How oppressive were the British taxes on the American colonies?

Factual Questions
1

The origin story of the United States of America usually begins with a debate over “taxation without representation”. The British Crown, needing to pay for the costs of the recently concluded French and Indian War, imposed taxes on the colonies which gave rise to protest, and, eventually, a revolution.

The first act was the Sugar Act , which was passed in 1764. This placed a tax on sugar and molasses imported into the colonies. Among other costs, this made it more expensive to make rum (an important export for New England)

A year later, in 1765, the Stamp Act was passed. This placed a tax on all printed materials such as newspapers, magazines, and legal documents. Even playing cards and pamphlets needed an official tax stamp.

Next, Townshend Acts were a series of acts passed in 1767 and 1768 that placed indirect taxes on imports British goods such as glass, lead, pants, paper, and tea.

It was at this point that we got the Boston Tea Party (destroying tea worth millions in modern dollars), and at that point Parliament was clearly pissed, as they then passed the Coercive Acts in 1774. In the American Colonies, these became known as the Intolerable Acts and included 5 total acts:

  • The Boston Port Act
  • Massachusetts Government Act
  • Administration of Justice Act
  • Quartering Act
  • Quebec Act

Among other things, these acts took away rights and self-governance in Massachusetts, precipitating war.

My question, though, concerns the initial series of taxes, before things became combative.

Sure, the sugar tax impacted colonial businesses, and the stamp act undoubtedly increased costs for everyone.

But how oppressive were these taxes?

Nowadays, a municipality will occasionally impose a “penny tax” to generate revenue for some project. It isn’t that bothersome.

Other times, taxes are used to coerce conduct. The really high taxes on cigarettes has contributed to fewer users, for example.

Where do the taxes on the colonists fit on that spectrum? Beyond the philosophical notion that they were “unfair”, how crippling was the cost?

2

My understanding is the taxes themselves were not oppressive. The colonists’ issue with the taxes were for other reasons.

Colonial and Early Americans paid a very low tax rate, both by modern and contemporary standards. Just prior to the Revolution, British tax rates stood at between 5-7%, dwarfing Americans’ 1-1.5% tax rates. - SOURCE

3

This isn’t quite accurate. It was the British Parliament that imposed the taxes, as your subsequent references to the various Acts indicates.

One of the polemic features of the Patriots was to blame it all on King George, and to undercut the fact that an elected legislative body was doing it. It’s much easier to blame a single bad guy.

The Crown had no power to impose taxes on the colonies. Once the Parliament passed the statutes, then the Crown had the legal authority to collect the taxes, but the decision to impose the taxes was with Parliament.

4

(Always fun to think about how a, let’s say, casual relationship with historical facts has been baked into American political dialog from day one.)

5

(More fun to note that while “taxation without representation” was a focus and rallying cry for the revolutionaries you will not find it in any US law…weird how that works.)

6

So they were less a legitimate reason, and more a convenient excuse?

7

It’s worth noting that the Tea Act of 1773 actually had the effect of making British tea cheaper. Why did the Sons of Liberty get so angry that they threw British tea in the harbor? Because they ran a highly lucrative smuggling business in Dutch tea. With British tea now being cheaper, the Sons of Liberty could no longer rip off colonists with the overpriced Dutch product.

8

So you’re saying taxation without representation is a standard feature of American society?
:thinking:

9

<< deleted by poster >>

10

So, in trying to answer my own question I found this.

https://www.nps.gov/people/paul-revere.htm

Now, at that time Revere was a silversmith with his own shop; so, a small business owner.

By the late colonial period, it appears that the average annual income was 13.85 pounds, although it goes up to 16 if you only count free white people.

So it sounds like Revere was still a rich man, even after his business took a hit.

11

AIUI, the issue wasn’t that the taxes were particularly high. It was that the British Parliament, as the ultimate sovereign power of the British Empire, could impose them unilaterally on the colonies. The Cider Bill of 1763 - Wikipedia in Britain is illustrative: there was widespread protest against the tax, and because those taxed were represented in Parliament, opposition to the tax had political voice. But the colonies could in principle be told “put up and shut up” without recourse. Taxes in England/Britain and the colonies were traditionally low precisely because the populace was so suspicious of them. It was far too easy to envision the colonies becoming Britain’s “milch cow”, when no MP was in danger of losing their seat if they voted to tax the colonies. The English had forced John to cede a unilateral authority to tax, Charles got beheaded when he tried to regain that authority, and James got deposed when it looked like he was thinking of trying. The English/British and their American offshoots feared taxation more than actual tyranny.

One of the taxes, the Stamp Act, was controversial on multiple grounds. One was it’s potential to be abused in the pursuit of political censorship. If all printed material such as newspapers and political pamphlets had to have a tax stamp, what if the taxing authority simply refused to issue the stamp? A similar sophistry is in effect in the USA today to effectively ban full-auto firearms, even though a flat-out ban would be constitutionally dubious if it could ever get a hearing in the Supreme Court. It de facto works by requiring registration and then simply making registration impossible. In addition, stamp taxes cause a reversal of the presumption of innocence baked into Anglo-American law, because they effectively make possession of the taxed item illegal unless one can present the affirmative defense of producing the stamp. Finally, tax agents were empowered to search anywhere they believed untaxed contraband was being stored with the flimsiest and most perfunctory of warrant requirements; again in contravention to long-standing traditional rights; and such agents were so abusive of their authority that they were seen as little more than graft extortionists.

12

I seem to recall that when Parliament lowered taxes (as in the case of the Tea act), the suspicion of some of the colonists was that this was a trick - if the colonies accepted the new lower taxes without complaint, they were accepting the principle that Parliament could set taxes as they liked. This concern, not being understood in Britain (or being deliberately misunderstood by some in Britain), led to a perception (or was used to promote a perception) that the colonists were irrational and unreasonable.

13

“we just want common-sense tax rates”? :stuck_out_tongue:

14

When were the problems with rotten boroughs fixed? I’m guessing there were entrenched interests who did not want to address disproportionate representation.

15

The worst of the issues were addressed in 1832.

16

Well after the revolution - part of the reforms of 1840, I think

Ninja’d!

17

Another point was that without the massive registry infrastructure we take for granted today, the simplest and easiest taxes were on imports, since there were not too many ports where big ships could land. (except smugglers, of course)

I assume the invasive nature of the stamp act was simply because nobody really had a list of all the printing equipment in the colonies particulalry in the back country - I wonder if the tax collectors worked on the commission system?

Don’t forget too another grievance and something considered a major imposition was the quartering of soldiers in private homes. (Cheaper quicker than building and provisioning barracks?)

18

The third amendment. Probably the most useless of all the amendments. But it was obviously important to them at the time they wrote it.

19

Goes back to the English Civil War era, when the practice first gained its dirty reputation. It was literally expecting the populace to house and feed the occupation troops that were policing them. Not to even mention being a tax in kind imposed by fiat, and an invasion of privacy.

20

This illustrates something that often goes over modern audiences’ heads: why originally voting was limited either to the propertied (land owners) or those who had paid a poll tax. In the absence of the multiple redundant ways we have today of confirming someone’s identity, how could officials in a pre-industrial society confirm that someone who showed up at the polls claiming to be so-and-so really was? The answer is that the franchise was restricted to people who could be checked against a central list: either the property tax rolls or the list of those who had paid the poll tax. Or later, a local census.