Talk:Poll tax

message: Para 2 of United Kingdom says "This charged each person for the services they received in their community." Should this not read "This charged each person for the services provided in their community." Local authorities provide, eg, child-care which is funded by the childless, etc. Sbz5809 11:59, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Services received vs services provided 

message: Changed an erroneous sentance, Margaret Thatcher did not reign.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.13.135.213 (talk) 14:53, 16 April 2006
: She probably liked to think she did! hedpeguyuk 13:06 11 June 2006 (UTC) False sig struck out by Jerzy•t 19:35, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Poll Tax 

message: An anonymous contributer added this sentence to the United States section of the article:
Georgia is currently accused of bringing back the use of a poll tax in this New York Times Article.
This sentence as it is a little awkward and possibly POV. Some research needs to be done on this topic and an appropriate paragraph inserted into the article. — Mateo SA | talk 00:54, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Georgia and voter-ID fee 

message: Is that factually accurate? Germans, French, and Scandinavian countries where not always looked down upon. Didnt they try to just disqualify poor whites? I dont know if it had anything to do with non british - Also considering how could one make the distinction between a british and a non british white in generally assiliamble society? Should it be changed? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.132.15.213 (talk) 03:55, 14 February 2006
Yes, it needs changed. Race was not explictly part of the grandfather clause, instead a year was chosen prior to the abolition of slavery which had the effect of keeping poor blacks and also poor whites who immigrated after that date from voting. Jon 14:17, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  whites of non british descent? 

message: IMO, the inclusion of the former "poll taxes" in the American South as instances of head taxes is a tortured treatment of the phrase: the general American understanding of "poll tax" as meaning "voting tax" (i remember being shocked at Thatcher's apparent -- to me and i think virtually all Yanks -- "tone-deafness" in naming her head tax!) no longer amounts to a misunderstanding by Americans, but to a difference in usage.  (If it is a false supposition that "poll" meant "voting place" to Americans when they adopted that usage, then it is indeed a folk etymology, but that is another issue.) Neither of the refs in Poll tax#Tax on voting contradicts the main body of the first relevant non-WP Google hit on "poll tax", which supports my life-long understanding that poll taxes were never a noticeable revenue source in the South, bcz no efforts were made to collect it, nor was anyone punished for its non-payment -- except blacks on election day.
It would be correct (at least technically) to have a ToP Dab (hatnote) reading something like
:This is about creating government revenue with head taxes. For restricting the right to vote to those paying a particular tax, see Poll tax (voting).
It could (tho i doubt it) make more sense to keep both concepts in this one accompanying article (and in any case the two topics should be interlink'd by more than Dab-support mechanisms), but at the very least the current lead-sent misstates the current scope of the that article's topic. 
I'll probably effect a split before long, in the absence of contrary arguments or pertinent refs cited in this talk-page section. --Jerzy•t 19:35, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should taxes on right to vote be disambiguated out? 

message: I oppose any merger of New Zealand head tax to here. It is appropriate for this article to link to and summarise the New Zealand article, but there's enough material in the New Zealand article to warrant it being stand-alone.-gadfium 19:25, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's been three months since the merge tag was placed on this article, and I'm the only one who commented on it. I've removed the tag.-gadfium 08:37, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [[New Zealand head tax]]

message: Shouldn't we split out Community Charge as a separate article?  It was a major event in British politics and it seems odd there is no independent article about it. Morwen - Talk 14:54, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, we really should... Shimgray | talk | 14:15, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: ...done. Community Charge. Shimgray | talk | 14:30, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

text:  I notice there is almost no mention of the riots which followed imposition of the poll tax during the thirteenth century or whenever, or even during the twentieth in the UK (The earlier ones were in ENGLAND...there is a difference). Also no mention that it was introduced a year early in Scotland, against the articles of Union, and never introduced in Northern Ireland. (Nothing to do with the large numbers of guns and the semtex floating around?)86.14.187.220 (talk) 21:41, 8 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: UK poll tax

message: ..."apparently chose to be both ruthless in imposing it and adamant that there would be no "U-turns" (reversals in policy)." This is egregious bias. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 70.241.27.173 (talk) 17:23, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Community Charge 

message: Not sure what the actual amount payable was but the 14th century tax section says "groat (2p)". A groat was 4p or more correctly, 4d. Stutley 13:28, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: 4d = 4/2.4 = 1.7p, so it's correct to the nearest penny. Duncan Keith 05:01, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Groat 

message: Does anybody have a quote how high the Poll Tax in the UK was? How much had someone to pay per year? Ccwelt 17:53, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It was set on a council by council basis so could vary quite wildly. The figures are further complicated by students and the registered unemployed only having to pay 20% of the "headline" figure and by central government stepping in in 1991 to cut all poll taxes by £140 as an interim measure whilst a replacement was worked out. I seem to recall the headline figure extremes before the cut were £136 in Wandsworth and over £500 in Lambeth. Timrollpickering (talk) 13:07, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  How high was the Poll Tax in UK? 

