Tax Per Head

Tax Per Head

A poll tax (head tax or capitation tax, per U.S. English usage) is a tax of a portioned, fixed amount applied to an individual in accordance with the census (as opposed to a percentage of income). When a corvée is commuted for cash payment, in effect it becomes a poll tax (and vice versa, if a poll tax obligation can be worked off). Head taxes were important sources of revenue for many governments from ancient times until the nineteenth century. There have been several famous (and infamous) cases of head taxes in history, notably a tax formerly required for voting in parts of the United States that was designed to disenfranchise poor people, including African Americans, Native Americans, and white people of foreign descent. In the United Kingdom, poll taxes were levied by the governments of John of Gaunt in the fourteenth century, Charles II in the seventeenth and Margaret Thatcher in the twentieth century.

The word poll is an English word that once meant "head" - and still does, in some specialised contexts - hence the name poll tax for a per-person tax. In the United States, however, the term has come to be used almost exclusively for a fixed tax applied to voting. Since "going to the polls" is a common idiom for voting (deriving from the fact that early voting involved head-counts), a new folk etymology has supplanted common knowledge of the phrase's true origins in America.