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- [00:01]
Roman Mars
Lowe's knows that taking on more projects should be rewarding. That's why loyalty members get more every day with rewards for every home or business purchase. Plus shop weekly member deals and get access to free standard shipping. So what are you waiting for? Join for free Today Lowe's we help you save loyalty programs subject to terms and conditions. Details@lowe's.com Terms subject to change Design is everywhere, even in the merch you choose to put on your body and carry around with you. And right now, you can get your hands ON Brand new 99% invisible merch, a beautifully curated selection of books, vinyl and gear. It even includes a signed copy of the book Kurt Kolsted and I wrote called the 99% invisible city. These signed editions are limited, so get yours now@siriusxm store.com invisible because once they're gone, they are gone. Use code Roman for 25% off. That's a great deal. Hey, right there, that's Roman. R O M a n for 25% off@siriusxmstore.com invisible this is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. On a hot summer day in 1799, French army engineers in occupied northern Egypt were sifting through the rubble of a centuries old abandoned fortress. These soldiers had been tasked by their general, Napoleon Bonaparte, heard of him, to repair the fort for proper use.
- [01:32]
Joel Slemrod
And as they were laying the foundation for the walls and barracks, someone made a startling discovery.
- [01:38]
Roman Mars
That's producer Vivian Le.
- [01:40]
Joel Slemrod
They stumbled upon the Rosetta Stone, possibly the most famous chunk of rock in human history.
- [01:46]
Kurt Kohlsted
The reason it's famous and the reason you can see it when you go to the British Museum is, is that there was text in three languages.
- [01:56]
Joel Slemrod
That's Joel Slemrod, professor of economics at the University of Michigan. The text on the Rosetta Stone had been inscribed with the same message in three different Greek, Egyptian Demotic script, and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, which at the time.
- [02:12]
Kurt Kohlsted
No one could decipher.
- [02:14]
Joel Slemrod
Based on the first two scripts, researchers were eventually able to crack the code for how to finally read hieroglyphics, a writing system that hadn't been used for about 1400 years.
- [02:26]
Kurt Kohlsted
Question what was so important to write about? And the answer is, well, among other things, the Rosetta Stone describes a tax break given to the temple priests of ancient Egypt. So the Rosetta Stone helped us unlock the secret of hieroglyphics by talking about something in Texas.
- [02:48]
Roman Mars
Taxes are essentially as old as human civilization and they've been shaping it ever since. Historically, they've influenced everything from what our buildings look like, to what kind of cars we drive, to who we elect as our president, to whether we revolt.
- [03:03]
Joel Slemrod
History has shown that tax codes can reveal so much about a society. And if you're an American, the revelation is that filing our income taxes sucks.
- [03:15]
Roman Mars
If you're listening to this episode on its release day, it is April 15, aka tax day here in the United States, and we Americans tend to have a pretty fraught relationship with our tax system. The filing process has become so complicated that the average individual spends 13 hours preparing their income taxes. And that can feel twice as long when you want to put your fist through the computer screen the entire time.
- [03:41]
Joel Slemrod
53% of Americans are very bothered by the complexity of our tax system. And one survey even reported that it makes 1 in 3 people, quote, want to cry. Even Albert Einstein allegedly once said, the hardest thing in the world is to understand the income tax. And he was famously smart. So, on this, the final day of tax season, we're sifting through nearly 250 years of US tax history to figure out how things got so damn complicated.
- [04:13]
Roman Mars
Being mad about taxes is a quintessentially American experience. In fact, tax rage is a large reason why this country was created.
- [04:22]
Kurt Kohlsted
The Boston Tea Party, a formative event in the American Revolution.
- [04:28]
Joel Slemrod
Most of us learned in middle school that the Boston Tea Party was an act of defiance over an increase in taxes on tea. But fun fact, that's totally wrong.
- [04:38]
Kurt Kohlsted
Actually, though, that isn't what happened. Closer to the truth was that some tax on tea had been decreased.
