of the aggregate
taxes in the United States. The national government gets about
one-fourth of this amount from a tax on immigrants and the rest is
collected by (some of) the states, counties, and minor divisions.
Usually, if not always, the poll tax is imposed only upon voters, as a
condition to the right to vote.

(b) Taxes may be laid upon _incomes_, as they come into the possession
of the owner. Usually, only monetary incomes that arise in commercial
transactions are taxable, and no attempt is made to estimate the value
of psychic incomes. Commercial incomes are more easily measured, but
the omission of the other elements must cause many inequalities in the
burden of the tax as between two individuals controlling equal incomes
of real things.

(c) Taxes may be on _property_, either general upon all property in
the taxing district, or special, upon certain forms of property. A
property tax may be specific or _ad valorem_, in proportion to value,
as to the method of its determination. Since the value of material
wealth is the capitalization of the rentals at the prevailing rate of
interest, a general, _ad valorem_, property tax, so far as it applies
to material wealth, and if it were accurately assessed, would take
an approximately equal proportion of wealth-incomes. It does not, of
course, touch directly incomes derived from wages and salaries, but it
reduces their purchasing power in many cases. It is in some respects
more searching than a tax on actual rents, for it reaches the
prospective, or speculative, rental.

(d) Taxes may be on _expenditure_ (sometimes called taxes on
consumption). This is but another mode of attacking income, for in the
long run most income is spent, not always by the individual who earned
it, but by some one, and thus it is reached by a tax on expenditure.
Usually in the United States the tariff duties are accounted to be
taxes on expenditure, as also the internal revenues (also called
excises) of the national government. In time of war, internal revenues
are extended in the United States to a multitude of articles, but
usually they have been limited (with minor exceptions) to liquor and
tobacco. Most of these taxes are in fact levied not at the time of
purchase by the ultimate consumer, but upon the specific goods in
the hands of some merchant or business agency, and some of them are
essentially special property taxes and others are business taxes of
the kind next to be mentioned.

(