The Tax Man Cometh

April 15th, tea, in particular, teabags are an important symbol to Americans of the conservative stripe. Colonial residents of the nascent United States dumped tea into the Boston Harbor objecting to ‘taxation without representation’. Today, spurred on by talk radio, conservatives will wave tea bags as act of civil dissent. This group, who are both dismissively derided and surprising, earnestly self-promoted as 'teabaggers’, will ostensibly be protesting the same colonial beef – You know except there is representation and the objection isn’t the manner in which tea is taxed - so both the privileged and less fortunate pay the same rate on a common household commodity; no today’s outrage is that income taxes are being restored to Clinton-era rates, raising the tax on the top earners about 6%.

While tea has symbolic meaning to Americans, historically, salt has been one of the most taxed items in humankind’s history. The Greek Republic taxed salt, Rome’s relationship with salt was more intricate, both accepted by the state as a tribute and paid out to soldiers with such regularity, the Latin sal, would become the basis of the word salary. The doubling of the salt tax did not endear the people of China to the Emperor’s rule in the days leading up the revolution. While on the subcontinent, a combination of monopolistic tactics, heavy taxation and severe penalties for salt scofflaws would inspire a 60 year-old Gandhi to walk over 200 miles in his ‘March to the Sea’ in order to set up a small salt works - defying British Authority and setting in motion events that would lead to Indian democracy and self-rule.

But it is the French, the mortal enemy of American conservatives, who set the standard on salt taxation. The salt tax, or en françois, the gabelle – a duty on salt that began as a modest 1.66% value added tax but would ultimately grow to become a leading source of revenue for the French crown. In addition to the gabelle, there was mandatory salt consumption, not like a salt gavage, but a sel du devoir, a requirement that anyone over the age of 8 purchase 15 ½ pounds of salt annually, an amount that would absolutely pickle even a modern convenience food junkie. By the time the Revolution rolled around, 3,000 people would annually be imprisoned or put do death for cheating the salt tax. Revolution, The National Assembly would annul all salt offenses and would put an end to the gabelle.

My taxes have been prepaid through employee payroll deductions, not salt. Considering the national deficit, it might be time to think about an American gabelle: Societally, we average of 7 pounds of salt annually, (This sodium intake is believed to be 80% greater than what our hunter-gather progenitors ingested, not because they lived a life idyllic, because if they had been hunter-gathering Doritos, anthropologists would be reporting different things about sodium intake of ancient people). With 75% of our dietary salt coming from processed food - by taxing salt, we would be mimicking the European Union’s value added tax on ‘junk foods’, inching us ever closer to the European socialism the teabaggers are always warning us about.