A dumb and deadly way to raise money
Back in the waybacks, we didn’t have income taxes. Governments and monarchs raised money by levying charges on anything they could.
One of the more bizarre options here was a window tax in the 1690s.
The government used to charge a house tax. To raise more cash, they levied additional charges on houses with more than ten windows. The more windows you had, the more you paid.
This tax was supposed to benefit the poor. Technically, only the rich could afford big houses with lots of windows. But, this backfired.
Poor people often lived in shared tenement buildings with loads of windows. Their landlords had big window tax bills. They often put up their rents or boarded up windows to reduce their costs.
People lived in rooms with bad/no ventilation. This allowed contagious diseases like cholera and typhus to spread willy-nilly. More people died.
The tax itself died a death in the 1850s but left behind the phrase “daylight robbery”.
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