The history and future of the tax state: Possibilities for a new fiscal politics beyond neoliberalism
本文通过历史视角分析税收国家演变，提出新自由主义财政紧缩源于不对称资本会计实践，并探讨疫情后民主压力催生的财政混合性如何可能创造财政空间，对研究财政政治、国家资本主义的学者有参考价值。
Neoliberalism is marked by fiscal austerity. Yet, in response to the COVID-19 crisis states again, briefly, began to exercise fiscal discretion. We reflect on the potential for a more enduring shift in fiscal politics beyond neoliberalism by placing recent developments in the historical context of the ‘tax state’. We make two claims. First, we argue that different phases of capitalism are reflected in, and can be understood through, changes in fiscal accounting practices that demarcate public and private, and mark turning points for the role of the state within capitalism. Charting the unravelling of the Keynesian welfare state, we propose a fiscal understanding of neoliberalism in which asymmetric applications of capital accounting practices facilitated the financialisation of the state. Second, we argue democratic pressures are giving rise to forms of ‘fiscal hybridity’ that reassert accounting symmetries between public and private wealth to potentially create ‘fiscal space'. We examine how the fiscal actions taken by states in response to COVID-19 express hybridity, reflecting contestation over neoliberal policy models that was emerging prior to the pandemic, as fiscal politics shifts the state’s focus to its role as creditor, underwriter and investor.