Issue link: https://newsleader.uberflip.com/i/107047
Sarasota News Leader February 1, 2013 OPINION 1600 with £72,000 contributed by 125 prominent investors, the company had 17 million pounds of unsold tea and was in urgent need of a "stimulus." The act granted the company a monopoly on the American tea trade. The company's newly sanctioned exclusive rights allowed its tea to be sold directly and untaxed to colonial markets. Earlier it had been compelled to sell tea at auction in London, where it was taxed. The taxes would now be paid by the Colonials. The company's monopoly threatened the livelihood of American tea merchants. It was also a troubling precedent. If the tea trade were monopolized by order of Parliament, could not the textile or china trade be as well? On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty lightly disguised as a Mohawk raiding party rowed to three British merchant ships lying at anchor in Boston harbor, overpowered their crews and threw 340 chests containing 92,000 pounds of tea into the harbor's frigid waters. Page 72 stamp. Further, these taxed documents had to be purchased in hard currency (pounds sterling) and not in Colonial paper script. Reaction in the Colonies against the Stamp Act was swift and acute. Parliament repealed it on March 18, 1766. On that same day, however, Parliament also passed the Declaratory Act, which asserted Parliament's "full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America ... in all cases whatsoever." Many Colonists interpreted this to mean that further parliamentary acts of taxation over which they themselves would have no say were being contemplated. Its passage, together with subsequent missteps, set the colonies on an irreversible collision course with England. Death is also taxed. More precisely, it is the "transferable estate" of a deceased person that is subject to taxation under federal law; that is, the Revenue Act of 1916, as amended. Federal estate taxes (or "death duties") were repealed during the whole of 2010, but they While the Tea Act may have been the final have since been restored. The District of Costep in a procession of ill-considered British lumbia and several states impose their own financial and tax policies toward the Colonies, death duties. Other states, like Florida, do not. the Stamp Act of 1765 was among the first. No one cheats death and few avoid the watchBriefly, the Stamp Act imposed for the first ful scrutiny of the U.S. Internal Revenue Sertime a direct tax on the Colonists by requiring vice. Both are lifelong companions on the road that legal documents, newspapers, pamphlets, to reaching one's destiny. But if you master etc., be exclusively printed on paper manufac- your destiny, as someone quipped, you will find tured in England that carried an embossed tax that there is a destiny tax waiting for you. %