Tax Justice: A Christian Response to a New Gilded Age

From the U.S. Presbyterian Church, a report written by a former World Bank economist entitled  “Tax Justice: A Christian Response to a New Gilded Age”.

As the summary notes, it

“provides a framework for engaging in discussions about the large and growing concentration of income and wealth in U.S. society and about the tax structure as part of an agenda for addressing economic inequities.”

The study looks at the U.S. tax system through the lens of five core principles:

1. progressivity in allocating the tax burden across households at different wealth levels. 
2. transparency that fully informs democratic decisions,
3. social solidarity supports our life together as a community,
4. ecological and fiscal sustainability that take a longer term view of systems that fuel the economy, and
5. adequacy in raising revenue to fund appropriate and necessary government activity.

That is a sound set of principles for tax justice. The full report, engaging with a wide array of themes that we at TJN are familiar with, including the phenomenon known as ‘tax competition’ (which we prefer to call ‘tax wars‘) is here.