History of taxation

An essay on austerity politics from the blog of Alex Himelfarb, sociologist, former top federal civil servant:

In one way or another, Canadians have been living with austerity for several decades. Admittedly, we have experienced nothing like what the Greeks or Spanish have gone through. Ours has been an austerity in slow motion, but austerity nonetheless and austerity largely self-imposed.

In Canada, for example, taxes as a percentage of the economy are lower than they have been since the days before medicare and universal pensions. Total government spending as a portion of the economy is below the OECD average. And when it comes to social spending, we are near the bottom. Here in Ontario, following a round of unaffordable tax cuts, cuts to vital services accelerate, even though Ontario’s per capita spending is the lowest of all the provinces.

And while Canadians not so long ago voted for governments that vowed to end the austerity, the previous decades of tax cuts constrained their options and none were willing to reverse those cuts in significant ways. Any tax increase for some was typically joined by an even more costly tax cut for others. And, now, for many, austerity at full throttle seems to be making a comeback.

Is there a counter-argument to this? I mean, there are conservatives who promise "We'll cut taxes." But there a case being made that, contra Himelfarb, today's taxes are higher than they used to be? Or that in a complicated society like today's, we have less need for public services like health and education?

More history of taxes (which is better than more taxes, I guess)

See why historians should welcome anniversaries and centenaries?  Canada150 sparked more lively and useful debate about Reconciliation than almost anything else has managed to do.  The War of 1812 started some lively discussion about militarism and "old" history. The Vimy 100 seemed to conclude with a decisive victory in the meaning of Vimy wars for the Ian McKay forces. 

And to add to the Heaman, Tillotson, and Tough histories of income tax at its one hundredth, recently noted by Active History's Tax Week (okay, it's not quite as big as Shark Week...), comes news that the Canadian Tax Foundation has its own tax history book, Income Tax at 100 Years, a collection of conference pieces edited by Jinyan Li, Scott Wilkie, and Larry F. Chapman and available from the foundation's website  ($90, however, maybe for specialists or libraries!)

Who's afraid of taxation history?

David Tough wraps up Active History's "Income Tax History" week with an essay about "boring history." He explores the virtues of working through boredom, boredom as tool of the market economy, and David Foster Wallace on boredom. He's too polite to say so, but one suspects the "someones" who mock his field as boring --

People who suggest that my work must be boring intend to insult my taste, but they really insult my craft.

 -- may include a lot of his fellow scholars. After all, he declares himself a "political historian" (All the income tax essays this week have been highly political). And political history has been unfashionable in the academy for quite a while. As I think I was trying to grasp a week or so ago, "Boring!" is a way to celebrating one's one ignorance.

The boredom that people evince when they sense they’re in danger of encountering tax history is the boredom of disgust, not surfeit.... [T]hey want you to never start talking about it.

History of income tax again

Who says anniversaries don't matter?  The centenary of the introduction of federal income tax in Canada seems to be disproving that. Today Active History launches a five-part series on income tax history with a lively piece by David Tough arguing, more or less, that everything you know about income tax is wrong.

It wasn’t a temporary tax, and no, it wasn’t introduced to pay for the First World War...

More to the point, income taxation wasn’t brought in by an overzealous government using the war as a pretext for a money grab.

Tough's book on the subject is promised for 2018. This year we already have E.A Heaman's Tax, Order and Good Government, on pre-income tax public revenues in Canada, and Shirley Tillotson's Give and Take, on income tax 1917-1967. All three scholars insist on a fundamentally political analysis of income (and other) taxes.  Tough emphasizes the farmer and labour insistance on "conscripting wealth" through income tax, and Tillotson considers the two-way relationship that developed between taxation and representation.

Both the history of taxation and the political history of the country look to being usefully reshaped by this scholarly flurry of responses to the anniversary.