On The House Property Tax Reform From The Principle Of Tax Fairness

Taxes are the economic bases of the government machine. Tax fairness is a concretemanifestation of fairness and justice which the laws always pursue in the field of taxation. Itoriginated in the United Kingdom. William Petty explained the principles of tax fairness first,then Adam Smith raised tax fairness to the level of theory, made his famous four principles oftax-equality, economy, convenience and determination. Adolf Wagner developed the fourprinciples of tax of Adam Smith. He combined the four principles of Adam Smith into theprinciple of tax administration and the principle of social justice. In the modern tax theory, theprinciples of tax fairness includes substantial fairness of tax and procedural fairness of tax.And the general principle of tax, the amount of energy taxation principles and the principle ofequality of taxation are important parts of tax fairness.As a kind of property tax, house tax is levied on houses, based on housing tax residualvalue or rental income. In the field of real estate tax, the principle of tax fairness has thefunction to refrain speculation, demand for housing security, regulate China’s real estatemarket. The Chinese government has introduced a series of macro-control measures to adjustthe real estate market, including the house tax reform. Chongqing and Shanghai wereincluded into the first experiment cities introducing individual housing property tax. However,in the current property tax system, there exists vacancy in the fairness of tax procedures andtax entities. This absence of principle of tax fairness is mainly attributed to the obstructionfrom the vested interests and property tax reform interference caused by multiple goals.I believe that tax fairness should be the most fundamental goal of housing tax reform.From the tax fairness perspective, this article is intended to explain and introduce the author’ssome views by comparing relevant provisions on these issues about estate tax regime one byone of the UK, U.S., Japan, France and other countries’ estate tax regime, in order to improveour house tax system.