ses, 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.

Sec. 14. #Special taxes on transportation.# Another great group of
businesses whose taxation has been especially complex, because they
are distributed throughout different taxing districts, are agencies of
transportation and communication, especially railroad, sleeping car,
express, telegraph, and telephone companies. A state tax on railroad
tonnage (Pennsylvania, 1860) was declared unconstitutional by the
United States Supreme Court. But many other plans have been tried
to compel the railroads to contribute, the chief being by taxes on
dividends, gross earnings, equipment, and valuation of capital stock,
taxed either to the company or to the stock-holders, (Connecticut
since 1849). About a third of the states no longer make the physical
plant the basis of taxation, except that in most of them some part or
kinds of real estate are taxed locally.[10]

Telegraph companies are still locally assessed in most states, but in
over a third of the states are taxed either on gross receipts, or
on mileage of wire. Te