Little Falls herald. [volume] (Little Falls, Morrison County, Minn.) 1889-1950, 1912-08-30
TAXATION m MINNESOTA
THIRTY-FIRST ARTICLE -. BASIS
OF VALUATION FOR TAXATION
PROPOSES-NO.2

tudC pIOptiIy Shall De dSScooCu "o A'e
true and full value in money! is an
other, equally explicit, providing that
all property not exempt from taxation
shall be listed and assessed. While this
provision Of law is not violated by as
SCISSORS in the same open and systematic
way as the one requiring full valua'
tion'' it is, nevertheless, willfully
violated in a great many assessment
districts every year. In many districts
it has long been the custom to assess
five horses as four; three cows as two,
and so on down through all the classes
on the list, the purpose in most cases
being to keep down the assessment of
the district by keeping up the average
assessment Of each article in given
class, while in few cases it may be
resorted to for the purpose of favor
ing the assessors friends.
If all property was assessed at q
uniform given per cent Of "true and
full value' the result would be a
square deal for everybody. IF the law
permitted, there would be no inherent
vice in "undervaluation' so long as
everybody was treated alike. But when
property that should be taxed is omit
ted from the rolls; and when every
article in given class is assessed at
q fixed sum regardless of value, a
square deal is impossible. Such methods
Invariably result in the grossest in
Justice not only to districts taken as
a whole, but to individual taxpayers as
well, and are unquestionably the most
vicious and indefensible of all the IL
legal practices that have fastened
themselves upon our taxing system dur
ing fifty years Of lawbreaking. They
work almost invariably in favor Of tax
payers owning high grade and costly
property, and against the owners Of in
ferior and inexpensive property. In
short, they favor the rich as against
the poor, and, worst of all, they leave
the. small taxpayer without any ade-
Quate means of redress. It is just about
as expensive, and takes just as much
time to obtain relief from an over-as-
sessment against the small holdings of
"a poor man as it does to correct an as
sessment involving thousands of dol
lars; and the result is that the small
taxpayer submits to the wrong be-
cause he cannot afford to do anything
else, while the large taxpayer, because
of the large amount involved, can af-
ford to and does usually fight for his
rights and get his unfair assessment
corrected.
Equality and justice in taxation I'M
der our laws depend almost entirely up
on the assessor. He is by far the most
important officer who has anything to
do with taxation. If he makes his as
sessment in the way the law provides,
or even if he makes it at uniform
definite per cent of "true and full
value' approximate justice will pre-
vail between the individual taxpayers
of his district; but if on the other
hand he makes it in accordance with
the agreements usually adopted at as
SCISSORS meetings, or if he omits any
considerable amount of taxable prop
erty from his list, the assessment in
evitably abounds in the grossest in
equalities-and they are inequalities
that cannot be corrected by equaliza.
ton. If they could, the situation
would not be 50 bad, but as rule
every attempt to equalize simply tends
to make bad matter worse. Nothing
short Of doing the work over again
will correct such assessments. The
inequalities existing between assess
lnent districts and counties can be
smoothed out and equalized fairly
we'll by boards Of equalization, but
not so the inequalities between in
dividuals that result from following the
illegal method above described. Never
until we are able to get away from
these conditions and have everything
assessed in strict accordance with the
law will we have anything even ap
proximating equality and justice be
tween individual taxpayers.
The next article will set forth some
of the obstacles in the way of assessing
property cat it's true and full value. ;