I was reading the book The Hamilton Scheme which says Hamilton basically was trying to create a more powerful central government to increase the wealth of the new nation, and particularly enrich his mentors, some of the more wealthy merchants. The Articles of Confederation gave no taxation power to congress, so they were reliant on a funds from the states, who had their own financial problems. Unpaid promissory notes were common.
The idea was to get a national tax, a reliable source of funds to pay off the IOU’s left over from the Revolution - preferrably at face value, preferrably with interest. His mentors and other rich elite had bought up these notes for pennies on the dollar from poorer, desperate folk.
First thing was an import tax - that could be collected in major ports, just like the British.
After getting a national tax for imports, his second scheme was a whiskey tax. It was particulalry skewed to larger producers, which is why the smaller producers in the west rebelled against the idea.
The whiskey tax allowed the government to create its own list of stills (it was mandatory to register them) and a force of “revenoors” to go inspect and collect taxes, based on the size of the still. While the industrial scale stills ran 24-7, most smaller ones were small time occasional ventures, that did not make enough to pay the tax.
But that was the start of collecting information and major data about who had something worth taxing.
Precisely - and also because the landless were more transient and less documented. Not just a class thing.
To be fair, most countries will have their own [cough] historical myths and legends, about themselves and their historical antagonists. There’s a subterranean cultural battle in the UK about the Empire (among much else), and no doubt the foundation narratives in quite a lot of countries might differ quite a bit from their neighbour/antagonist’s accounts of the same events.
I think the point is that they pitched a fit over a problem that they didn’t even try to solve once they’d won the political power to do so, suggesting they weren’t being honest about their actual aims. See post 6 above.
And THAT, my friend, definitely has been a standard feature of American society from the beginning.
Underlying this, too, is that there was continual tension between the colonial governor appointed by Britain and the local legislatures, which had very little power but kept pushing the bounds - which caused excessive retaliation from the governors. .
I was searching for an image for the caption contest thread the other day and ran across this:
Heh, one of the complaints against the British government was that it tried to prohibit private land purchases by the colonials from the natives. After the revolution, the federal government assumed an exclusive treaty power with native American tribes.
Some folks say that taxes were not the real issue. The real problem was that after the French and Indian War, Britain actually began cracking down on the rampant smuggling in the colonies in order to make their money. Many wealthy folks in the colonies were highly inconvenienced by the sudden disruption of their income but couldn’t just complain that they were not being allowed to operate criminally anymore. So officially it was taxes that were a problem and we should declare independence right now! This book covers the topic as part of Americas traditional love of smuggling.
You think non-citizen immigrants (legal or otherwise) don’t pay taxes? It is worse for the undocumented since they pay SS taxes and will never collect. Then there are organizations devoted to making it hard for citizens to vote, but I will stop before it gets political.
