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  3. After a run of several thousand years, it is entirely fitting that 2000 will

After a run of several thousand years, it is entirely fitting that 2000 will

游客2025-05-07  24
问题     After a run of several thousand years, it is entirely fitting that 2000 will be marked as the year the tide turned against taxation. Clay tablets recall the taxes of Hammurabi in the Babylon of 2000BC, but the practice is certainly older. People in power have always tried to divert some of the proceeds of economic activity in their own direction. Lords took feudal dues from their vassals; landowners took tolls from merchants; gangsters took protection money from small businesses; governments took taxes from their citizens. Despite the different names, the principle has remained constant: those who do not produce take resources from those who do, and spend it on altogether different things.
    The tide is turning because of the convergence of several factors, in the first place, taxes are becoming harder to collect. Capital is more mobile than ever, and inclined to fly from places that tax to places that do not. Governments do not move their boundaries and jurisdictions as rapidly as companies can change locations. Attempts to establish trans-national tax powers are almost certainly, ably doomed by international competition to attract economic activity.  Many businesses will choose to stay out of reach.
    The global economy and the Internet mean that purchases can now cross frontiers. People buy books, clothes, and cars from abroad, and any finance minister who likes to tax these items find his tax base diminishing. It is not only capital and goods which are harder to pin down. Even wages are crossing frontiers. The rise of the service sector means that many income-generating activities can take place across frontiers, causing yet more headaches for overstretched public treasuries. Furthermore, the pace of electronic, hard-to-trace activity is accelerating.
    No less important has been the rise of political resistance. The past quarter-century has been marked by a movement led in Britain and America itself in California’s famous tax-cutting referendum Proposition 13, but saw its fullest expression in the Thatcher and Reagan tax cuts of the 1980’s. Britain’s Tories entered office in 1979 with the top rate of income tax at 98%, and left office 18 years later with a top rate of 40%. Indeed, their Labour opponents became electable only after a firm promise not to raise it again. The plain fact is that electorates these days will not stand for it. They recognize, correctly, that governments spend their money less carefully and less efficiently than they can spend it themselves.
    One of the greatest uses of tax money is to provide pensions. And here a revolution--as important and pervasive as privatization--is sweeping the world. Fully-funded personal pension plans, based on individual savings, are sweeping away the poorly funded public pensions promised by governments. The latter take taxes from the young to support the old. The former invest savings from the young to support themselves when old. [br] According to this article, the people who have many problems relating to tax are ______.
选项 A、the old.
B、the young.
C、the banks.
D、the finance ministers of various countries.
答案 D
解析
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