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Show to maintain those departments. Here are some of the uses made of the policyholders premium dollar: Fremium tax, license tax, fee for filing fil-ing annual statement, fire department depart-ment tax, fire marshal tax, agents' license fees, publication fees, retaliatory retalia-tory taxes, pension funds, school tax and all other taxes paid generally by business. It is difficult to understand how legislators, in view of the opinion of public officials charged with the responsibility re-sponsibility of supervising insurance in the public welfare, advocate the collection; wf constantly iin-easnig sums from a special class of people who are endeavoring to protect their affairs rom unforseen contingencies thereby relieving the state from the burden involved in caring for persons or business left destitute or incapaci-sease. incapaci-sease. , The man who docs not provide this protection for himself or his business is the one who should be subject to additional taxes rather than the man -j who voluntarily pays the cost of protecting pro-tecting himself and society. MAKING THOSE THAT ARE CAREFUL PAY THE BILL ' A national authority on insurance points out that fire and life insurance policyholders pay some fifteen or twenty indirect taxes taxes that are assessed against insurance companies compan-ies for purposes other than maintaining maintain-ing state 1 insurance departments. These figures do not include causal-ty causal-ty insurance, which in modern business busi-ness is becoming as indispensable as fire and life insurance. In 1923, policyholders in the United States paid morexthan $59,000,000 in these hidden and to the policyholder almost unknown indirect taxes; and this amount does not include special municipal taxes, licenses or fees, all out of the pockets of the insured. This $59,000,000 would pay nearly six billion dollars worth of fire insur ance for a year. Year by year these added costs are being increased by the states. The increase in total amout collected in 1923 was 12 per cent over the preceed ing year." Originally, these taxes were impos ed for the purpose of paying the cost of operation of thevarious state insurance in-surance departments but now an aver age of only one twentieth of all the money collected by the various states in the form of special taxes is used |