No one loves taxes, but they are unavoidable. People have been paying taxes since quite a long time now. The modes of tax payment may have evolved over time but paying taxes and filing returns are important obligations, although these are quite tedious tasks. Despite this, there are several interesting facts associated with taxes, both historically as well as in the present time. Here are a few fun things about taxes you might not have read before.
- Let’s start with the present times. You just need to have tax dues exceeding $50,000 for the government to be able to block your passport. Although failure to pay tax dues doesn’t directly result in any penalties, but this is one inconvenience that a defaulter might have to face.
- If your doctor prescribes you to lose weight as a treatment for severe ailments such as obesity, then the expense of weight loss treatment can be written off from your tax liability. You can get tax deductions for your weightloss program.
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- When you are relocating to a new city to take up a new job or for any other reason, you can also write off the expenses of moving your pet. The reason is that your pets too are considered as your personal property.
- In the UK, there is a tax to be paid for the privilege of owning a television. Television owners have to pay about £145.50 a year. The total collected taxes are channeled to fund television, online, and radio services of the BBC.
- In Pennsylvania, you have to pay an additional tax whenever you buy alcohol. This tax was introduced in 1942 to raise money for flood relief. However, the tax was continued even after enough funds were collected for the flood relief.
- It seems Pennsylvania is a state that has a tax on almost everything you can do to have fun. For instance, an amusement tax is imposed by the state when you buy tickets for movies, concerts, bowling alleys, rock concerts, and so on.
- New York is a place where a tax law has been in place for even the humble bagels that we eat. If you ask your bagels to be sliced before taking it from the shop, then it would fall under processed foods category, and you will have to pay a tax. You can avoid the tax if you slice the bagel at home!
- Another food related tax fun fact is that some US states have different tax rules for carved pumpkins and cooking pumpkins.
- Going back to the early ages, we find evidence of some more interesting taxes. Personal hygiene used to be taxed, and you could use soap only after you paid a tax on it. This was mostly in Europe, and in UK, this tax was retained until the middle of the nineteenth century.
- Go back even further, and you will find an even more interesting story. Egypt had a tax on cooking oil. Not only this, but once used, cooking oil could not be reused, forcing people to buy oil again after paying tax.
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