The Trend To “No Religion”

Open Culture has an article on the popularity of religious groups in the United States.  The growth of those declaring “no religion” over the last couple of decades is noteworthy.

The reasons given are also interesting.  A non-belief in God is only the fourth most popular reason; complaints about religious institutions scores higher. Much of the decline seems to have come from “mainline” protestant denominations.

These changes have significant political effects:

“Evangelicals punch way above their weight,” says [Ryan] Burge. “They turn out a bunch at the ballot box. That’s largely a function of the fact that they’re white and they’re old” … A 2016 PRRI report noted that “religiously unaffiliated Americans do not vote in the same percentages as evangelicals, and are often underrepresented at the polls … Additionally, and most importantly to point out any time these numbers come up: “the nones” is an entirely overdetermined category full of people who agree on little.”

That compares problematically with the evangelicals who tend to vote a lot and as a bloc.

Image: Industrial Sculpture #1

Voluntary Taxation

It is tax time again.  And yet again I make my pitch for an all-voluntary tax system.

Way back in June 2002, I proposed doing away with all non-voluntary taxation by replacing income and all other taxes with a consumption tax. This is what I wrote in 2002, and I still see little need to change the basic structure proposed:

The basic principles for a new tax scheme are that it should be essentially voluntary, and concerned with ensuring equal opportunities for all. Therefore, I would propose the elimination of all personal and corporate income taxes as they violate by their very nature the voluntary aspect of taxation. I propose to replace the revenue with an all-inclusive sales tax on goods and services with a few, well-defined exceptions (the figures below represent Vancouver costs of living and could be adjusted as required):

• all foods
• shelter (to $24,000/year rent or the first $700,000 of purchase)
• all non-cosmetic medical, dental and optical-health services
• all educational services
• financial services (bank charges etc) to $500/year
• legal services to $2,500/year

The sales tax should be a single percentage across all categories of goods and services in order to reduce accounting and bureaucratic requirements.

The use of the sales tax for the bulk of government revenues brings a great deal of volunteerism to the matter. The exceptions provide an important and necessary break for those goods and services which can be described as the necessities of life; above that, the more I choose to buy, the more taxes I choose to pay.  Rampant consumerism therefore becomes a tax liability.

On the other side of the ledger, also to the good, the simplicity of the scheme allows for huge bureaucratic savings in administration and zero non-compliance. The tax would also be levied on all capital transfers outside the jurisdiction. It will oblige tens of thousands of “tax lawyers” to find genuine productive employment.

All government activity should be categorized into line items that can be shown to have a direct bearing on the level of the sales tax. In this way, the people are enabled to make decisions about what sections of government can be further cut to reduce the level of taxation. Conversely, any additional work to be performed by the government can be readily calculated as an addition to the sales tax.

In other words, the cost of a government service will be immediately and directly calculable — and the people can make their judgments on whether to go ahead with it on that basis. It is one thing to say that a government program costs $600 million — an abstraction at best; it is quite another to say that program x will cause a rise in the sales tax by 1%.

In a capitalist system where the government bureaucracy acts as a nanny on so many issues, taxation of some sort is inevitable, as will be resistance to such taxation. The sales tax that I propose will allow the taxation system to operate on a voluntary basis, thus achieving considerably greater support and compliance.

It might be claimed that rich folks will simply remove their money from Canada to avoid the sales tax.  Possibly true, but in my scheme, the sales tax would apply to all such financial transfers from the moment the scheme is announced.

Finally, I believe that many political types concern themselves far too much with how much money people make. If we concentrate on the input (salaries, bonuses etc) there will always be those who can play fast and loose with the rules.  However, if you apply taxation to outputs (purchases, transfers etc), the returns will always be progressive: the more they spend, the more they’ll pay.