message: Got cited: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/235362/ 68.39.174.238 (talk) 04:25, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Press 

message: The definition of a Poll tax according to the article is that its a Tax per head, a uniform tax imposed equally upon all residents of a certain age. There is even some quote in the article from a religious book saying that both rich and poor must pay an equal share. " a tax of a portioned, fixed amount applied to an individual in accordance with the census ". "The word poll is an English word that once meant "head" - and still does, in some specialized contexts - hence the name poll tax for a per-person tax."
The Jizya Tax is (a) not uniform / not a fixed amount per person , (b) is a punitive income based tax levied against specific minority groups (c)Form of tax whereby minorities pay for limited basic rights that the majority enjoys at no cost. Countries that have Jizya taxes have a Poll Tax (called Zakat, at 2.5% per person) which meets all the criteria of a Poll Tax. The Jizya Tax ( at 10% to 50% per person) is a selective tax imposed on second class citizens with the intent to punish minorities. 
This section should be removed and added to a form of taxation it represents - and a Poll Tax is just not it. Consensus?
Cheers! Meishern (talk) 20:11, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  I understand the concern.  However, jizya is commonly characterized as a poll tax in the literature (e.g. , .  etc.), and it does have its features.  The lede of the article that may be a bit misleading.  "Tax per head" is the method of assessment.  That does not necessarily mean all heads.  Indeed, you will notice that, in practice, nearly all poll taxes are scaled for social position, and allow ample exceptions for certain segments of the population. The defining point of a poll tax is that it is assessed per head, and not per dollar earned or per dollar of value. Jizya was not a percentage, but rather fixed sum payable by a person of a certain social status.  Now, jizya rolls defined the social status in terms of religion, and it is true that, in practice, social status was further differentiated into three "classes" with cut-offs determined by income level.  In that respect, it does have some features of an income tax. But the sum payable is not scaled to income within a class, but per person in that class, and so remains inherently a poll tax. Walrasiad (talk) 12:10, 15 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is Jizya a Poll Tax? 

message: What does that mean, in plain language please? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.136.236.90 (talk) 19:22, 28 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:   it was not too unpopular 

message: This article has very few references. While it appears well written, it is impossible to determine whether this is in fact all original research or flatly wrong. References are desperately needed. Capitalismojo (talk) 13:36, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Largely unreferenced 

message: The Imperial China section is poorly worded and unclear. I don't understand it well enough to fix it myself.
Definitely needs to be revised.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 45.78.214.177 (talk) 19:09, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Imperial China 

message: I have requested that this article be moved to Poll tax.Mikedelsol (talk) 18:48, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move to [[Poll tax]]

message: I think The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics is wrong. The American poll taxes that were used as a precondition for voting were not called poll taxes because of the election polls. They were regular old poll taxes. You just had to be all paid up to be eligible to vote. Poll taxes were charged annually, but the only penalty for non-payment was being denied the right to vote. I think it is important to distinguish between what the poll tax was in fact in America and what the term "poll tax" has always and only meant (even in America). Srnec (talk) 14:39, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: It's possible, but we would need to gather additional sources and determine due weight for the different (or not different) definitions. Unfortunately, my OUP account is in the process of being renewed, so I can't do an overview of their encyclopedias at the moment as I would normally do.  Eperoton (talk) 14:57, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: The New Oxford American Dictionary gives only one definition: a tax on every adult without reference to income or resources. The Oxford Dictionary of Economics gives "a lump-sum tax levied on every citizen at the same rate regardless of income or wealth" (and specifically denies that the Community Charge was a poll tax). The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States also does not define a poll tax in reference to election polls, although it seem somewhat confused to me. Srnec (talk) 21:12, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Two definitions? 

message: This article says that the rates were based on the rental value of a house. The rates were not levied on houses' rental value but on their market value. Vorbee (talk) 07:51, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: Rental value