Whenever we have to pay a tax we ask ourselves what the State will do with our money, what it will use it for, how it will verify that it has not been wasted. Concern is inevitable because we distrust the administration.
However, as Professor Rita de la Fuente explains, "taxes are the basis of our societies." "It is not possible," she adds, "to have wonderful public services and pay less taxes."
De la Fuente is a professor at the University of Leeds and a researcher at the Center for Business Taxation at the University of Oxford. From the academy she tries to make fiscal policies more equitable and more efficient.
If "everything around us is the result of taxation, we must strive to make it as effective as possible," he says in this new installment of the video podcast Re-Imagine Europe, which La Vanguardia publishes exclusively in Spanish.
The problem is that the most egalitarian is not always the most effective. Perfect equity, as De la Fuente explains, is that which meets the needs of each citizen individually, but the most effective is that which seeks the benefit of a group of people, not a particular individual.
Therefore, the solution to which any State must aspire involves a balance between the needs of the individual and those of society as a whole.
