The Sun.
London, England, 1856-11-27 00:00:00

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THE INOOME TAX.

(Front the Times.)
No taxes are popular things. It is not to bey'
expected that they should be. Under the disguise
of a high price paid for your tea, coffee, or sugar
at the grocer's, they are unpleasant enough. But
indirect taxation is still a veil, however thin a
one, upon the Chancellor of the Exchequer's cruelty.
When he puts his hand into your pocket and takes
out the actual contents of your purse, he is the
robber undisguised. This is a rude, coarse, un-
gentlemanly, impertinent proceeding, at which we
fire up. Whatever the financial reason of the com-
munity may admit in favour of direct taxation,
imagination will always be against it.
But this is not the only objection to the income
tax. It is an inquisitorial tax, nor is it inquisito-
rial only as subjecting you to the sharp eyes and
ears of a collector ; it makes you an inquisitor upon
yourself, which nobody likes to be. Even if you
are only your own inquisitor, which is the very
mildest form of inquisition, that is a burden and a
nuisance to most people. There may be a select
few to whom it is not—some choice, happy spirits,
who let themselves off quite easily, and find it has
a most natural and healthy effect. They are not
troubled with any qualms or scruples, and under-
take the responsibility of judging their own ease
with a fearless readiness. But the majority of men,
who have we trust some sort of conscience, find
this tribunal of self-inquisition not at all a com-
fortable one. If they decide against themselves
they seem to be Unfair to themselves, and if they
decide in their own favour they seen to be unfair
to the State. They are in a fix, then, and what
shall theydo ? There are so many pros and cons
in the estimation of a large class of yearly incomes,
so many allowances which a man thinks he may
make, and fairly make, though at the same
time he does not make them with that per-
' feet accuracy of self-approval which he would
like .to feel. So, he must draw a line some-
wheire between his own claims- and those of
the Exchequer, and, wherever he draws it, he
either thinks he has done himself a little injustice
or done the State one.. Either alternative is un-
'pie-ale:a, especially the -former; and we doubt not
many an honest man has had an uneasy night after
a sacrifice of himself in a decision which the income
tax has imposed upon him. While he is tossing
about in bed the text, "Be not righteous over
much," has come to his recollection with uncom-
plimentary vividness, and time alone has re-
stored the equilibrium of his mind, and imparted
the satisfaction of a good conscience.
But the income tax is not only a direct tax, and
an inquisitorial tax, but an unjust tax. We say
unjust, not as if injustice proved against a tax im-
mediately decided the argument against it, for few
taxes perhaps can be proved to be perfectly just or
to operate equally upon all classes. All that pub-
lic justice intrinsically requires is, that the taxes
together, taken in a lump and regarded as a sys-
tem, should be fair. But, as this is an intricate
question, and as it never can, perhaps, be shown
what the result of a whole system of taxation as
regards its justice or injustice is, we cannot be 'sur-
prised if people set to work very summarily to ex-
amine the justice of particular taxes, especially if
they are important ones, if they squeeze a good
deal out of the taxpayer, and if they happen to be
as objectionable in other respects as the income
tax is. In the case of the income tax, then, it
does so happen that the mind is immediately:ar-
rested by a very obvious, marked, and palpable
inequality attaching to the very nature of the tax,
and that is, that it extracts from the yearly in-
come, without any regard to the source from which
that income is drawn, whether a permanent capi-
tal in laud or the funds, or the uncertain and
fluctuating profits of a trade or profession. There
is at first sight a plain unfairness in taxing an
income which may possibly stop next year, and
which, at any rate, has an insurance to pay out of
it, exactly to the same amount that you do the
interest of a regular capital. You are taxing
equally what is in fact very unequal property,
whereas it is of the very essence of the justice of a
property tax that property should be taxed under
the act according to its value and amount. We
are aware there are certain financial metaphysi-
cians who profess to undercut this plain and ob-
vious view of the case as being shallow and super-
ficial. We will not deny the ingenuity of these
arguers, or deprive them of the merit of a certain
needlepoint acuteness and subtlety. They choose
to look at income entirely apart from the possessor
of the income ; then, when they have got this ab-
straction before them, they say that what the State
has to do with is the income of the nation for the
year, apart from all connection with the several
owners and their peculiar circumstances. One
man's income may have a permanent basis, another
a temporary, still the income of both is alike in-
with.4l,.4. 4. .11 that}4..4
ff a man says his income may stop
next year, they tell him he is to blame, not the
inequality of the tax, but the inequality of his own
fortune. He is not so rich a man as his next-door
neighbour the capitalist, but that is not the fault of
the tax, but the fault of Providence ; he must take
his income as a present thing, with the liabilities
of taxation to which it is subject, and must not
complain because the basis of it is different from
and not so good as the basis of his neighbour's in-
come—that is to say, because Providence arranges
a variety in men's lots, and has not made him so
rich as his neighbour. All this may be ingenious,
but no argument of this sort can ever do away with
the obvious prima facie injustice of taxing a casual
income and a permanent income equally.
We cannot express any surprise, then, that peo-
ple should be considerably on the qui vive now on
the Income-tax question, and the continuance o f
the present rate of this tax. With respect to the
tax itself, the country has tacitly accepted it till
1860, but it was understood that the present rate
of it was only to continue till April next,—i. e.,
till a year after the termination of the war. The
Chancellor of the Exchequer, however, it appears
now, gives his own date to this event, and he fixes
it at the ratification of the treaty, instead of at the
Treaty of Paris itself—a postponement which just
laps over the financial year, and gives him another
year's squeeze of the nation. The history of the
Income-tax is a history of Ministerial dodges and
pious frauds, cunning devices of Chancellors of the
the Exchequer to get the nation to put its neck
into the halter, the understanding being that it is
taken out again at such a time. He pats the na-
tion's neck, and says—" Good people, reasonable
people,
you will not object to a little inconvenience
for a very short time." " Only for three years,"
said Sir R. Peel ; and when those were ended it
was only to be for three years more, and when those
were over it was only to be for one year more, and
then it was only again to be for three years more.
This brings us to 1852, and then the Income-
tax promises faithfully, on its word of honour,
that it will positively only last seven years longer,
when the falling in of the Long Annuities will cer-
tainly suppress it. And now the present war-
ratel
wasdodge
o desupposed,
provided,fer tha
ata
enp dhu
er tpahol
of the tax is to be maintained a year longer
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of the present rate of the Income-tax beyond April
h
and
v tel and; it hthaos itn ge
ife,
add- permanence, because, we presume, if the In-
come-tax is reduced to its old rate next April the
Association will disperse. We can only hope, then,
that this will be its fate, and that it will attain this
successful brevity of existence. Associations have
doubtless been formed for grander, sublimer, and
more lasting objects, but seldom for a more practi-
cal one.