- [04:47]
Joel Slemrod
At the time, Britain had been taxing tea at such a high rate that nearly two thirds of tea imported to the colonies was smuggled in illegally to get around the cost. In response, Parliament actually lowered taxes on legally imported tea to undercut this illicit tea trade.
- [05:04]
Kurt Kohlsted
The new proposals from the British looked like they were going to deprive some prominent patriots of their livelihood through smuggling tea, and it got a lot of people upset.
- [05:18]
Roman Mars
That upset eventually led to the American Revolution and the founding of an entirely new country.
- [05:25]
Joel Slemrod
Given that tax overreach was a huge contributing factor to the Revolution, the early American government was very cautious when it came to taxation. It remained very low and extremely simple. And for many, many decades, federal revenue came mainly from things like excise taxes and tariffs.
- [05:43]
Roman Mars
For clarity, excise taxes are applied to certain goods and services, like fuel. And if you don't know what a tariff is, well, then, bless your heart, you clearly haven't been looking at the news.
- [05:54]
Joel Slemrod
In those early years of the Republic, federal spending was low enough that the country could fund itself like this until suddenly it needed a lot more money and fast.
- [06:03]
Kurt Kohlsted
During the Civil War, like all wars, a lot of revenue was needed.
- [06:08]
Joel Slemrod
In 1862, President Lincoln signed into law an income tax to fund the war. This was actually the very first federal income tax in US History and even led to the creation of the irs, then called the Bureau of Internal Revenue. The income tax generated $55 million for the union government, which was the equivalent of about $1.1 billion today. It was an innovative approach to raise.
- [06:30]
Roman Mars
Federal funds, maybe a little too innovative for its time.
- [06:34]
Kurt Kohlsted
Sure enough, when the war ended, I think 1872, that income tax was eliminated.
- [06:41]
Joel Slemrod
With the Civil War behind them, kind of. The Grant administration repealed most emergency taxes and reverted back to the old way of tax collection, excise taxes, with a special focus on what were called sin taxes.
- [06:54]
Kurt Kohlsted
90% of all federal revenue came from taxes on liquor, beer, wine and tobacco.
- [07:03]
Roman Mars
Although the income tax was effective, leaders remained resistant to the idea. Excise taxes seemed adequate to fund the government, plus they were a lot simpler to implement.
- [07:13]
Kurt Kohlsted
They were simpler, but a lot of people thought they were very unfair.
- [07:16]
Joel Slemrod
Excise taxes are regressive, meaning they place a higher burden on lower income individuals. If someone who makes very little money is paying the same rate as someone who makes a lot of money, then they are paying a higher percentage of their income.
- [07:30]
Kurt Kohlsted
And most people would view that as patently unfair. So years go on and there were a lot of people who were not happy with the fact that most of the revenue is coming from taxes on liquor, beer, wine, tobacco. And probably the burden was felt heavily by lower income people. So picking up in the 80s, that's the 1880s and especially the 90s, there was a lot of political support for instituting an income tax and therefore reducing these other taxes.
- [08:01]
Joel Slemrod
This was all taking place during the Gilded Age, an era of profound wealth inequality and exploitation of the labor class. The tax burden was mainly shouldered by the vast majority living in extreme poverty. Meanwhile, robber barons were living in luxury and rubbing elbows with Christine baranski.
- [08:19]
Roman Mars
So in 1894, against the odds, Congress passed the Wilson Gorman Tariff act, which instituted the first ever peacetime income tax. This tax specifically applied to the rich and only applied to anyone making over $4,000, which at the time was the highest earning 1% of the population. It also lowered tariffs on imports, making them cheaper. So the law was very popular with the pro free trade wing of the.
- [08:46]
Joel Slemrod
Democratic party, but unpopular with the Supreme Court.
- [08:50]
Kurt Kohlsted
The Supreme Court had ruled that an income tax was unconstitutional because you know, richer states, the tax burden would be higher than poorer states. So on that basis, it was ruled unconstitutional, even though it wasn't clear during the Constitutional Convention what a direct tax was, and still isn't entirely clear what was meant. Okay, so it's unconstitutional.
