This type of tax policy covers, from taxes on financial transactions (both in national currency and foreign currency), business taxes (assets, presumed income, “minimum tax”, etc.), taxes on the primary activity of the economy (presumptions on the income of the agricultural sector, withholding on exports, etc.) and taxes on assets (on large fortunes). At that time, the concern of the tax policy makers was to increase revenues, in the face of a traditional tax system incompetent to do so for reasons of the tax structure (high tax expenditure), weakness of the tax administration, economic instability (economic crisis, high informality) and fiscal sociology (low level of consciousness or discipline). To understand this policy, it must be considered that it has multiple causes, instrumentation, and objectives. Hence, in 2009 within the framework of ECLAC (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) I presented my paper on the subject and designated them as “heterodox taxes”, that is, opposed to orthodox or classical. This motivated me to study them, to know their causes, characteristics, categories, objectives, and consequences. My degree of astonishment reached the maximum when in an international meeting, a tax expert from an international organization described them as “banana growers”, as if there was no need to mention them. It was curious to me that they did not even bother to study their “harmful consequences” and were simply demonized with the withering definition of “distortive”, as if the rest of the taxes were not. During the nineties, the doctrine of the “Chicago boys” and economic orthodoxy were on the rise, and any tax that did not follow the classical tradition, that is, that was not a tax on income and wealth (direct taxation) or a general consumption tax -VAT- or other specific (indirect taxation), was cursed and its implementation considered heresy.
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