Tax justice: the debate is open
In the frame of our tax justice campaign, Social Platform hosted the debate “Social justice, democracy… and taxes” animated by Francine Mestrum.
As a researcher specialised in globalization, poverty, inequality, development and global governance, she has been looking at taxation as a crosscutting issue able to substantially affect all kinds of public policy. The current political, economic and social crisis and the resulting growing inequalities across the EU should lead us to re-think our social protection systems and ask ourselves what kind of society we actually want. And before going into technicalities, the political vision by which we are filtering our position should be clarified.
Talking about taxation, she highlighted two main points to the debate.
The first is the relation between taxes and democracy. The question we need to answer is: what role do we want the State to play in social protection? Do we want it to be responsible for welfare or not? Because it is here that a question of governments’ accountability arises, especially at the supranational level.
Next is the issue of what links should there be between taxes and social protection? Do we want a direct contribution system, or an indirect one? This brings into the debate issues as to the role of the trade unions, social partners and basic income propositions.
Defining these points becomes even more urgent if we look at the EU level. Do we want the EU to have more responsibilities for social policies? And if so, for which ones? What if we decide that in order to do it, the EU needs to set up a direct taxation system? The same problem, and debate, occurs at a global level: which institution should manage the revenues of an international tax?
The interactive debate also discussed capital taxes and their functioning; social security provisions in different contribution systems; use of tax revenues; labour cost and tax shift; and, progressivity of taxation. Moreover, increased transparency is needed in the taxation system and the involvement of citizens in this debate is very urgent.