- [09:16]
Joel Slemrod
And so how do you make a federal income tax not unconstitutional?
- [09:21]
Kurt Kohlsted
You change the Constitution.
- [09:24]
Joel Slemrod
The income tax slowly made its way through the ratification process until finally in 1913, it was solidified by the 16th amendment.
- [09:33]
Kurt Kohlsted
And the 16th amendment basically says the federal government has the right to levy an income tax, even though the revenues collected would not be proportional to population.
- [09:44]
Joel Slemrod
The national income tax opened up the federal government to a whole new source of income and was a huge change for people filing an income tax for the first time, but barely anyone had to file one. The exemption level was so high that it was actually thought of as a class tax, not a mass tax, because it applied to so few people.
- [10:04]
Kurt Kohlsted
So in 1913, the exemption level was $3,000. Okay, that's about $90,000 in today's dollars, approximately. So in 1913, about 350,000 returns were filed, and that's in a country with a population just under 100 million.
- [10:24]
Roman Mars
Not only did the income tax only impact a narrow fraction of the population, the paperwork involved was wonderfully uncomplicated.
- [10:33]
Kurt Kohlsted
As a tax nerd, you won't be surprised to know I have a copy of the original tax form framed in the. The filing form of the new income tax was, and this is the form and the instructions, four pages long.
- [10:50]
Joel Slemrod
Despite how sparse the four page form was, by the following year, some were already decrying its complexity. At the Annual Conference on Taxation, one speaker declared, it will hardly be denied.
- [11:02]
Vivian Le
That the federal income tax needs simplification.
- [11:05]
Roman Mars
Its complexity is its distinguishing characteristic. To begin with, the language in which the act is couched is involved and its rhetoric bewildering.
- [11:15]
Vivian Le
Its terminology is confusing.
- [11:19]
Roman Mars
But of course, in terms of complexity, it was only uphill from there. And just a few decades later, the US Reached an inflection point that changed the income tax for good. Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which.
- [11:37]
Kurt Kohlsted
Will live in infamy. So, as we're talking, it's clear that wars play a big part in the story of taxation. It changed very precipitously in World War II.
- [11:52]
Joel Slemrod
The sheer scale of the war meant that Americans would be taxed like never before. For one, the exemption level for filing taxes was lowered way down, meaning a lot more of the population actually had to deal with it.
- [12:03]
Kurt Kohlsted
In 1939, 7.7 million returns were filed. Okay, six years later, 49.9 million. So that's an increase of, you know, more than six times. So that was the big change.
- [12:18]
Joel Slemrod
It officially went from being a class tax to a mass tax. And the Department of Treasury plugged it as our patriotic duty to the war effort to file our taxes. They even commissioned Irving Berlin to compose a jaunty little number about it.
- [12:33]
Vivian Le
I'm squared up with the usa.
- [12:37]
Roman Mars
You see those bombers in the sky?
- [12:40]
Kurt Kohlsted
Rockefeller helped to build them.
- [12:41]
Roman Mars
So did I. I paid my income tax today. I paid my income tax today. And it wasn't just the tax base that evolved during this time. The way we collected them changed as well.
- [12:58]
Joel Slemrod
Before 1943, individuals filed once a year for the one lump sum that they owed. Ideally, taxpayers would plan ahead and save enough all year in order to file and pay their taxes in the spring.
- [13:10]
Kurt Kohlsted
But 1943, federal government changed the rules. It said no. Now the employers have to be sending money to the government while you're earning it.
- [13:20]
Joel Slemrod
If you earn a living as an employee of a business or a corporation or government agency, you know, you report to the man, then you are already fully aware of employer withholding. Your employer is required by law to withhold a portion of your wages to pay into taxes you owe.
- [13:37]
Kurt Kohlsted
That was a major change in how the income tax system worked.
