Personal income tax which makes up 46%of all revenue.

Western European nations - Germany, Denmark, Belgium.

Corporations hide their profits, moving their headquarters to low corporation tax nations e.g. Ireland, Luxemburg and Switzerland.

9%

Unlike sales taxes, income taxes are progressive meaning that the wealthiest individuals pay a larger proportion than low income households e.g. in USA the wealthiest 5% of earners pay almost 50% of income tax revenue. 

Unlike corporation and income tax, sales taxes do not discourage hard work or entrepreneurship as they are regressive.

Sales taxes can be used to discourage the consumption of certain kinds of goods - cigarettes, alcohol, petrol e.t.c.

Current expenditure - 10% on education, 10% Police and defence combined, 5% on interest payments

Transfer payments - 50% which goes on social security payments and health care plus the 2% of the budget which goes to foreign aid. 

£ 175 bn

The government was putting up for sale, £16 bn of national assets including student loan debt, The Dartford tunnel, Channel tunnel link and a property portfolio.  The government is expecting to make £3bn this year.

Receiving the full market value for the assets is unachievable, given the state of the economy and the fact that potential buyers are aware of the government's desperation to sell

It raises revenue in the short term but then deprives the economy of revenue in the long term.  Individually students and car drivers are concerned that their costs will rise following the sale.

On the other hand, the government stresses that the alternative would mean savage cuts to public services.

The video argues that rather than reducing national debt reducing taxes actually makes the problem worse.  This is because taxation reduces hte incentive for businesses to invest and individuals to work.  Therefore, the video claims that higher taxes reduce income in the economy which means that government ends up taking a larger and larger slice of an increasingly smaller cake.  The video instead suggests that governments should instead focus on reducing the size of government spending.  They point to the fact that government revenue is now 3 times higher than 1950s, because of increases in spending.  Therefore, the USA's problem can be summarised as excessive spending, rather than falling taxation. 

The table appears neither to confirm of rule out the claims made in activity 3.  The presidencies of Barrack Obama and Ronald Reagan saw significant rises in US debt and both also made tax cuts a central plank of their economic policy.  Donald Trump has done likewise and his term in office has already witnessed more than $2 Trillion added to the nation's debt.  An up to date record of the nation's debt can be viewed on the following simulation: National debt clock

As the New York Times addressed in February 2019, when the federal debt ticked past $22 trillion this week, neither political party appears to be making a priority of debt reduction.  In part this is because the nation is able to borrow in its own currency (unlike many other nations) and the US is also able to attract some of the lowest interest rates in the world on the money it borrows.

Larry Kudlow, the director of President Trump’s National Economic Council, for example stated that 'the scale of the debt was not a problem'.  Similarly, leading Democrats also have left the issue largely untouched.  Several members of the emerging field of presidential candidates have proposed tax increases, but they have generally presented those plans as antidotes for economic inequality, not measures aimed primarily at curbing the debt.

Hint:

Some conservative Libertarians make the argument that taxation amounts to a restriction of individual freedom, on the grounds that governments are effectively taking their citizens hard earned money and spending it on what they believe is in the national interest.  This claim states that this is wrong because citizens are more likely to know how to spent their own money more than governments do.  While this claim makes some sense, without government taxation there would no provision of public goods, merit goods would be under demanded, demerit goods over demanded and income wealth and inequality would sore.