Governments around the world are being dragged, in some cases kicking and screaming, into doing something about their budget deficits. The difficulty is that the public will neither pay more tax nor countenance any cuts to entitlements and services. Hence, recent state budgets have been using euphemisms such as ‘efficiency dividends’ and ‘trimming the fat,’ while senior politicians rush to reassure electorates that public service job losses will not affect frontline services.
However, such cloak-and-dagger methods can take you only so far,
especially if (like the United States) you’ve got a trillion-dollar hole to
fill. Perhaps, the thinking goes, where dissembling fails envy might succeed.
After all, everyone knows that the super-rich are rorting the tax system; all
we need to do is raise their taxes so they pay ‘their fair share’ and
everything will be OK, right?
