The ABC of taxation

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1010741608

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-21094

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Fillebrown, Charles Bowdoin

Title:: The ABC of taxation

Edition:: Fourth edition specially revised

Place of publication:: Garden City, New York

Publisher:: Doubleday, Page & Company

Year of publication:: 1916

Scope:: 1 Online-Ressource (236 Seiten)

Digitisation:: 2018

Collection:: Economics Books

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Part III. Other essays and addresses

Collection:: Economics Books

INHERITANCE AND INCOME TAXES j51 remains to be invented. President R.oosevelt in his message confesses that the question of an income tax is “very intricate, delicate, and troublesome.” It would seem that the proposed dissipation of fortunes by means of an inheritance tax must prove awkward and of questionable justice, besides discouraging enterprise at its point of greatest efficiency, and in the midst of a beneficent career. It would discourage the accumulation of Unprivileged fortunes, which are a blessing in proportion to their size. With all his boasted freedom, the American citizen cannot invent or manufacture his own principles. He can select them, but he cannot remould or ignore them. He may make permutations and combinations to his heart’s content, but two and two will always make four, and the square of the hypotenuse will always be equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of the triangle. So in economics, certain fundamentals cannot be disregarded, as for example that the expenditure, enterprise, and activity of society express themselves in economic rent, the value of land. Whoever pa)'s this rent pays, as President Roosevelt says, “for the protection the State gives him.” Whatever of this rent the city gets in taxes it has bought and paid for; whoever else gets any considerable part of it gets something for nothing. Taxes are like the wheat poured into the public hopper; rent, in whatever form, may be described as the flour that comes from the public mill. The privileged man, who is allowed to carry off the grist, eats his bread, as it were, at the tax payer’s expense. A tax upon rent subtracts nothing from wages, and any tax upon rent, however large,

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