376 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The j)resent is therefore an advantageous opportunity for asking 

 "whether any income tax which discriminates in any degree is likely, 

 as is often claimed, to constitute the one perfect form of taxation 

 of the future. And at tlie outset attention is asked to the following 

 considerations, to which popular attention is not always intelligently 

 given : 



A Federal income-tax system necessarily involves multiple 

 taxation on one and the same income, person, and property. For ex- 

 ample, in the United States a citizen of any one State would be 

 liable, in the first instance, to the Federal tax on his income; second, 

 to a State tax on the same income; third, to a tax on the property 

 or business producing the income, in virtue of its location and con- 

 sequent territorial jurisdiction of the State. In some States — ■ 

 Massachusetts, for examjile — the State, in virtue of its jurisdiction, 

 over a person, taxes him also for property beyond its territorial 

 jurisdiction and subject to taxation in the State where it is an actu- 

 ality. Doubtless such duplications in a greater or less degree will be 

 inevitable in the case of all Federal taxation. But where there are 

 so many sources available to the national Government for obtaining 

 revenue, it would seem to be impolitic for it to encroach on those 

 methods which are particularly applicable to the States — as income 

 taxes, taxes on legacies and successions, which are governed and pro- 

 tected by State laws, and franchises, which are almost exclusively 

 granted by the States and rarely by the Federal Government. Cer- 

 tainly there would seem to be no warrant in either justice or expe- 

 diency in unnecessarily favoring such a system of multiple taxation; 

 thereby increasing the real or fancied grievances of the people in 

 respect to all taxation, and creating, by reason of a sense of injus- 

 tice, additional temjDtations on the part of the taxpayer to fraud and 

 evasion. 



Again, all modern systems of income taxation have recognized 

 the principle of discriminating in favor of persons in receipt of 

 comparatively small incomes, and have provided as a fundamental 

 feature of their policy, that all incomes below a certain rate should 

 be exempted from assessment. Such exemptions, except in the ease of 

 the United States, have always and until within a recent period been 

 of a comparatively small amount. In Great Britain it is £160 ($800) 

 per annum. No difference is made in England in levying the 

 income tax, though often proposed and advocated, on account of 

 the source whence the income is derived. Whether the income is 

 earned by the exertions of its possessor, or arises from property, so 

 that the recipient is sure of it without the slightest exertion at all 

 on his part, the same proportion has always been deducted from it. 

 In the administration of its income-tax system England has aban- 



