Book Description

It does not take a very long investigation to show that the general property tax is wholly unsuitable to the taxation of intangibles. The case in Ohio alone is sufficient to prove this. We have had in Ohio the most efficient and detailed scheme of bringing upon the duplicate all classes of intangible property that any state has devised, yet the report of the State Tax Commission states that there are many millions of dollars of this class of property that are not listed. In every section intangible property is concealed. The experience of the whole country in regard to the taxation of intangibles by the general property tax is summed up by the United States Court of Appeals when it said, "There is a monotonous uniformity in the reports of the failures of every system attempted, however stringent the legislation of however arbitrary or despotic may be the powers with which the assessors are clothed -- the result is always and everywhere the same, no appreciable part of such intangible property is reached by laws however ingeniously framed or severely enforced." In regard to real estate and tangible personal property, taxation by direct valuation has proven more satisfactory and undoubtedly is the best means of reaching real estate, tho this may not be so clearly true for tangible personal. But the best means of taxing these classes of property is not the problem I am interested in here. In this paper only the problem of the taxation of intangibles will be dealt with.