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It’s tax season and so as long as you’re American, watching this video when it first
comes out, and choose to pay them wave one final goodbye to your money!
Now, a bunch of other countries also have their tax filing deadlines around April too,
but today we’re talking about America.
Other countries just don’t make taxes fun.
You see, for example, the entirety of Swiss tax law fits into this measly 92 page document!
I mean, what is this, a tax code for ants?
The US meanwhile has this glorious, 3,837 page document chock full of rules, exemptions,
deductions, and definitions and if I learned anything in economics class, it’s that the
best way to make people do their taxes is to make it really really difficult and expensive…
or was it the other way around?
Who knows, but do we have examples of taxes having weird consequences that we can make
a video out of?
Of course we do.
What’s best is that the 3,837 page US tax code is only the main document—there are
plenty of other related ones like the 3,713 page Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United
States.
This document outlines what percent tax is levied on different products when they’re
imported into the United States.
For example, cross-country skis can be imported for free while downhill skis are subject to
a 2.6% import tax.
Why?
Because they said so!
What’s on this document, whether a number of 2% or 20%, has enormous, worldwide consequences
that can make or break industries and economies.
After that big worldwide war, the second one, West Germany started to really like Chicken.
European Chicken was expensive while American chicken was cheap so west Germany bought a
whole lot of American chicken but the West German government didn’t like that.
They wanted their citizens to eat European chicken so the European farmers would be happy
and so they implemented an import tax against American chicken, and America didn’t like
that.
They fired back with this—a 25% tariff on trucks under 5 tons.
That devastated the import market for pickup trucks and vans which especially hurt Germany
given their focus on automobile manufacturing.
Nowadays, if you live in the US, just pay attention to how infrequently you see a small
truck that’s not manufactured by Ford, GM, or Chrysler.
If you don’t live in the US, just take my word for it, there are not many foreign pickup
trucks.
This number here is exactly why.
It’s just too expensive to import foreign trucks and this is all because the Germans
taxed American chicken.
But here’s the craziest part of the Chicken tax.
Ford, for example, despite being an American company manufactures their Transit Connect
vans in Turkey which means that normally they would be subject to the 25% chicken tax as
they are light trucks, but, Ford imported all of these vans as Tourneo Connect Vans—a
passenger variant with back windows and seats.
Because of this, Ford only had to pay the 4% import tax on passenger vehicles but then,
once the vehicles cleared customs, they would remove the back seats and windows and convert
the vehicles into cargo-carrying vans.
Unfortunately, the Feds eventually caught on and have started charging Ford the 25%
tax for light trucks.
At the point, I’d like to encourage you to leave your full opinions on taxes, tariffs,
and trade wars in the comments!
I’m sure it’ll convert loads of people to your political ideology and even better,
its great for engagement!
No matter how sarcastically I say this, people will still do it.
But let’s pick on another country for a bit.
If you’ve ever seen a building in the UK that looks like this its because of taxes.
Basically, the idea of an income tax was super unpopular in 17th century Britain so they
tried to raise revenue through other means.
This didn’t always work out, but in one instance they taxed windows.
The idea was that richer people had bigger houses with more windows so it was a form
of variable tax—taxing more from those who had more.
Houses with fewer than ten windows paid two shillings in tax, houses with ten to twenty
paid six shillings, and houses with twenty or more windows paid ten shillings so that
led to all these people boarding up their windows to get out of paying taxes.
At this point, there are just so many good sponsor segues so I’ll do three.
(If you want to evade your taxes like the rich, Skillshare has a course for that!
Not even joking!
But they call it “tax reduction”/ The good news is that there’s no tax for browser
windows because with the number of courses Skillshare has, you’ll need plenty of them./If
you don’t have any money left after taxes, I have good news, because you can get 2 months
of Skillshare for 99 cents.)
As it turns out, learning is good for you and Skillshare is a great place to do just
that.
They now have over 20,000 classes about pretty much anything and everything.
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