- [13:42]
Joel Slemrod
This modernized tax collection in some very important ways. For one, most citizens stop being slammed by a larger tax bill once a year, since they were already paying into it incrementally through their paychecks.
- [13:54]
Roman Mars
Also, there were fewer people to shake down.
- [13:57]
Kurt Kohlsted
It makes the administrative burden and the burden on the IRS much lower. They don't have to track down all the employees. But, you know, history shows that this has been the biggest innovation in how tax systems work. Almost every country of the world with an income tax does this.
- [14:17]
Roman Mars
When World War II ended and government spending declined, you might have expected the income tax to be abolished once again, like what happened after the Civil War. But instead, it just stuck around.
- [14:29]
Kurt Kohlsted
The level of tax didn't decline precipitously after World War II, sometimes called the ratchet effect. And. And you know, why that happened is not entirely known. You know, one story is that people had become familiar with it. The government had gotten good at it during World War II, and so it stuck around and has stuck around since then.
- [14:56]
Joel Slemrod
During the war, the role of the federal government had permanently expanded in a way that made going back to the old tax structure impossible. Government spending had ramped up from increased Social Security to the GI bill to defense spending.
- [15:10]
Kurt Kohlsted
So it's just been a huge increase in the amount of money collected and spent. After World War II and up to the 50s and early 60s, the top rate of income tax in the US and in the UK was over 90%. Vivian, I don't know if you're a fan of popular music, but the Beatles had a song, the Tax man, right? It's one for you, 19 for me. I'm the taxman. So that's a 95% rate.
- [15:43]
Joel Slemrod
World War II made filing income taxes nearly every American's problem. But there were two big reasons why filing taxes became a much more complicated problem.
- [15:53]
Roman Mars
One reason is that after World War II, policymakers more and more started using the tax code to socially engineer taxpayer behavior.
- [16:01]
Kurt Kohlsted
There's no question that the tax system can affect behavior. And legislators have noticed this. And there's a lot of things in the tax system which are there, not particularly to make the tax system fairer, but to change people's behavior.
- [16:18]
Joel Slemrod
Using tax law to drive behavior was not new or unique to the United States. In fact, historically, it's been used in some kind of bizarre ways in Russia.
- [16:27]
Kurt Kohlsted
Peter the Great, when he was modernizing Russia to look more like Western Europe, he noticed that the nobility in Russia had these full beards. In Western Europe, that was kind of out. And so what, what did he do? He could have banned beards, you know, having a beard, but instead he cleverly had a tax on beards. So if you were out in public with a beard, you had to have a little medallion that was proof that you'd paid your beard tax.
- [16:56]
Joel Slemrod
In Post World War II America, the income tax now applied to so many more people that it became a useful tool for lawmakers to nudge the masses to certain socially beneficial behaviors. Tax credits can encourage you to save for retirement or discourage you from buying a gas powered vehicle, or encourage you to renovate a historic building or discourage you from buying tobacco and alcohol.
- [17:20]
Roman Mars
Another big reason why the income tax code has become so complex is ironically, for a very simple reason. Because we want it to be fair.
- [17:30]
Kurt Kohlsted
Our tax system, any tax system could be made much simpler. But the issues in deciding how much simpler, I think are best illustrated by talking about what's the simplest tax system you can think of. The simplest tax system I can think of is what economists call lump sum tax.
- [17:49]
Joel Slemrod
A lump sum tax is basically the same flat monetary amount owed by every person, regardless of how much they make.
- [17:57]
Kurt Kohlsted
It would be darn simple. Why would this never happen? Because most people would find that to be Completely unfair that the richest person in America owes exactly the same tax as, you know, a single mother struggling to get by.
- [18:13]
Joel Slemrod
We do not have a lump sum tax here in the United States. We have a progressive tax where our tax rate increases alongside our income. But even that doesn't truly account for fairness.
