Friday 13 March 2020

Reflections on the DPRK's Abolition of Taxation -special article by Dr Dermot Hudson

                                                         

The other day a large white envelope from my local authority arrived . It was the council tax bill for the coming financial year  April 2020 to March 2021 . My council tax had gone up from £92 to £96 per month . Daylight robbery if you ask me . I do not know how the council expect people to pay this kind of money . It is an increase of 4.37 per cent , an increase above the rate of inflation . I honestly do not know why we have to pay council tax, it is a most unnecessary tax , you wonder what they do with . Recently , the property management company told us that we are charged by them to for rubbish removal . I wondered what we are paying council tax for ?. It is a fact that in the UK you can be jailed for not paying council tax or have the bailiffs sent in .


                                             

In the UK we not only have Council tax but Income tax/PAYE , national insurance , VAT , inheritance tax  and other taxes . 
  Yet there is one country in the world that abolished taxation : the Democratic People's Republic of Korea . Soon on the 21st of March it will be 46 years since all taxation was abolished in the DPRK . 
Yes all taxes were abolished . In fact the agricultural tax in kind was abolished by 1966.
    After the liberation of Korea from Japan  on August 15 1945) the predatory  tax system of the Japanese imperialists was abolished and a popular and democratic tax system was established in the DPRK, thus putting an end to over 50 kinds of miscellaneous taxes and turning the taxation into a single one.
   In 1955 the government of the DPRK again cut the income tax of the workers and office employees by 30 percent, sharply reduced the tax burden of the handicraft workers, entrepreneurs and merchants and decreased the agricultural tax in kind from 25 percent of the grain output to 20.1 percent on an average. From 1959 it reduced the agricultural tax in kind to 8.4 per cent . After the abolition of the agricultural tax in kind in 1966 the only taxes left were the tax on income and local authority tax . Because social services were funded by the revenue from state owned industries there was no need for the DPRK government to levy taxes on people any more . So in March 1974 the Supreme People's Assembly passed the Law on the Abolition of Taxation which went into effect on the 1st of April 
1974. Goodbye taxes !
                                        


Looking at the demand for council tax I reflected on the happy lives of the citizens of the DPRK who are free from taxation . No DPRK citizen or family comes home one day to find an extortionate demand for council tax ! How I envy the lives of Korean people under Juche socialism !

Dr Dermot Hudson
Chairman British Group for the Study of the Juche Idea
President Association for the Study of Songun Politics
Official Delegate Korean Friendship Association/ Chairman UK KFA
Chairman British Solidarity Committee for Peace and Reunification in Korea
hon secretary general International Central Committee for the Study of Songun Politics

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