The Price of Progress pot

[...]... valuations in the urban counties of Montgomery and Mobile for failing to account fully for the intangible forms of wealth that were accumulating there.22 “Do not pursue private persons and swear them about the contents of their safes and their pockets,” The Nation advised state of cials at the end of the decade, “because it is both useless and productive of gross fraud and of a habit of contempt for the law.”23... in the Golden State Like the new railroad assessment laws in Illinois, Michigan, and Kansas, the California constitution made the state board of equalization responsible for assessing all railroad property but left the actual collection of the tax up to lo- 22 | THE PRICE OF PROGRESS cal of cials.42 After county of cials collected the tax and forwarded the money to the state treasurer, the board of. .. put it, The whole revenue system of the several counties was disarranged thereby; the ordinary obligations of the counties could not be fully met, and in many of the counties the public schools were closed for want of funds.”44 When the railroads refused to pay their taxes in 1880 and 1881, the counties were deprived not only of the revenue to which they had become accustomed but also of the additional... locomotives—and leave the remaining property to be assessed by local of cials The state board of equalization would then apportion the value of the property to each county, depending on the proportion of track that ran through the county The localities would still tax all railroad property, even property assessed by the state; only the method of assessment changed Illinois retained that system of state assessment... upheaval The completion of the transcontinental railroad, the spreading aftershocks of the financial earthquake of 1873, and an extended drought resulted in widespread unemployment in the Golden State In 1877, a former drayman named Denis Kearney organized the crowds of jobless workers loitering in the streets of San Francisco into the Workingmen’s Party of California, or WPC.37 At their first of cial... had, the more money it got The state retained only tax revenue that was proportionate to the stock owned by out -of- state investors, which amounted to about a quarter of the total receipts of the corporation tax Thus, the corpo- 16 | THE PRICE OF PROGRESS ration tax created a massive and somewhat lopsided system of intergovernmental payments in Massachusetts because the dozen or so towns that had most of. .. bonds the bulk of America’s new corporate wealth Both forms of property, the physical and the intangible, supposedly paid the same rate of taxation But the locally elected, part-time assessors who actually collected the 14 | THE PRICE OF PROGRESS tax lacked not only the know-how but also the inclination to assess stocks and bonds because energetic assessment meant unpopularity and defeat in the next... to cut their own deals with the railroad, hoping to get some kind of relief from the fiscal pinch County supervisors in “most of the counties” ordered their district attorneys to “accept sixty per cent of the taxes due.”48 The state controller, on the other hand, refused to accept such compromise payments “because I believed that, as an of cer of the State, I had no right to accept less than the whole... decade afterward The controller repeated the same complaint year after year, about the “heavy deficiency in the receipts to the General Fund, School Fund, and Interest and Sinking Fund, owing to the refusal of the Central and Southern Pacific and other railroad companies to pay the taxes levied upon them by the law.”57 The railroads made various payments over the years—sometimes paying the whole tax levied,... taxes unique in the United States was the fact that they touched corporate capital at all In both states, the new corporation taxes required company treasurers to report the value of corporate stock to state of cials In Pennsylvania, firms paid a tax that was based on the total value of the firm’s stock In Massachusetts, firms paid a tax that was based on the value of the stock less the amount of physical . for the first time since the Civil War, Americans grew preoccupied 6 | THE PRICE OF PROGRESS Introduction | 7 with the high cost of living. Now, instead of. suspicions of any large aggregation of capital. They suspected the young industrial titans of corrupt- ing Congress and the state legislatures. They blamed the