Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/82

70 "hearth" tax, which is collected from each separate building inhabited, or used for any commercial or industrial purpose.

An income tax has existed in Austria-Hungary since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was repealed in 1829, and reenacted in 1849. This tax is divided into three classes. "Under the

 would be at the utmost only $600 in place of the $2,600 levied upon the unfortunate New-Yorker.

In return for what he pays, the Parisian enjoys well-paved and well-cleaned streets, wide and unobstructed sidewalks, shade trees with benches under them for the weary, public gardens kept in beautiful order, etc., while the New-Yorker gets—well, the less said on this subject the better. May we not entertain the hope that honest men of all parties will soon unite to secure a better system of taxation and a more efficient administration of the government in the most populous and wealthy city of the model republic? or must we accept as a melancholy truth that universal suffrage inevitably results (at least in American cities) in rabid democracy, dishonesty, and dirt?"

—M. Yves Guyot, in a report recently made on questions connected with proposals relating to the establishment of an income tax in France, regards the great fiscal wrong in that country to be the inequality of the assessments of real property in the different departments. This is increased by the fact that the French land tax is not levied at the same rate on all property, but the proportion of the whole amount which is to be paid by each department is fixed by the central authority; the departments allot the quotas to be paid by the several communes, and the communal authorities apportion their quota among the individual taxpayers. The tax is, to use the French technical term, one of répartition and not of quotité. If it were the latter, each taxpayer would pay in proportion to his property; the rate of the tax would be fixed by the Government instead of the amount to be raised from each department. The valuation on which this tax is levied is the net annual value, and was fixed unsystematically and imperfectly from fifty to seventy years ago; the value of real property has changed, but the original assessment is still in force. The result is that some departments pay from six to eight times as much as others in proportion to their real annual value.

M. Guyot advocates a tax on the capital in place of on the annual value. There is, as he points out, a manifest injustice in taxing the same amount of capital at different rates, according to the mode in which it is invested. In France a capitalist might invest his money in building lots or other land temporarily unproductive, but held for resale at a profit. The investment, yielding no income, would practically escape taxation. If the same sum were invested in safe securities yielding an income of three per cent, the tax would be levied on that income, while if placed in business where, though it might temporarily yield twelve per cent, the loss of the whole would be risked, the owner would pay four times as heavy a tax as in the previous case.

The same objections have been frequently urged against the income tax in England, but there a difficulty exists in the way of assessing the capital value of land—viz., that land is generally the subject of letting and seldom of sale. In France, however, not only are there nearly a million sales of land each year, but on every devolution by inheritance the capital value of the land is officially registered. The ascertainment of the capital value of the entire country would be an easy matter, and such an assessment would be of more durable benefit than an official estimate of the annual value, which, necessarily varying from year to year, would be a much more fluctuating and uncertain basis for taxation than the selling value.

The reforms proposed by M. Guyot would increase the land tax in those departments which are undervalued; and he estimates that a revaluation for taxation would cost ten million dollars, and that it would take ten years to complete. He thinks the complaint by landowners of overtaxation generally is unfounded; but he would nevertheless relieve them