Practice reading the following words and collocations

a) expenditure, authority, specific, unrequited, individuals, budgetary, required, municipal, monetary, exemptions, redistribute, inequalities, involuntary, bound, failure, amount, imprisonment, merely, macroeconomic;

b) financial burdens, legal entities, mandatory levies, source of government revenue, sever penalties, national debt;

c) to be defined, to contribute towards, to be regularly imposed, to give effect, to be subject to, to be owed.

WHAT ARE TAXES?

People often say there are only two things a person can be safe of in life: death and taxes. What are taxes? Taxes are defined as financial burdens borne by individuals and legal entities according to their ability to contribute towards the expenditures of public authority without a specific compensation. Taxes are compulsory levies that are regularly imposed and, as a rule, not destined for a special purpose; they are regarded as a contribution to the State Budget from which most government expenditures are financed in the common interest of the society. Taxes differ from other mandatory levies in that they are unrequited – i.e., they are not paid in exchange for some specific services or any particular benefit but represent a general obligation of taxpayers. In other words, there is no relationship between the tax paid by the person and the benefits received as a result of public expenditure. In modern economies taxes are the most important source of government revenue.

Taxes are considered to have three functions:

1) fiscal or budgetary, to cover government expenditures, to provide the public authorities with the revenue required for meeting the cost of defence, social services, interest payments on the national debt, municipal services, etc.;

2) economic, to give effect to economic policy, to promote such general aims as full employment, monetary stability, to influence the stable satisfactory rate of economic growth of the nation, and also to influence the macroeconomic performance of the economy (the government’s strategy for doing this is called its fiscal policy. To achieve this aim tax exemptions are used.);

3) social or redistribute, to increase the welfare of the community, to lessen

inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth by redistributing resources between individuals or classes of the population. Historically, the nobility were supported by taxes on the poor. Modern social security systems are intended to support the poor, the disabled or the retired by taxes on those who are still working.

Taxes are compulsory involuntary payments and every citizen of the country is legally bound to the tax imposed on him. Failure to pay taxes, or paying less than one owes, can lead to substantial penalties (besides just the tax owed). If the failure to pay or the payment of incorrectly low amount is deemed intentional, not merely a mistake, it is a crime subject to more sever penalties, including large fines and imprisonment.