History
In the United States, many states used to collect state sales tax through the use of "luxury tax tokens" instead of calculating a percentage to be paid in cash like the modern-day practice. Tokens could be purchased from the state and then used at checkout instead of rendering the sales tax in cash. Presumably, the purpose of the practice was to remove the incentive for stores and businesses to avoid reporting income. Some tokens were copper or base metal while some were even plastic.
Read more about this topic: Luxury Tax
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
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“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
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“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)