Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/790

772 about one third of the national debt, and has been mainly incurred for municipal and urban improvements, such as water and gas supply, markets, tramways, parks, libraries, public baths, wash houses, drainage, and other improvements. The purposes for which the proceeds of local taxes are expended in the United Kingdom are mainly for poor relief, gas and water supply, schools, police, asylums, etc. In a report made to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1870 by Mr. Stanley Jevons, it was stated that the methods by which the local taxes of the kingdom were then levied were substantially according to an act passed in the reign of Elizabeth.

—The general idea which constitutes the basis of the system of State or local taxation mainly recognized in the United States (though not in other countries), and genererallygenerally [sic] known and designated as "the general property tax" is founded on the assumption that, in order to tax equitably, it is necessary to tax everything; the term everything being at the same time used in a sense so indefinite as to embrace not merely things in the nature of physical actualities other than persons, but also persons, incomes, rights, representatives of property, titles, trusts, conclusions of law, debts, and in short any act of assessing capable of resulting in the obtaining of revenue. As a logical consequence of this idea, the exemption of anything from taxation is furthermore held to be not only impolitic, but unjust, and if made necessary by circumstances, as something to be regretted.

The general property tax for general State purposes exists in all but four of the States of the Federal Union—Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In Delaware there has been no property tax since 1877, as its expenses are defrayed mainly by licenses and taxes on railroads. In New Jersey there is only a school tax on property, but no property tax for general State purposes. In Pennsylvania the State tax is levied only on personal property. In Wisconsin the so-called State tax is levied only to defray the interest on the debt, and for the purpose of contributing to the university (one eighth mill tax), schools (one mill tax), and expenditures on account of the insane. But there is no property tax for general purposes. In addition to these four cases a property tax is levied in Vermont only in case the corporation taxes do not suffice to pay the entire expenses of the State (Seligman, Financial Statistics of the American Commonwealths, 1889).