Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/379

Rh State of Pennsylvania; respecting which condition of affairs the court used the following language:

"It is apparent, if the State of Pennsylvania is at liberty to tax these bonds, that to the extent of this Maryland portion of the road she is taxing property and interest beyond her jurisdiction. Again, if Pennsylvania can tax these bonds, upon the same principle Maryland can tax them. This is too apparent to require argument. The consequence, if permitted, would be double taxation of the bondholder, and its effect is readily seen. Thus a tax of three mills per dollar of the principal, at an interest of six per centum, payable semiannually, is ten per centum per annum of the interest; a tax, therefore, by each State, at this rate, amounts to an annual reduction from the coupons of twenty per centum; and if this consolidation of the line of the road had extended into New York or Ohio, or into both, the deduction would have been thirty or forty. If Pennsylvania must tax bonds of this description, she must confine it to bonds issued exclusively by her own corporations. Our conclusion is, that to permit the deduction of the tax from the coupons in question would be giving effect to the acts of the Pennsylvania Legislature upon property and interests lying beyond her jurisdiction."

Again, the national (United States) bank act acknowledges, and the courts of the United States have so held, that a bank has a situs and its shares a situs where the bank is located, and not where the stockholders reside. The national bank act, therefore, discards the usual State principle of taxation, that personal property follows the owner.

A debt incurred for stock in a corporation has recently (1897) been held by the Appellate Supreme Court of New York as non-taxable, because the assets represented by the stocks are assessed and taxed.

But are credits, in any or all of the various forms in which they are exemplified, property? This question brings us face to face with another of those curious anomalies of opinion and practice that characterize this whole subject of taxation.

In most of the States of the Federal Union credits are generally regarded as property, and are made the subject of taxation at the residence or domicile of their owner, and are held to embrace all debts due from solvent debtors, whether on account, contract, note, bond, or mortgage, and stocks in moneyed corporations, irrespective of the place where such securities may be at the time the assessment shall be made. In States, however, like New York, which reject the assumption that the situs of movable, visible, personal property for taxation follows the owner irrespective of its actual location, and accept the decision of its own courts, that the situs of such property