Year:    2014

Author:    Gawel, Erik

Die Verwaltung, Vol. 47 (2014), Iss. 4 : pp. 467–491

Abstract

User-based Financing of Public Spending – Current State and Future Prospects of the Benefit Principle

The benefit principle of public finance is unmistakably regaining ground in the arenas of scholarship and politics. User-based financing for excludable public services plays a special role here. The main drivers of the current political development are, above all, the fiscal limitations of a crisis-ridden but dominant tax state that feeds off charges without reference to the receipt of specific individual benefits. Due to tax-resistance and long-standing economic limitations of a secular increase of tax quotas, the tax state itself is now hardly able to adequately finance the tasks it is required to fulfil.

The obvious fact that the tax state has already reached or long exceeded its limits necessitates not only a comprehensive critical assessment of public spending, but also a review of the revenue–raising principles. A perceptible shift in emphasis towards fee-based funding – beyond traditional municipal services and the social security sector – appears reasonable in order to again lend greater significance to the allocation function and to the principle of responsibility in the public budgeting process. Constitutional law certainly seems to provide the necessary scope for this – contrary to the doctrine of the tax state as the dominant form.

However, when putting financial policy into practice, amplifying the benefit principle has very little effect. On the one hand, the normative, inappropriately excessive doctrine of the tax state delegitimizes other burden distribution regulations as socially unbalanced. On the other hand, in financial policy terms, this is primarily due to a ubiquitous “fee-resistance” that expresses the unwillingness to see access to goods that were previously free of price obstacles now obstructed by individual payment obligations. In this way, the fiscally-exhausted tax state immunizes itself against an obvious cure: because, ironically, one symptom of the crisis of the tax state is that it provides hardly any prospects of finding a way out of its predicament in the political process through switching over to increased fee-based financing, even to the extent that appears possible by constitutional law and is indicated economically.