Like many homeowners in Bryan County, I opened our latest property tax assessment recently and did a genuine double take. It certainly got my attention! The big jump in valuation, soon to be appealed I must add, immediately got me thinking about how property taxes here compare with those in the country where I grew up.
When I first arrived in Georgia, I assumed every country taxed homes in much the same way, but I quickly discovered that wasn’t the case.
The United Kingdom does not have a single “property tax” in the way most Americans understand the term. Instead, the UK assesses a “Council Tax” which is the closest equivalent to the American system. This annual tax is levied by local authorities to fund local services such as police, fire, waste collection, and education and is paid by the occupier of the property, not the owner (unless the property is vacant).
However, the UK also has a national Stamp Duty Land Tax which is a transaction tax paid when you purchase property or land with a value above a certain threshold.
Taxes in the United States date back to North America’s colonial era and in America’s 250th year, we still remember the political slogan used by American Patriots during the Revolutionary War: “No taxation without representation”.
This slogan took root after the French and Indian War (1754– 1763) when the British government found itself in a huge amount of debt and began implementing new taxes on their American colonies.
To the British, the whole purpose of having overseas colonies was to enrich their empire, and they saw it as their right to raise taxes at their discretion in the Thirteen Colonies. A series of taxes on everything from sugar to newspapers convinced many colonists that they were being treated unfairly by a Parliament in which they had no representation.
Those frustrations eventually boiled over into events such as the Boston Tea Party.
The Boston Tea Party was a protest against The Tea Act of 1773, which didn’t actually raise the price of tea but made British tea cheaper than inexpensive smuggled Dutch tea, creating a monopoly for the British owned East India Company.
After independence later that decade, Americans still paid taxes, but at least now they were set by their own elected government.
Over the next century, our American ancestors paid taxes on common household and personal items like kitchen furniture, clocks, pianos, billiard tables, and jewelry. For example, in 1865, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. (Teddy’s father) paid taxes on his income, but he also had to pay taxes on his carriage, silver, piano, and his watch.
Britain has certainly experimented with some unusual taxes over the centuries, but none was stranger than the famous and despised Window Tax introduced in 1696. At that time people thought that it was inappropriate for governments to inquire about how much people were worth, so in response the government came up with the idea of counting the windows in homes.
More windows generally meant larger and more expensive houses, so homeowners were assessed based on how many windows their homes had. The tax collector could literally count your wealth from the street.
This assumption proved fairly accurate in rural areas, but it broke down in urban areas, where poor people were often packed into large apartment buildings. The definition of a “window” for purposes of the tax was also not very precise as it counted any opening in the wall, even perforated gratings used for larders and ventilation.
This was so unpopular that people bricked up windows and built new houses without adequate ventilation. By 1766 the number of dwellings with seven or more windows—the threshold that kicked you up into the next tax bracket—had fallen by more than half. This had an unfortunate effect of people living in darker, more crowded, and less ventilated homes, conditions that most probably exacerbated later outbreaks of diseases, such as dysentery and typhus.
The tax was increased six times over its lifespan, then cut in half in 1823, and finally abolished in 1851. Even today, you can see many homes and buildings in the UK with obviously brickedup windows….and now you will know why! After liberation from Great Britain, the United States did have a shortlived attempt with this tax in 1798 that was popularly called the Window Tax or Window Pane Tax.
Income tax didn’t exist at that time, and this was part of the Federal Direct Tax passed by Congress on July 14, 1798, to raise $2 million for war preparations during rising tensions with France.
However, resistance to this tax was fierce, and this unpopular idea was scrapped less than a year later.
So while none of us enjoys opening a property tax notice, we can at least be thankful nobody is counting our windows!
I will leave you with a quote we have all heard before from Founding Father Benjamin Franklin which dates back to 1789, the year before his death at the age of 84: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.”
God Bless America!
Lesley grew up in London, England and made Georgia her home in 2009. She can be contacted at lesley@lesleyfrancispr. com or via www. lesleyfrancispr.com.