_Peculiar taxes._--Aside from these general forms of taxation, peculiar devices are common. The stamps required on official papers or commercial transactions, involving checks, notes, mortgages and deeds, have been familiar at various times in our country, and are associated with the history of the world. These differ little from the practice of affixing stamps to patent medicines, cigars and other articles of trade; but instead of being attached to the article transferred they are affixed to the check or note or deed or bond employed in the transaction. These bear unequally, being proportionally heavy upon the people of small means, and are generally annoying in active business. They are frequently favored, however, as being felt most by those who deal most in commerce.
The heavy taxes laid upon the consumption of alcoholic liquors and tobacco illustrate another device for making so-called luxury bear the heavier portion of taxes. It looks both ways, attempting to check luxurious living or vicious practices by a penalty for indulgence, and at the same time to secure a revenue as the result of such indulgence. Evidently in so far as it prohibits indulgence it is not a revenue measure; and in so far as it secures the revenue it does not prohibit indulgence. It is borne somewhat patiently, because each person feels that he can avoid the payment by ceasing to indulge himself. The universal tendency is to make it purely a revenue measure by fixing the tax just where it will not retard consumption in any material degree, and in some instances will give a quasi dignity to the dealer through his official license.
_Taxation of credits._--A very common device adopted in most of the states is that of assessing credits as well as property. The majority of farmers favor the assessment of mortgages upon a valuation equal to, if not higher than, that upon farms. They forget that the ability to pay taxes from year to year comes out of the profit or rent from the farm; and if both farm and mortgage are taxed, the adjustment comes through the interest which the mortgage must bear. To illustrate, a father sells his farm, worth $5,000, to his son, taking a mortgage for the entire value. If mortgages are assessed, the value of that farm for all purposes of taxation is $10,000; and yet the living of both father and son, taxes included, comes out of that farm's production. The two have no more property and no more ability after the transaction than before. Thus the mortgaged farms in every community where mortgages are taxed bear double burden.