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| - Facebook posts listing a number of modern day taxes that they claim didn’t exist 100 years ago are misleading. Some of the taxes have been around for more than a century, while others don’t exist in the UK.
The posts, including one with almost 200,000 shares, all feature a poem about tax, and then list dozens of different taxes before saying: “Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago, & our nation was one of the most prosperous in the world.” We’ve written about almost identical posts that circulated earlier this year and in 2022.
But it’s not correct that all of these taxes didn’t exist 100 years ago but are paid in the UK today.
Excise duties—taxes levied on specific goods—were first imposed on beer and tobacco in 1643, for example.
Income tax was first introduced as a temporary measure in 1799 during a war against Napoleon’s forces. While it was repealed in 1802 after a peace treaty was signed, it was revived the following year when war broke out once again with France, this time lasting until 1816. It was then re-introduced in 1842 by then-Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, and has remained in place in various forms ever since.
A duty has also been charged on petrol for drivers of motor vehicles since the 1909 ‘People’s Budget’, while a “death tax”, which was known as estate duty and was the forerunner to inheritance tax, was also introduced in 1894.
Moreover, not all of the taxes on the list exist in the UK. It lists the “Medicare Tax”, which appears to refer to the US Medicare programme, and “Goods and Services Tax”, which exists in Australia and India but not the UK.
The list includes a “Cooking Tax” and a “Workers Compensation Tax”, which do not exist, as well as a “Poverty Tax”, which may be referring to the ‘poor rate’ beginning in the 1700s but which was absorbed into the ‘general rate’ local taxation in 1925.
The posts also mention a “Fishing Licence Tax”. There is no specific tax under this name in the UK, although a rod fishing licence is a permit you have to pay for if you’re fishing for certain fish. They similarly reference a “Driving Permit Tax”, but while drivers have to tax their vehicle, they do not get taxed on their licence.
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