Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/400

384 $133,333+. And, according to any lair interpretation of the action of the committee which reported in 1884 a $4,000 exemption, a citizen who is worth less than $80,000 of ordinary property yielding income, or $133,000 of property invested in United States bonds, was a legitimate object for national charity; the above sums representing the dividing line in the United States between those who were entitled to be regarded as poor and those who were entitled to be considered rich. Such an assumption finds no precedent in fiscal history, and was an unwarranted favoritism to nine tenths of the well-to-do people of the country, who were abundantly able to pay any just proportion of the taxes which the Government then considered it necessary to impose for its support. Under such circumstances it would be a misnomer to call such an extortion taxation. It was unmasked confiscation and a burlesque on taxation. In the case of the income tax of 1868, when the amount of exemption was $1,000, experience demonstrated that more than nine tenths of the entire property of the country, and more than ninety-nine hundredths of its property owners, escaped payment from this form of taxation.

Again, an income tax which exempts $4,000 of income in the United States can not be defended by any rational rule or doctrine, legal or economic, for the property and income exempted would be infinitely greater in the aggregate than the property and the income of the same class made subject to the tax. Under this form of an income tax there could be no equality between taxed-producers and non-taxed-producers, and more especially as the non-taxed-producers will be the most numerous and the greatest producers in quantity as a body.

]o man is a freeman whose industry and capital are subject to exaction, and from which his immediate competitors are entirely exempt. Equality of taxation of all persons and property brought into open competition under like circumstances is necessary to produce equality of condition for all, in all production and in all the enjoyments of life, liberty, and property; and government, whatever name it may assume, is a despotism, and commits acts of flagrant spoliation, if it grants exemption or exacts a greater or less rate of tax from one man than from another man, on account of the one owning or having in his possession more or less of the same class of property which is subject to the tax. If it were proposed to levy a tax of five per cent on annual incomes below $4,000 in amount, and exempt all incomes above this sum, the unequal and discriminating character of the exemption would be at once apparent; and yet an income tax exempting all incomes below $4,000 is equally unjust and discriminating. In either case the exemption can not be founded or