보유세 개혁의 좌절에 관한 조세정치적 해석 : 종합부동산세의 사례

This study explains the failure of holding-tax reform represented by frustration of the comprehensive real estate holding tax from the view point of the tax-political relations of social forces over the real-estate taxation. For this, this paper defines the holding-tax reform as a tax modernization project. The Roh Moo-hyun Administration initiates the reform of tax structures, whose key point is the abolition of tax privileges via fractional assessment, in order to archive the conjunctural strategic target of real estate price stabilization. On this account, this project was tangled with not only the social conflict over the property interests from the fractional assessment, but also the political conflicts concerning the price stabilization effect of holding tax. Tax-political interest conflicts, which was in latency owing to the social expectation and policy coalition’s institutional detouring strategy in the early period of reform, was realized in the context of changing housing market and tax environment invoked by the mid-2000s real estate price boom. Especially, in company with the increasing tax burden and the enlarging tax payer, the confrontation over how much will reduce the fractional assessment, such as a cumulative taxation by households and exemption or exceptional measure from taxation, acted as a catalyst to bring about a stronger backlash. In their eyes, the comprehensive real estate holding tax was not seen as an attack on the interests of the privileged against the universal, but rather as an attack on the material interest involved in owner-occupancy. After all, due to the alienation of social forces, such as urban home-owning households and technocrats within government, power relations between forces were reversed, and thus opposition coalition attained superiority. Eventually, the holding-tax reform died on the vine by the constitutionalistic political tactics, of which opposition coalition made use. According to this analysis, this paper rejects common notions which read the failure of holding-tax reform as a mark of the resistance by the privileged group, and stresses the need of political strategy based on complex life politics surrounding the housing problem.