What Brazil Can Teach the World

Written by Guy Burton    Last weekend central London was host to a tax protest. The thousands who marched were campaigning against the council tax, a levy which every household must pay to help maintain local government finances. ...The tax has been in place since the early 1990s and supplements the grant ministers make to municipal authorities. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats, the third force in British politics after Labour and the Conservatives, have begun a campaign to abolish the property value-based council tax and replace it with a local income tax. ...But replacing the council tax with a local income tax won't address this problem. All it will do is swap one form of tax collection and may well maintain the disconnection many voters feel that they have any stake in the way their taxes are spent. http://www.brazzil.com/content/view/1639/51/