To Fill Budget Gaps, ‘Stealth’ Taxes Are Creeping Up

London released a draft bill in January that would establish an animal health body, the cost to be met partly by livestock owners. Equestrians have called it the horse tax and are angry that a leisure industry will have to pay for a measure to aid farmers, who already receive payouts from the European Union.

Di Grissell, a former jockey and the owner of Grissell Racing, a racehorse training facility in East Sussex, England, expects her personal income and business to be squeezed.

“The government’s being very crafty by bringing in back-door tax increases,” she said. “The good guys — people who work and are trying to build businesses — are being taxed to the hilt.”

A similar trend is playing out in the United States. In 2008, Winter Haven, Fla., started charging “accident response fees” to move the financial burden of tending to accidents directly to at-fault drivers.

This month, Nevada officials drafted an emergency regulation to raise entrance fees and season passes for state parks to help plug a gap in state funds, according to The Associated Press.

Data from the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, shows that the total state and local government revenue as a percentage of personal incomes has been steadily rising since the start of the last decade.

By contrast, experts said, most Western governments will not tinker with corporate tax. Those receipts naturally fall during downturns as companies earn less. Corporate tax is also seen as a zero-sum game, as raising rates could lead companies to flee to lower-tax jurisdictions.

In recent years, the overall tax burden has been volatile. Among counties belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based in Paris, tax rates were highest around 2000, then dropped in response to the dot-com recession, before rising again.

“Governments have tended to use the benefits of new growth over the past decade to cut taxes rather than improve public finances,” Mr. Matthews of the O.E.C.D. said.

“They thought that growth was sustainable,” he added. “In hindsight, it clearly wasn’t.”

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