- [18:23]
Kurt Kohlsted
Somebody says, well, that's not enough. Somebody with this same income as somebody else, but with a lot of medical expenses, they're not really as well off. All right, so let's have a deduction for medical expenses. More complicated. And the more we try to fine tune the fairness of the tax system, that inevitably makes it more complicated.
- [18:51]
Joel Slemrod
This opens the door to a lot of questions like doesn't a single mother of three deserve a larger tax refund than a single person with no children? Or can you deduct a ransom payment? Or why should a whaling ship captain have to pay the same amount as a sailing hobbyist when it's a business expense?
- [19:08]
Roman Mars
Whether or not our tax system is actually fair is a whole other story, but we are constantly tinkering with it to account for these unique questions and circumstances.
- [19:17]
Joel Slemrod
It is the eternal struggle for fairness and the resulting credits and deductions and exemptions that has ratcheted our tax code into a labyrinth. Corinthian experience. The Form 1040, which started out as four pages in 1913, has become a whopping 106 page document in 2025.
- [19:36]
Kurt Kohlsted
Well, I think it, it could and should be simpler. I think the tendency is too much to try to fine tune the tax system for fairness and to use the tax system to change behavior and incentivize various things. I think we've gone a little bit too far. So I would take seriously making the tax system simpler than it is now.
- [20:04]
Joel Slemrod
There have been plenty of attempts to reform our tax code with varying levels of success. And policymakers will continue fighting over the best ways to do it until the end of time. The United States has a complex economy that for the most part, requires complicated tax law.
- [20:19]
Roman Mars
But just because we have a convoluted tax code doesn't necessarily mean that average Americans need to suffer while navigating it. The government could make the income tax filing process a lot simpler. And in a lot of other countries, that's exactly what happens.
- [20:35]
Kurt Kohlsted
So in a lot of countries, most households don't have to file tax returns.
- [20:41]
Joel Slemrod
36 countries, including the U.K. spain, Denmark and Estonia, all have a variation of a system called return free filing.
- [20:48]
Kurt Kohlsted
What happens is come January or February after the tax year, they get an email from the government and it Says, hey, we've, we've gotten information from your employer and your bank, etc. And based on what we know, here's what your tax return looks like and here's what you owe. So all you we ask you to do is look it over. If we got it all right, you know, click this box and you're done.
- [21:13]
Joel Slemrod
Of course, the tax code in the United States is long, winding and complex. But there are plenty of other countries with complicated tax codes that have made filing easier and free for taxpayers. In the US The IRS already has a lot of the information needed to pre populate our tax forms for us, which could save us a ton of time and money.
- [21:34]
Kurt Kohlsted
That sounds like a pretty important simplification in the tax filing system. And you can guess who doesn't think it's a good idea. It's the makers of tax software.
- [21:46]
Roman Mars
Tax software providers and related special interest groups have a vested interest in keeping tax forms as intricate and intimidating as possible.
- [21:56]
Joel Slemrod
Filing an income tax without the help of a professional is daunting. A 2024 survey indicated that 44% of Americans plan to use tax software provided by companies like H and R Block or turbotax. In order to cut through that confusion.
- [22:11]
Kurt Kohlsted
The companies that sell tax software do better when the tax system is complicated. Because if as it gets complicated, you worry you're not doing it right and you worry you're not getting all the credits and deductions you deserve.
- [22:27]
Joel Slemrod
ProPublica reported that for decades, Intuit, the parent company of TurboTax, has spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying against new tax systems that would have made filing free and easy for average Americans.
- [22:40]
Roman Mars
There's also another cost outside of time and money when it comes to this issue. Filing an income tax return is one of the most common ways that the average American directly interacts with the federal government. When that interaction is a perpetually bad experience, people lose trust in the government.
- [22:59]
Joel Slemrod
Despite the resistance, there have been some major moves over the past few years to transform the taxpayer experience. One development in particular has been especially promising, and a new tool is available.
- [23:10]
Roman Mars
To make filing your own taxes easier.
- [23:12]
Joel Slemrod
Starting this year, taxpayers have access to.
