Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/513

 SOME INEQUALITIES IN LAND TAXATION 493

the group for the smallest amounts and the lowest for the group with the amounts between $3,000 and $5,000. After this group is reached, the percentage materially rises to the group for the largest sales, those for amounts over g 10,000. The figures for mortgage foreclosures show the same regularity for the groups from S500 to $3,000, but a slight irregularity in the series for amounts above $3,000. But there were only ten sales in the larger two of these groups, and the variation noticed between the two series of percentages is, underthese circumstances, nothing strange. The lands conveyed by warranty deeds for amounts below the average were assessed 51 per cent, of the selling value, while those for amounts above that average were assessed 38.55 per cent. The less valuable tracts were assessed relatively 32 per cent, more than the more valuable. This quite closely agrees with the corresponding variation noted for the improved acres of 34 per cent.

Noting the series of percentages presented in the foregoing table, the economic student will want to know how far this apparent variation in relative assessment is expressive of an actual discrimination by the Minnesota assessors, and how much of it is due to sacrifice sales and sales with unreal considerations stated in the deeds of transfer. The officers of the Minnesota bureau gave much consideration to this subject. Its agents expended much time and labor in a special investigation into the same. The results of that investigation are given at length in the published report both for city lots and rural acres or farm property. For farm property the conclusion reached was that the percentages fairly represented the relative assessment of the different classes of property. Attention is here called to one fact of the many presented in proof of that belief.

It is well known that the maximum credit usually allowed on farm lands in Minnesota is from 60 to 66 per cent, of the selling value of the land mortgaged. Land thus mortgaged for the maximum of credit that may be secured upon the same should, when sold by foreclosure, show an amount of sheriff certificate approximately equal to from 60 to 66 per cent, of the true sell- ing value of the land when disposed of by private sale. The