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WHO PAYS YOUR TAXES?

mansion with its usual furniture demands no more fromthe public than a cheap wooden house does. Why, then,should it pay more to the public ? Clearly taxes are notcollected for that reason.

Taxes are not paid for protection, except in the samesense that the price of protection is paid in buying acoat. They are a necessary condition of having roads,bridges, public justice, sewers, boards of health, commis-sioners of agriculture, police, water, lights, education,harbors, and the thousand and one privileges incident toliving in civilized society.

Another popular theory is that men should contributeto the common burden according to their abilities—thata man should pay because he could . 1 This is as fallaciousas the last , 3 because such a tax is a tax on abilities, andconsequently a large tax is a discouragement of largeabilities, whether mental, physical, or- financial. Again, itis unequal, since a rich man is better able to pay twentyper cent, of his annual million than a poor man is able topay one per cent, of his annual hundred dollars.

1 Wells, “Second Report,” p. 65, 1 to 1, enunciates this common-senseand equitable principle, which, very curiously, the majority of those whoundertake to discuss taxation in the United States wholly ignore, “ that thepublic revenues ought not to be measured by the people's abilities to give, but bywhat they ought to give." “And what they ought to give,” as has beenremarked by another writer, “ can of course only be measured by thebenefit they are to derive.”

’ “ It must therefore be evident that equality of taxation cannot meanthe taxing of people according to their means.”—H. Fawcett ’s “Manualof Political Economy,” sixth ed., p. 518.