What the hell is stamp duty?
Posted: Thu Oct 07, 2021 7:47 am
"Stamp duty is a tax that is levied on single property purchases or documents (including, historically, the majority of legal documents such as cheques, receipts, military commissions, marriage licences and land transactions). A physical revenue stamp had to be attached to or impressed upon the document to show that stamp duty had been paid before the document was legally effective. More modern versions of the tax no longer require an actual stamp."
So it's a bribe to get officials to validate documents in a legal transaction between two consenting parties!
There's no other reason for it that I can see!
"The duty is thought to have originated in Venice in 1604, being introduced (or re-invented) in Spain in the 1610s, the Spanish Netherlands in the 1620s, France in 1651, Denmark in 1657, Prussia in 1682 and England in 1694."
Maybe in Venice in 1604 - that's how the stamp man was paid, but today, those officials are employed by the state and paid for through other forms of taxation. It leads to the logical absurdity that we pay tax to employ people to levy a tax that exists only to pay people to tax legal transactions that have nothing to do with them. How is this still a thing?
So it's a bribe to get officials to validate documents in a legal transaction between two consenting parties!
There's no other reason for it that I can see!
"The duty is thought to have originated in Venice in 1604, being introduced (or re-invented) in Spain in the 1610s, the Spanish Netherlands in the 1620s, France in 1651, Denmark in 1657, Prussia in 1682 and England in 1694."
Maybe in Venice in 1604 - that's how the stamp man was paid, but today, those officials are employed by the state and paid for through other forms of taxation. It leads to the logical absurdity that we pay tax to employ people to levy a tax that exists only to pay people to tax legal transactions that have nothing to do with them. How is this still a thing?