Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/517

 SOME INEQUALITIES IN LAND TAXATION 497

there has come a great variety in the buildings erected and in the changes and improvements in or upon the several tracts of land in any township or county. For a time no attention is paid by the assessors to these improvements. The original flat or level assessment — so much per acre — would, with few excep- tions, prevail. Such a condition leads, first, to assessing the vacant or unimproved acres at a higher relative amount than the improved. It gives to the most improved land the greatest degree of tax exemption. Later, when the assessors begin to take notice of buildings and improvements, they lay less stress upon them than upon the land. As a result, a portion of the earlier injustice caused by the bad assessment still remains in most counties of Minnesota. The report of the Minnesota bureau calls special attention to the statistics of a few counties which exhibit the worst phases of this faulty method of assess- ment. In Cottonwood county the average selling price per acre varied from $10.25 to S35.80, while the average assessment for unimproved acres varied between $6.41 and $6.90, and that for improved from S6.99 to $7.48.

As a result of this faulty system of taxation, in the group of seventy-eight rural counties for which the figures were presented in the first exhibit, the poor owner of a small tract of improved land is assessed $1.62 ; the rich owner of a large tract of vacant land, 90 cents ; and the rich owner of improved land only 70 cents, where all should pay one dollar. The system works to the benefit of all classes excepting the poor man. The rich resident farmer is satisfied because he receives the most benefit. He is specially satisfied because he is taxed relatively less than the owner of non-resident vacant acres. But the system of assessing vacant lands more than improved actually exempts the rich owner of such land from a part of his true burden of taxation and secures his exemption at the expense of the very poorest resident o^ner.

Incidental to the foregoing analysis of the facts disclosed by this investigation of land taxation in Minnesota, attention is here called to the 1898 report of the Kansas Bureau of Labor. This work, just out of press, contains the summary of an investigation