Weirdest Taxes Ever Collected

Saturday, Aug 15, 2020, 1:56 pm

By:Tony Williams

1.strip club

strip clubs in Texas have to pay a $5 pole tax per customer and this has been running since 2007. The idea is that it will get money to help people on low incomes, but it is still a strange thing to target in the first place.

2.Men's hats

There was a tax on men's hats in England between 1784 and 1811. The idea was that if you could afford a hat, then you could afford to pay more tax and they then produced revenue stamps that had to be with each hat. If you forged those stamps you could be executed.

3.Wallpaper

A wallpaper tax was introduced in 1712 in England and imagine being forced into giving the government money just because you want your room to look nice. What then happened was people would keep the walls blank and then draw in the pattern to make it look like wallpaper just to get around the tax.

4.Bricks

The British decided to start collecting tax on bricks in 1784 and it was purely because of the debt that they had managed to rack up fighting in the United States. This led to companies making bigger bricks because less of them would then need to be used, but then the government brought in a law that limited the size of the bricks.

5.Windows

A window tax was introduced in the UK in 1696 and it was still in existence up until 1851. The idea was that if a house had more windows it could then afford to pay more tax, so that actually led to some people bricking up windows in order to reduce their tax bill.

6.Fireplaces

Charles II of England decided to introduce a tax on fireplaces in the mid 1600's. He did it because he had been spending too much money on himself, so thought that this would be a good way to get more cash in by simply taxing people for every fireplace that they had in their home.

7.Playing cards

Up until the 1960's tax used to be paid on playing cards and indeed this is a tax that is still applied in some countries. If you look at an old deck and examine the ace of spades you will see a mark on it that tells you the tax has been paid.

8.Soap

Soap in England in the 1700's and early 1800's was basically seen as a bit of a luxury and that was partly due to the fact that there was tax on it. This tax was removed in 1835 to allow people to get clean and beat disease.

9.Beards

Peter the Great of Russia had noticed that the nobles in the rest of Europe were all clean shaven. He then hit upon the idea of having a beard tax and everybody had to pay it if they wanted to grow one apart from those that were poor simply because they could not afford it.

10.Breasts

This has to be one of the strangest taxes ever, but in the 1800's in India women who were deemed to be of the lower castes had to pay a tax in order to cover their breasts. The mind really does boggle at this idea of a tax and the fact it was only aimed at the poorest made it even worse.

11.Urine

The Roman Emperor called Nero was a bit strange, but one of the strangest things he ever did was to put a tax on urine. In actual fact it was more on the collection of it because they used urine for a number of different processes including making leather.

12.Cooking oil

Cooking oil used to be taxed in Ancient Egypt and indeed it is one of the earliest known examples of any type of tax being collected. There were even people employed to check how much oil people had and how they were using it.

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