- [23:15]
Roman Mars
Something called the IRS Direct File Tool.
- [23:18]
Vivian Le
It's free, user friendly.
- [23:20]
Roman Mars
The online service allows eligible.
- [23:22]
Joel Slemrod
In 2024, the IRS rolled out a Direct File pilot program in 12 states which allowed qualifying taxpayers to file returns electronically for free without the use of commercial tax prep software. Participants were able to file in as little as 30 minutes, and 86% of respondents reported that Direct File increased their trust in the IRS the program has been widely seen as a good start for making taxes a lot simpler and a lot cheaper for a wide swath of Americans. But unfortunately, it does face an uphill battle.
- [23:54]
Vivian Le
The latest casualties of Elon Musk chainsaw.
- [23:56]
Joel Slemrod
Thousands of IRS workers.
- [23:58]
Roman Mars
The layoffs hit roughly 7% of the.
- [24:01]
Vivian Le
Agency'S 100,000 person workforce this week, just.
- [24:04]
Joel Slemrod
As millions of American prepare to file their taxes.
- [24:07]
Roman Mars
Although the Treasury Secretary committed to keeping and even expanding the direct file program through the 2025 tax deadline, its long term future is uncertain. Congressional Republicans and private tax firms have criticized the program as unnecessary and unsustainable. Elon Musk even posted that he had already, quote, deleted the government agency that worked on the program. So who the hell knows what will happen?
- [24:35]
Joel Slemrod
And until we know what the hell will happen, every April 15, filing an income tax will continue making me want to cry alongside a third of Americans and Albert Einstein. We're supposed to be doing our taxes right now. Do you have any tips for people who have not done their taxes just yet?
- [24:57]
Kurt Kohlsted
No, I don't. As I said, I'm not a lawyer. I'm an economist. Missed. So I guess I don't have any tips. Vivian.
- [25:11]
Roman Mars
Joel Slemrod is a professor of economics at the University of Michigan and the co author of the book Rebellion, Rascals and Revenue Tax Follies and Wisdom through the Ages. If you're a 99 PI fan, I highly suggest you check it out because it is right up your alley. When we come back from the break, Kurt Kohlsted gives an Architectural Digest tour of how taxes have shaped the world. World's Buildings Stay with us. With longer daylight hours, you may be spending more time away from the house and giving burglars more opportunity to strike. Protect your home with SimpliSafe's proactive security that helps stop threats before they happen. Traditional security systems only take action after someone has already broken in. That is too late, my friend. SimpliSafe's Active Guard outdoor Protection can help prevent break ins before they happen. AI powered cameras backed by live professional monitoring agents monitor your property and detect suspicious activity. If someone's lurking around or acting suspiciously, those agents see and can talk to them in real time, activate spotlights and even contact the police, all before the burglars have a chance to get inside your home. If you're like me, you like things handled well so that you will worry less and that's what you get with Simplisafe. You will get less worry in your life, which is the greatest gift of all. Visit simplisafe.com invisible to claim 50% off a new system with a professional monitoring plan and get your first month free@simplisafe.com invisible there's no safe like SimpliSafe. I want to tell you about another podcast I really love, Criminal. Criminal is a podcast that shares true stories about people who done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Stories told by people who know them best. Like a man who figured out how to negotiate with his father's kidnappers. Or a woman who fell in love with a man in prison and then snuck him out in a dog crate. Criminal reports on the most curious crimes around. I've been in on Criminal from the Ground floor. I know the producers and is in contention for the best podcast of all time. And I really mean that. Discover the unexpected side of true crime. Listen to Criminal every week wherever you get your podcasts. So one of the things we mentioned briefly in Vivian's piece about tax code was that taxation influenced what our buildings look like. And so I'm here with 99 PI's own Kurt Kolstedt to talk about that. How the built environment around us was shaped by taxation.
- [27:43]
Vivian Le
Yeah, that's right, Roman. And, you know, we tend to think of buildings as being the product of regional styles and architectural designers, and maybe on the more mundane side, things like the availability and cost of certain materials, or, of course, building codes. But tax code can leave incredible marks on buildings that last for centuries.
