Americans are frequently heard to equate death with taxes because as far as their expectations as Americans go, you must pay your taxes as surely as die at the appointed time. You even have to pay your taxes within a specified time frame. The consequences of not doing so are supposed to be so unpleasant as not to make the payment of tax very attractive. That holds true for most Americans but not for all Americans. This piece of knowledge we have been able to extract from the life and times of one Donald J. Trump who has managed to withhold his taxes for long periods and in the end paid derisory sums as tax. He has been able to do this with the connivance of his lawyers and accountants who by all accounts are as clever as a cartload of monkeys. That method will not work for the vast majority of Americans which is why it will not be discussed any further.
I remember clearly my first encounter with the subject of tax. Not as you may have guessed from a lesson in Economics but as a topic in Religious Knowledge. Or, to quote the correct title, Christian Religious knowledge. As can be expected in a joint Anglican and Methodist owned secondary school which I attended, everyone who passed through the school in my time had to face the WAEC examiners in that subject and so, I did.
In our study of the New Testament, we were informed that in the year when Quirinius was governor of Judea, the word went out from Caesar Augustus that each person be counted, each one in his own village. This is why a humble carpenter named Joseph loaded his pregnant fiancée on a donkey which bore this heavy burden all the way from Nazareth where he lived and practiced his trade to Bethlehem on account of having descended from the house and lineage of David. How that story ended is known to everyone and is therefore not worth telling here. It is at this point that we have to veer off into the jungle of taxation.
The census of Quirinius has been placed around the year 6BC, which means that it took place some two thousand and thirty years ago at a time when the nascent Roman empire was undergoing rapid expansion under Caesar Augustus. This demanded a great deal of money which was squeezed out of the conquered peoples who had just been brought under the umbrella of Pax Romana, which guarantee was provided by the sharp spears and sturdy shields of superbly trained Roman soldiers.
Taxes are paid by living people and the rulers of the Roman empire were determined to collect the taxes from everyone living within their far flung empire hence the decree that everyone reported in their ancestral homes. There to be counted, meticulously no doubt, and be added to the tax roll. These taxes collected was the money used in providing equipment for the army and the building of those excellent roads along which the army moved swiftly whenever and wherever their intervention was required. It has to be pointed out that the army at that point was not only needed for the upkeep of empire, it was also to be made available for the expansion of empire so that even more taxes could be collected from newly conquered territories. Apart from the expenditure on the army, there were other items of other public works including, for example, the provision of potable water which were of course taken care of by the taxes which were extorted from the subjects of the Emperor on his throne in far away Rome.
The people of Judea, like most red blooded people everywhere loathed the payment of taxes. This is not just because it deprived them of their hard earned money but in their special case, because it also forced them to work to acquire Roman coins on which the head of the emperor was stamped. This went violently against the tenets of Judaism which forbade the handling of graven images. The combination of these and other circumstances within the principality precipitated extremely brutal revolts which were no less ferociously confronted by the Romans who were not averse to the large scale crucifixion of all those who were found guilty of tax evasion in the course of these revolts. The need for Joseph to be captured in that famous census was all about the payment of tax and it was as compulsive as death itself. I must confess that the connection between the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus was not emphasised in the lessons that we were exposed to in those days. I made that connection in later years by which time, I had become exposed to books other than the Bible for further instruction.
Later, much later, many thousand miles from Judea across the Atlantic, there was another iconic response to the issue of taxation. Then, the altercation was between the settlers in the original thirteen colonies which made up the nascent United States of America and the English king, George III who by the way, was German. This time, nobody was being counted and the conflict was upon a point of principle. The thirteen colonies which acquired statehood existed under the shadows of Great Britain to which as it befitted a budding empire, taxes had to be paid and they were duly collected. The colonies were directly controlled by governors who were responsible to the king and this being the case, those from whom taxes were being collected were excluded from the process by which tax assessments were carried out. In time this became a sore point with the people who had to pay those obnoxious taxes. They voiced their dissatisfaction with this arrangement but rather than try to find ways of reducing tax burdens, they were increased. The situation quickly spiralled out of control and the colonised people decided that since they were not represented in the councils of power, then they should not be taxed. They took up the cry, no tax without representation and went into rebellion which after years of bitter fighting led to the birth of the USA. This, the foundation of the Republic was built on the issue of tax and since they had no king or a hereditary aristocracy, nobody could be exempted from paying taxes and the principle of joining life taxes to life itself became firmly established. An example will suffice.
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One of the most powerful but certainly the most colourful gangster in the USA in the turbulent Prohibition era was Al Capone, a ruthless but bloodily successful killer with the blood of many men on his hands. It is thought but never proved to be responsible for the Valentine day massacre, so called because it took place on February fourteen 1929. On that day seven mobsters were shot to death in a Chicago garage by gunmen, two of who were dressed as policemen. The men in the garage who were members of a rival gang, the head of which was the prime target were lined up against a wall and cut down in a hail of submachine gun bullets. The operation lasted only a few minutes after which the gunmen coolly emerged from the garage with their hands up followed by the fake policemen with drawn guns. Although the target of this mayhem fortuitously escaped the massacre, this was a brazen show of force which showed the perpetrator’s contempt for all the rules of civilised behaviour, a monster who had put himself above all laws, human and divine. Al Capone was conveniently hundreds of miles away from the scene of the crime but a great deal of objective evidence pointed to his instigation of the crime. Almost a hundred years later, this involvement, as his involvement in many other murders has not been proved and could not be proved. Al Capone lived above the law in every way except one; he could not live and at the same time not pay his taxes.
Al Capone had led a life of crime virtually all his life. He was steeped in prostitution, robbery, gambling, bootlegging, protection racketeering, drug trafficking, not to talk of countless murders. Still, he could not be touched by the law because nothing could be proved against him. There was no doubt however that he had a stream of income as proved by the lavishness of his lifestyle. His belief was that since all his income was illegitimate, he did not have to pay any tax. The ground was cut from under him however when a judge ruled in a separate case that illegitimate income was also subject to tax. The most casual investigation showed that Al Capone had no tax returns for many years. He was promptly charged with tax evasion and sentenced to a long term imprisonment equivalent to the crucifixion he would have been subjected to under the harsh laws of the Roman empire. He paid the penalty for living and not paying tax and found out the hard way that the only two things you could not escape in life were death and taxes.
The issue of taxes continue to loom large in the consciousness of Americans which is why it featured prominently in the manifestoes of both Harris and Trump leading up to the lately concluded elections. It might have done but it does not seem to have mattered to the electorate in the end. This is because the net takeaways from the two candidates are that under Harris tax paid by all income groups except those in the highest 1% earning group was to be reduced. For Trump on the other hand, tax was going to be increased on all earning groups except for those in the highest 5% group. In other words, taxes were to go up across board except for the richest people and corporations who could look forward to increased income and higher profits. The poor on the other hand had little to gain but higher taxes. And this in a country where the only things that you cannot dodge are death and taxes. Times have indeed changed from the days of Augustus when some people were ready to put their lives into the real danger of excruciating torture and death by refusing to pay their tax. At least now, people do not have to go on any journey to be registered because it is the business of the government to make sure that you are tracked every step of the way from cradle, wherever that cradle may be, until death when you are released from the burden of paying tax even though there is still the small matter of death duties.
