By Bienvenido S. Oplas, Jr.
Should governments be allowed to charge high income
tax rates, or should citizens have the freedom and
choice on how they should spend their earnings and
savings?
After the World War II, socialist thinking spread
throughout the world and became popular among governments.
Using high income tax rates to redistribute wealth
is one of the dominant tools that socialist governments
used to ensure more equality and social progress
of their respective society. However, the emergence
of globalisation in the 1980s and increasing income
tax competition among countries caused a rethinking,
with the rapid progress of globalisation in the
1990s forcing many governments to reduce their personal
and corporate income tax rates. By 2000, only Japan
and some European countries still have marginal
income tax rates of 50 percent or higher.
Learn more about the worldwide development of income
taxation in the full
article and view a chart comparing top income
tax rate in selected countries from 1980 to 2005.
The article also discusses whether the socialist
thinking has really vanished as well as the new
trend of the so-called flat tax and how it benefits
average income earners and commercial firms.
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