Newman Portal Digitizes American Tax Token Society Newsletter

As noted in last week's E-Sylum, the ATTS Newsletter, published by the American Tax Token Society, is now available on the Newman Portal for the years 1971-2010. State salestaxes are today a routine matter with fractional cents rounded off as necessary. It was not always so. With the introduction of state sales taxes in the 1920s, the question arose of how to charge afractional cent on, say, a ten-cent item. The ATTS website explains the situation: "Merchants had to pay sales tax to the state on the total amount of sales made by the merchant during each day'ssales. You can imagine that if the sales tax rate is 3% and a child buys a 10c piece of candy there is no way to collect the three-tenths of one cent. If you rounded down that meant that the merchantcould not collect anything for the tax. If you rounded up the state was gaining 7 tenths of a cent on every 10 cent sale.

You can see that if the merchant sold 100 pieces of candy he was losing 30 cents a day in tax revenues to the state, so the token was born. This allowed the merchant to take 11 cents for the firstpiece of candy and give change back in mills. The next time you wanted to buy a 10c candy you could present the merchant with the 10c and a token and complete the transaction. This allowed themerchant to collect the sales tax on each transaction."

Tokens of all kinds were produced to represent fractional cents, and these today are collected and researched by the ATTS. Thanks to John Ostendorf for his assistance with this project.

Image: Cardboard token good for one-third cent state sales tax at Harper's Variety Store in Washburn, IL.

Link to ATTS Newsletter on Newman Portal:
https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/publisherdetail/524434