What type of tax?

[Thurlor]

What type of tax charges everyone the same dollar value (not tax rate)? As in the expenditure of a community divided by the population of a community. It's not a Flat Tax as that only refers to percentages.

 

[Cognisant]

How big is "a community"?

If tax was based on the wealth of a city wealthy people would move to the poorest cities, reducing the amount of tax they have to pay while increasing it for everyone else.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

for example in Sweden people pay a fixed fee to the church. So it's sort of a membership fee.

It would be an interesting idea though to apply this generally and, say, split a country into many small municipalities, each with their own fixed fee to live in so that people could move to whatever municipality they thought offered the best price relative to the fee. That would incentivize bureaucrats in each municipality to put the taxes to good use, by means of supply/demand mechanisms. Would be a nice alternative to percentage-based tax where the state just sucks the maximal amount of money from the populace just because they can.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

I meant "municipalities that offered the best service relative to the fee". Jeez, without the edit button I gotta start copyreading every post before posting

 

[Thurlor]

The size of the community is irrelevant to my question. I'm just wondering what the name is for a tax system that charges everyone an equal figure.

 

[Cognisant]

Okay I think I get it now, everyone in a country pays the same amount like paying a subscription to a service, "subscription" may actually be the word you're looking for.

Are we talking mandatory or non-mandatory subscriptions?

 

[Pizzabeak]

It isn’t communism is it?

 

[Thurlor]

I think the term I am looking for is Regressive Tax. But all of the definitions of tax rates seem to focus on the percentage of income paid into taxes as opposed to the actual dollar amount which seems a bit disingenuous.

Progressive Tax - The higher the income the higher the tax rate.
Proportional/Flat Tax - Same rate for everyone.
Regressive Tax - The lower the income the greater the tax rate.