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Yes it was, from my reading of the article it was taxed for both profit and to make British-produced salt (ctrl+F Cheshire salt) more price competitive with loc
by exhilaration 9y ago
Yes it was, from my reading of the article it was taxed for both profit and to make British-produced salt (ctrl+F Cheshire salt) more price competitive with local salt. There's a quote from 1881 in there:
Then again there is a still more wretched creature, who bears the name of labourer, whose income may be fixed at thirty-five rupees per annum. If he, with his wife and three children, consumes twenty-four seers [49 lb] of salt, he must pay a salt duty of two rupees and seven annas, or in other words 7 ½ per cent income tax.
- eadmund 9y agoI'm sure that the labourers had to pay for other taxes too, but man, I'd kill for only 7½% income tax. Right now my total tax burden is about 50%.
- afterburner 9y agoYou're probably thinking of just your top marginal rate on income tax?
- eadmund 9y agoNo, I mean that my income, capital-gains, sales & property taxes, along with fees like those for my car registration, equal roughly half my total income.
- afterburner 9y agoSeems highly unlikely unless you're not including the gains from your capital gains in your ratio. Do you know how the marginal rates work?
- eadmund 9y ago> Seems highly unlikely unless you're not including the gains from your capital gains in your ratio. Nope, I am. It's remarkable how high one's tax burden is, once one starts to actually track it. All those sales taxes and fees add up. > Do you know how the marginal rates work? Yup. I'm calculating (total government costs)/(total income), for all of my income and all costs-of-government.
- afterburner 9y agoYou're hitting the top marginal rates and seeing sales tax be a large burden? Weird. Are you spending more than you're currently earning?
- eadmund 9y agoI wouldn't say that sales tax is a large burden, but 8½% adds up over time. No, I spend less than I earn, and save quite a bit. Some of that savings is tax-advantaged, but overall I pay a huge amount of my income in taxes & fees. I don't mind that taxes exist, really; I don't mind paying for a social safety net. But I think something's wrong when half of my productive labour & investment income is taken from me every year.
- afterburner 9y agoSo you have an extremely high income and no investments? The top marginal rate is 40%, and that only applies to what you make over $420,000.
- sangnoir 9y agoThe 7.5% is not income tax - it's just salt-duty! If we were to add a 7.5% duty for salt alone to your current 50% tax burden, I'm sure you'd be marching too.
- notahacker 9y agoSuspect the average early twentieth century Indian farmer would kill for the OP's state subsidised education, healthcare, unemployment benefits and pension too, never mind his disposable income after tax...
- mikeash 9y agoThe impact of taxes depends on how much you have to begin with. Would you kill to have both that laborer's tax rate and that laborer's wages?
- oblio 9y agoMaybe, but your 50% left cover your expenses for food, clothing, shelter, medicine, etc. I doubt that the 93% the average Indian laborer or farmer had covered his basic necessities. And as another posted said, this was just the salt tax.
- mkl 9y agoThat's a lot of salt! Why would they use so much? For preserving or something?
- oblio 9y agoI don't know a lot about the particulars of this situation, but I do know a bit of history. If things are how I expect them to be, yes, they were using it for preserving food. India has a warm and humid climate and it's hard to preserve food for more than a few hours/days. And here we're talking about a world before fridges or freezers. It depends on the type of food, but for example for meat, in a world before refrigeration, you could: * smoke the meat (kind of hard to do for a poor Indian, especially since large parts of India don't have abundant firewood) * drying, etc. (probably not as effective) * curing aka salting (probably the most popular solution) They probably also needed salt for iodine, otherwise you run into nasty issues: > Iodine deficiency affects about two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of intellectual disabilities.