Sec. 12. #Special taxes on banks.# Attempts to deal with the difficulty without clear perception of its cause took the form of legislative tinkering and patching.  Taxes were gathered from corporations by any device that seemed workable.  The banks, being the earlier important corporations, were first experimented upon.  Taxes on capital stock and on circulation were tried first (in 1805, by Georgia), then a tax on dividends (in 1814, in Pennsylvania, and in 1815 in Ohio), examples which were followed or modified by a number of states.  After the national banking system was started in 1864, attempts to tax both the capital of the banks and the stock in the hands of individuals led to federal court decisions and then to state legislation by which now in many of the states the banks are separately taxed on their real estate and the shares are assessed to the individual holders (by various rules), but the taxes deducted from dividends and paid by the bank.  There are, besides, special franchise taxes and fees paid by banks in various states.

Sec. 13. #Special taxes on insurance companies#.  Insurance companies present in a striking manner the complexities of the ambiguous property concept.  The assets of the insurance companies (we refer here particularly to the reserve companies), which belong in equity to the policy holders (less the claim of the stockholders in the case of the stock companies), are nearly all invested in stocks and bonds of corporations and in mortgages on real estate.  Now under the general property tax, strictly interpreted, the policies are assessable at their surrender or reserve valuation in the hands of the policy holders; secondly, the securities and credits which compose the assets are assessable to the company; and, thirdly, the railroads, factories, and houses, built with the outstanding loans made by the insurance companies, are assessable as tangible wealth, to the owners.  If such an interpretation were practically enforced it would result in triple taxation to be drawn from the same economic source, and would be utterly prohibitive of the insurance business.  The enforcement has, however, been impossible in practice.  Insurance companies have comparatively little tangible wealth excepting real estate for offices.  This is taxed locally.  Several methods have been tried (beginning as early as 1824) to make insurance companies pay taxes (usually for state purposes) on something besides tangible wealth.  A tax on receipts from premiums proved most workable, first as applied to “foreign corporations” (that is, to those of other states) and later, generally, to domestic companies also.  Now, amid bewildering variety and interstate rivalries in tax laws, the most usual rate is two per cent on gross (in a few cases on net) premiums collected.  The taxes on premiums, with various licenses and fees, now amount to 2.15 per cent of the total receipts from life insurance premiums in the United States.  This is taxation not on an existing body of accumulated wealth, but upon the process of accumulation, a tax directly on the act of saving.  A consistent policy of wealth taxation combined with income taxation would require the abandonment of the present forms of special insurance taxes.