Physical-Outcome Taxation
Taxing products by verified physical characteristics rather than price alone.
Physical-outcome taxation
Where Taxation states the general principle, this page states the specific mechanism for products: a tax component that is a function of a product's declared and verified physical characteristics rather than only its price.
Two products identically priced at £500 need not face identical tax
treatment: one built largely from recycled material, lasting twenty years
and easily repaired, could face a materially lower rate than one requiring
mostly virgin material, lasting five years and difficult to repair. The
exact functional form of f(·) is explicitly a research problem (see
Evidence) — the principle being asserted is narrower: the tax exists to
change relative prices in a direction that rewards durability,
repairability, recycled content and effective recovery, not primarily to
raise revenue from that base.
This depends entirely on the verification and product-identity infrastructure described earlier — a declared characteristic that cannot be checked is not a usable tax base, only an invitation to misreport it.