Supreme Court Case on cotton production tax

Kirk's Raider's

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@jgoodguy ,
Apparently there was a cotton production tax that neted sixty eight million dollars from 1862 to 1868 although only three million dollars was collected from 1862 to 1865. There were lawsuits about the legality of such a tax at least through 1923.
I can't find the SCOTUS decision on this issue.
Any ideas?
Thanks
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5fish

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Did not find a case but did find this on cotton ... I love the south. It is fighting a war for them to keep their slaves but they do not want to pay their taxes...

Wonkish... https://www.dartmouth.edu/~dirwin/docs/exporttax.pdf

Plantation owners even resisted interference in their business by the Confederate government during the Civil War. The Confederate government actually imposed a 1.5% tax on exported cotton in an effort to raise revenue. But this tax was so widely ignored and easily evaded that it only collected the tax on 5% of cotton exports (Lebergott, 1983, p. 67). Planters also rejected any effort to cut the production and export of cotton as part of the war effort, insisting ‘‘on their right to grow unlimited amounts of cotton; to retain it for sale whenever they chose; and to sell it whenever, and to whomever, they chose’’ (Lebergott, 1983, p. 69). The Confederate government considered buying all of the cotton produced in the South, but this option was ruled out as being too expensive because it would have had to compete with other buyers in the market. Confiscation was another option, but not a politically acceptable one. Thus, all efforts to restrict cotton exports (beyond the Northern blockade) would have been opposed or would likely have failed. In Lebergott’s view, Southern owners like to trumpet the economic power10 of ‘King Cotton,’ but were frightened of actually exercising that power. Plantation owners feared that any export restraint would promote the cultivation of cotton in other regions of the world, potentially undermining the sales of American cotton in the postwar period

A simple export tax appears to have been impossible, at least in the antebellum period, because the constitutional prohibition of export taxes ruled out this course 9 of action. James (1981) suggested that existing import tariffs could have acted as an indirect tax on exports (via the Lerner symmetry theorem). However, Harley (1992) found that the actual tariffs apparently failed to improve America’s terms of trade because these duties did not restrict cotton exports, but rather the sale of marginal exportable goods—particularly food—in which the US was a price taker on world markets.
 

5fish

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cotton production tax
I think your production tax would be unconstitutional: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42780.pdf

The Export Clause, found in Article I, Section 9, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution, directly states “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.” The Clause represents one of the few restrictions on Congress’s otherwise broad taxing power. Examples of taxes that have been found unconstitutional as applied to exports include the harbor maintenance tax and the excise tax on domestically mined coal. The Clause prohibits taxes and duties that are targeted at exports or imposed on goods during “the course of exportation.” It also protects those services and activities that are “closely related” to the export process. Importantly, pre-export goods and services are not exempt from otherwise generally applicable taxes.
 

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Here is this those nontax paying Southerns...

The Export Clause in our Constitution says Congress cannot do that. When the Framers drafted the Constitution, the Southern states were worried that the North would impose tariffs on the South’s chief export, cotton, so the Northern states could buy cheap cotton. James Madison proposed requiring a supermajority to enact an export tax but that was not enough for the opponents, who voted it down. Hence, the Export Clause imposes an absolute prohibition on Congress laying any tax on articles exported from any state. As a nod to the North, the Framers allowed a simple majority in Congress to impose a tariff on imports.
 

5fish

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I think the tax you are looking for is the optimal export tax: it is a theory what if...


In terms of exports, the United States produced about 80 percent of the world's cotton in the decades prior to the Civil War, most of which was exported. A long-standing question has been the degree to which the United States had market power in cotton and how much it could have gained from an optimal export tax on cotton. To address this question, I estimated the elasticity of foreign demand for U.S. cotton exports and used it in a simple partial equilibrium model to determine the optimal export tax and its probable impact on prices, trade, and welfare.(8) The results indicate that the export demand elasticity for U.S. cotton was about -1.7 and that the optimal export tax of about 50 percent would have raised U.S. welfare by about $10 million, that is about 0.3 percent of U.S. GDP or about 1 percent of the South's GDP. (Such a tax was not implemented, however, partly because the U.S. Constitution forbids the imposition of export taxes.) One implication is that the welfare g ains from an export tax are not necessarily large, even for a country with
 

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Did not find a case but did find this on cotton ... I love the south. It is fighting a war for them to keep their slaves but they do not want to pay their taxes...

Wonkish... https://www.dartmouth.edu/~dirwin/docs/exporttax.pdf

Plantation owners even resisted interference in their business by the Confederate government during the Civil War. The Confederate government actually imposed a 1.5% tax on exported cotton in an effort to raise revenue. But this tax was so widely ignored and easily evaded that it only collected the tax on 5% of cotton exports (Lebergott, 1983, p. 67). Planters also rejected any effort to cut the production and export of cotton as part of the war effort, insisting ‘‘on their right to grow unlimited amounts of cotton; to retain it for sale whenever they chose; and to sell it whenever, and to whomever, they chose’’ (Lebergott, 1983, p. 69). The Confederate government considered buying all of the cotton produced in the South, but this option was ruled out as being too expensive because it would have had to compete with other buyers in the market. Confiscation was another option, but not a politically acceptable one. Thus, all efforts to restrict cotton exports (beyond the Northern blockade) would have been opposed or would likely have failed. In Lebergott’s view, Southern owners like to trumpet the economic power10 of ‘King Cotton,’ but were frightened of actually exercising that power. Plantation owners feared that any export restraint would promote the cultivation of cotton in other regions of the world, potentially undermining the sales of American cotton in the postwar period

A simple export tax appears to have been impossible, at least in the antebellum period, because the constitutional prohibition of export taxes ruled out this course 9 of action. James (1981) suggested that existing import tariffs could have acted as an indirect tax on exports (via the Lerner symmetry theorem). However, Harley (1992) found that the actual tariffs apparently failed to improve America’s terms of trade because these duties did not restrict cotton exports, but rather the sale of marginal exportable goods—particularly food—in which the US was a price taker on world markets.
There absolutely was a tax on cotton production from 1862 to 1868 it's at CWT. If you're still a member I can link you to it or if not a member I can refer it to you. Good research!
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On CWT we have plenty of documentation of the US cotton tax if anyone's interested. Apparently because the Supreme Court had at one time only eight members it split on the legality of the cotton tax. It was still being litigated by Governor Hardee of Florida in 1923.
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