Delhey, Newton, and Welzel. Most papers on trust work with general questionnaire responses, but those queries often conflate whether you trust the people you know, or the people who surround you, with whether you trust your government and other larger social institutions. You can imagine for instance that a country could have strong interpersonal trust at the micro level but also lots of cynicism about its establishment power structures.
