A Different Role of Taxation. From a One-Sided Taxation To a Circular Taxation

Abstract

The essay explores a possible different use of tax revenue, that is a perspective in which taxation is linked to a public choice in a circular way, thus determining a shift from the traditional “one-side taxation” process to a “circular taxation” process. Starting from the widely studied juridical phenomenon, known in Italy as regeneration of common spaces and goods or simply “regeneration”, and addressing the case of the regeneration of a brownfield, the Author argues that this phenomenon shows some common points with the so-called “circular economy”, since they are both inspired by the same principle of making resources usable in a circular context, exploiting already existing goods and reconverting them in different usable ways. Moreover, “regeneration” of brownfields by pursuing collective interests, among which falls the warding of some taxpayers’ rights (as, for instance, the right to health, the right to education, those concerning human socializing, work, etc.), covers interests that fall in the field of taxation. Yet, there is a peculiar difference, since the “regeneration” process pursues those interests in a most definite and direct way, where taxation pursues the same interests in a mostly expanded and indirect way. The highlighted parallelism suggests the possibility to use taxation in a different way, more similar to that of the regeneration process, stressing the circumstance that regeneration policies, differently by those of taxation, are not one-sided but shared, meaning that the process that leads to the reconversion of a given site starts from the very needs of citizens living that site. Is it then possible to shift from a one-sided to a shared policy also in the field of taxation? Often the process that leads to the granting of a tax benefit is one-sided since it develops only inside public authorities who imagine or hypothesize the outcomes of a given tax benefit, and this can lead to a waste of public expenditures since the concrete “utility” (economic, social, etc.) is not known before. The Author then suggests a different process in which tax expenditure is granted only when the social or economic “utility” that a kind of tax benefit is expected to achieve is already known. A process that can be called “circular taxation”.