- [28:03]
Roman Mars
Okay, give us an example.
- [28:05]
Vivian Le
Well, after the Revolutionary War, Britain was massively in debt. So King George III introduced the British brick tax in 1784 to, like, raise revenue and pay off those bills, you know, and of course, brick makers, they learned of this, and they saw that they'd be taxed on a per brick basis, and so they responded by simply making bigger bricks.
- [28:28]
Roman Mars
Right. And so with bigger bricks, you can make as big a wall with fewer bricks, and therefore, you're sort of. You're. You're paying the same, you know, per unit tax, but you get, you know, a bigger building out of it. Yeah, exactly.
- [28:40]
Vivian Le
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the idea. But, of course, the Crown caught on to this and responded both by increasing the taxes per brick, but also adding a tax for bricks above a certain size. And this move actually caused some businesses to go under because they couldn't afford the higher taxes. They had all this larger stock on hand, and they just couldn't pay that. But. But a lot of those larger bricks made during that era made it out into the world. And can be seen on buildings to this day. And in some cases, you can even see both the pre tax and the post tax bricks on a single wall. So I just shared you this photo of a high street in England, and maybe you can just describe what you're seeing.
- [29:24]
Roman Mars
Sure. So there's the sign High Street. It's a brick wall, and there's a vertical line dividing two parts of the wall. And at one side, the bricks are quite a bit larger than the other side, the smaller side, there's kind of a mosaic side and kind of big brick side.
- [29:40]
Vivian Le
Yeah, yeah, totally. And so you can imagine, like, a historian can literally just look at this and understand that, like, this part of the wall dates back to this era, and this part of the wall, you know, dates back to a different era just from looking at the brick sizes.
- [29:55]
Roman Mars
That's so cool. Okay, what else do you have for us?
- [29:57]
Vivian Le
Well, a few years later, British lawmakers introduced a per window tax.
- [30:01]
Roman Mars
Yeah. And if this follows the same logic of the brick tax, you would just have, like, really big windows, which. Which I don't think I've seen.
- [30:09]
Vivian Le
No, no, alas, no. I imagine that would have been super expensive. And so instead, people actually just started boarding or even bricking up the windows that they considered, like, less important. And even though that tax has, like, long since been repealed, you can still see windows around the country that were bricked up in that era.
- [30:29]
Roman Mars
Yeah, because, you know, that's something that's easy to do, but that's kind of hard to undo. Right, right.
- [30:35]
Vivian Le
Because then you have to install a window.
- [30:36]
Kurt Kohlsted
Right?
- [30:37]
Roman Mars
Exactly.
- [30:38]
Vivian Le
Yeah, yeah. And. And so I imagine that's part of it. And then in some cases, I could see people just getting used to it.
- [30:43]
Kurt Kohlsted
Right.
- [30:44]
Vivian Le
Like, those areas have become walls over the centuries, and so they've just taken on a completely different use. And, you know, those were deemed the least important windows. So that would make sense. Now, we've been talking a lot about Britain, but in some places, like Amsterdam, taxation has really fundamentally shaped the entire character of the city. And I'm specifically referring to those really prominent canal houses for which Amsterdam is really well known.
- [31:13]
Roman Mars
Yeah, these are beautiful. They're like these super thin buildings. They're usually, like four, maybe five stories tall, give or take. And they sit side by side, like, wall to wall along a lot of blocks in canals. And between their narrowness and their crowdedness, I mean, find them, like, delightful, like, storybook beautiful.
- [31:35]
Vivian Le
Absolutely. They look like something out of a fairy tale. And one could argue that they're, like the Most defining physical feature of Amsterdam. And somebody visiting the city could look around, see how consistent they are in a certain way, and maybe imagine that there was a master plan to build the whole city like this. Or maybe there are just building codes that say, you know, you have to have this kind of shape or whatever. But no, it was taxes. Amsterdam chose to tax buildings based on the width of a building's front facade.
