FOREST TAXATION IN THE UNITED STATES 79 
county which undervalues its taxable property or, more precisely, 
undervalues it in greater degree than the average of all the towns or 
counties is thereby escaping a part of its share of the county or State 
tax and correspondingly burdening the other districts. 
The next step is the apportionment of the tax. Each taxing district 
decides what amount of income it must obtain from the general prop- 
erty tax; this amount divided by the total assessed value of the taxable 
property within its jurisdiction gives the tax rate for that particular 
unit. The tax rate applicable to any given property will be the sum 
of the rates of all the jurisdictions by which it is taxable. 
The final act is the collection of the tax. In some States each town 
and county and the State has its own collector. The taxpayer may 
thus receive two, three, or more separate tax bills and make as many 
separate payments. In other States the entire tax is collected by the 
town or county collector, who then distributes its proper share to each 
jurisdiction concerned. 
The reader should be reminded that the foregoing is only a very 
brief sketch, intended to be typical rather than descriptive of any par- 
ticular State, and that very many modifications are to be found. 
There are certain States in which the State government has given up 
all share in the proceeds of the general property tax. The process of 
apportionment is not always carried out in all the refinement here 
described, and in two States an entirely different method is employed. 
There are States in which certain of the tax rates are fixed by statute 
in advance of assessment, so that the assessment determines the 
amount of the yield. Various matters of detail will be discussed in the 
following sections of this report. 
It is a matter of common knowledge that the property tax, as 
employed in the United States, has developed serious imperfections. 
In view of the heavy reliance of the State and local governments upon 
the general property tax and the fact that this is the chief form of tax- 
ation applied to the forests, it becomes essential to examine critically 
and in detail the present operation of the property tax in the United 
States with special reference to its impact upon forest property. 
ASSESSMENT 
MEANING OF ASSESSMENT 
Assessment is the heart of the property tax, since it determines how 
well or how poorly the burden of the property tax is to be distributed. 
The assessment consists of two parts: (1) the listing of taxable prop- 
erty, and (2) the discovery of the value of each parcel listed. The 
listing, though frequently very difficult in the case of personalty, is 
comparatively easy for forest or other real property. The chief prob- 
lem of forest assessment is therefore concerned with the valuation 
rather than the listing. 
As will be developed at greater length (p. 100), the value of anything, 
as that term is defined in economic science and generally employed in 
the tax laws, is the quantity of some other thing that would be given 
in exchange for it, this quantity being almost always expressed in 
terms of money. 
While all States require the assessor to find the value, certain 
States instruct him to reduce the value so found by certain arbitrary 
percentages before entering it on the assessment roll. In Alabama 
