THE HABITATION TAX? 
By JoHN BuRTON PHILLIPS 
Additional sources of public income are essential to modern efficient 
government. This is due to the great demand for increased revenue, 
and the need of a substitute for the general tax on personal property. 
The growth of urban population has made necessary additional taxes. 
A city government is more costly than governments of purely rural 
communities with their freedom from sewer, water, lighting, and police 
expenses. The increase of taxation that has to be borne by the city 
dwellers falls primarily on property within the corporate limits. In 
theory, all taxation in modern cities is levied on the real and personal 
property therein, but in reality, the tax is very largely contributed by the 
realty. It is well known that personal property everywhere does not 
contribute its share of taxation. Hence, in the selection of new sources 
of taxation, efforts should be made to relieve real estate as much as 
possible from the undue proportion of taxation which it now bears by 
securing from the owners of personalty the proportion of tax which they 
ought in equity to pay. The complications in the present method of 
assessing personal property render evasion easy and justice impossible. 
The new methods should conform as nearly as possible to the established 
principles of taxation. The more important of these principles are the 
following: 
1. A tax should be levied according to the ability of the taxpayers to 
contribute. This principle is so obvious that it needs no discussion. 
The other theories of taxation, such as benefit and sacrifice, seem to have 
been largely abandoned, and ability accepted as the fundamental principle. 
2. Again, a tax should be certain both as to its amount and payment. 
The amount to be paid should be definitely known both to the taxpayer 
and to everyone else in the same community. 
t Paper read at the National Conference on State and Local Taxation, Columbus, Ohio, November 
I2-15, 1907. 
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