- [32:09]
Roman Mars
Wow. And once you know that, it all makes sense, because that one tax encouraged people to build exactly what we see today. Like, really skinny buildings, Pretty tall for a residential place. You know, quite. Quite a few stories. And, you know, they're really deep. They go back as far as possible to get the maximum space they can, but with minimum width. So therefore reducing their taxes.
- [32:33]
Vivian Le
Exactly. It's all about the bottom line. And then as a result of this thinness, the interior staircases became really narrow, too. And that made it difficult, if not impossible in some cases to bring furniture up or carry up goods to be, like, stored on higher levels. So another iconic feature of these buildings are these hoist and pulley systems that stick out over the sidewalks and they sit below, right below, like, the gabled roof at the very top. And they're. I mean, they're very prominent.
- [33:03]
Roman Mars
Right. And these are because, like, say you got this gigantic couch to move or, you know, a heavy sack of grain or whatever. I don't know. But you just hook a rope on it and you pull it up, and then you swing it, like, you know, like into an upper story window.
- [33:19]
Vivian Le
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And some of those have been removed, you know, in the intervening centuries, But a lot of them are still around, and some are purely decorative, but others are still very much in use because it's not like the constraints have changed. Right. They still have these really narrow staircases and people still really need furniture.
- [33:39]
Roman Mars
And if I lived in one of those buildings, I would totally keep the hoist in working order. Oh, yeah. Because I mean, it's really like. It's a kind of iconic part of the building. It's as iconic as the narrowness of the building.
- [33:50]
Vivian Le
Yeah. And that's what's wild about all of this to me, because you've got this beautiful canal city and it draws tourists for this amazing architecture. And, you know, it would be easy to imagine that it was planned down to every detail. Like, they intended to have these narrow buildings and they intended to have these hoist systems. But, like, so much of it, like, it. It's all driven by taxation.
- [34:13]
Roman Mars
Right. And if these types of stories, like, excite you. We have a whole book full of them, 99% Invisible City that Kurt and I co authored about five years ago. At this point, it's like the five year anniversary.
- [34:23]
Vivian Le
Yeah, it's coming up on that five year anniversary and we're going to have some special content around too, but I'm gonna keep that piece a surprise.
- [34:31]
Roman Mars
Okay, excellent. But in the meantime, you can go check out the 99% Invisible City or just keep listening to the show. We'll talk about this stuff.
- [34:38]
Vivian Le
As always, we'll keep nerding out about this.
- [34:43]
Roman Mars
99% invisible was produced this week by Vivian Leigh and edited by Delaney hall, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real and apm fact checking by Graham Ha. Again, Joel Slemrod's book is called Rebellion Rascals and Revenue Tax Follies and Wisdom through the Ages. There's a ton fun, very 99 PI tax stories in there that we didn't get to that we know you'll love. Oh, this is really important. 99% Invisible is up for three Webby Awards this year and I'm really feeling the need to win them. We're up for Best Arts and Culture Podcast for the Power Broker series, Best Arts and Culture episode for Rocketman that was produced by Chris Berube, and Best Limited Series for the Power Broker series. We'll have a link in the show Notes to the Webby Awards or you can just search for Webby Awards and then search for Knights to get to our categories. Thank you so much. Kathy Tu is our Executive producer, Curt Kohlsted is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Barube, Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Lashma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family now, headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us all on Blue sky as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99pi@99pi.org Design is everywhere, even in the merch you choose to put on your body and carry around with you. And right now you can get your hands ON Brand new 99% invisible merch, a beautifully curated selection of books, vinyl and gear. It even includes a signed copy of the book Kurt Kolstad and I wrote called the 99% invisible city. These signed editions are limited, so get yours now@siriusxm store.com invisible because once they're gone, they are gone. Use code Roman for 25% off. That's a great deal. Hey, right there. That's Roman. R O M A N for 25% off@siriusxmstore.com invisible.