How food gifts are making paying taxes a little tastier
Thermal printing of receipts is now common in restaurants. The machines require no ink cartridges, are easy to use and portable. The only problem is for customers when, months later, they want to claim bills as expenses for tax purposes and find the printing has faded. Heating with hair dryers is said to resurrect legibility, but this is unsure and annoying to do when you're already frazzled with tax filing.
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April 15 is the usual deadline for filing individual tax returns in the USA and food outlets sweeten the stress by offering generous deals. Shake Shack, for example, gave an extra burger for every purchase over $10.40, since tax returns are filed using Form 1040. At Krispy Kreme, anyone buying a dozen doughnuts could get a second dozen for just the cost of the sales tax. India's tax preparation season is just starting, so maybe food outlets here could consider similar deals.
Taxation and food have an intimate history. In earlier times, actual food products were tithed to the authorities. The need to have these survive for storage was one of the factors driving technologies of food processing and preservation, like making milk into cheese and creating barrels for long-term storage. In Mark Lawrence Schrad's Vodka Politics , he explains how distilling became an easy way to concentrate the value of grains, which the Russian state then controlled through vodka taxes.
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For centuries, Japan was governed through the kokudaka system, where the value of land for taxation purposes was assessed by the weight (a koku was around five bushels) of rice it could produce. The real problems with food taxes arise in times of scarcity when the price rises due to taxes become intolerable to consumers. Smart governments would then reduce food taxes, yet they are such attractive sources of revenue that this often doesn't happen, leading to riots or, as with India's salt tax, potent political protests.
Japan provides an example of how food and taxes can be linked in a positive way. As in all developed countries, there has been a massive move away from villages to cities which, coupled with declining population rates, leaves fewer people in rural areas to farm or fish — or pay taxes to support local administration. An easy solution is for the central government to pour money into rural projects, but these suffer from lack of real connections with local people and their needs.
Japan's authorities also knew that many people still felt a strong connection with their villages, even when they were no longer there. Which is why, in 2007, Yoshihide Suga, then a minister, and later prime minister, announced the furusato nozei , or hometown tax scheme, under which taxpayers could get tax rebates by sending part of their income to a rural area. It was envisaged that people would choose their hometowns, but anyone could send it anywhere. Crucially, the money went to a specific place, not a general fund. To foster this direct connection, people from that place could send gifts, mostly of local food, to their benefactors.
This was the element that really helped the scheme take off. Local food producers, who often had surplus food, were happy to give it away — this actually helped revive declining rural occupations. Websites came up showing where people could send their tax money and the delicious food they would get in return, like premium sake from Niigata, seafood from Hokkaido, tea from Shizuoka or honey from Kumamoto.
This has become a rare example of a popular tax scheme, with revenues crossing one trillion yen in 2024. This success has caused criticisms, not least from urban areas losing revenue, but it also validates the theory of tax choice. This argues that people should get some say in where their money is used, and if they do, will then pay taxes more willingly. Furusato nozei 's food gifts give the benefits of tax choice tangible, and delicious, form.
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