Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/479

Rh banks pay one half per centum on deposits; express, telegraph, and telephone companies, three per centum on gross earnings, and steamboats two per centum. These quotations are sufficient to show the methods of corporation taxation.

The expediency and justice of a tax on collateral inheritances is not 80 readily admitted. Although it has been enforced as a war-tax, it is somewhat of an innovation on the principles of taxation observed in this country. There is a slight flavor of communism in the idea, yet the proposition is not altogether objectionable, and may be sustained by good arguments. A law of a similar character has been in operation in England many years. It is held to be in the nature of a franchise or license tax, upon the right derived from the state of transmitting property, and is inflicted only when property is bequeathed out of the immediate family. If there are no constitutional objections, the recipients of the bequests certainly have no cause for complaint, if the Government compels them to pay a small share of their gift for its support. A Pennsylvania man, for instance, who receives a windfall of $100,000 from a distant relative or an intimate friend, will obtain no sympathy if he growls because he is obliged to turn over $3,000 of it into the public treasury. lie is better able to do so than any other man who has acquired his property by hard toil and individual exertion and enterprise. In Maryland the rate is two and one half per centum on every $100 of collateral inheritances over $500, and the tax yielded, last year, $86,218.46. The New York Legislature last winter passed a bill imposing a tax of five per centum on similar bequests. Although it aroused some opposition, Governor Hill signed the measure, with a recommendation that it be amended next winter so as to place the limit at $5,000 instead of $500, it being argued that in its present form it might place heavy burdens on poor persons who might receive small bequests of $1,000 or $2,000. It is estimated that the new law will yield annually in New York between $750,000 and $1,000,000. Evidences of the spread of the idea of "taxation without lamentation" are found in the recent proceedings of the Legislatures of other States. In Pennsylvania a bill was introduced, in April last, imposing a tax of five mills on the interest of deposits in savings-banks having no capital stock. There are obvious reasons for not taxing deposits in savings-banks, and it is to be hoped that this sort of special taxation will not be more extensively adopted. Notwithstanding the disastrous results, politically, in other States, of a heavy tax on the liquor-traffic, Illinois has just placed on its statute-books a law imposing a tax of $500 per annum on the sale of liquors, and $150 per annum on the sale of beer. In California, at the last session, a bill was passed to submit to the people an amendment to the Constitution providing that railroads shall pay an annual tax of two and a half per centum on gross earnings, and also that income-taxes may be assessed and collected from persons and corporations. The existing laws, and