 It's April and in America that means tax season and as Benjamin Franklin said in this world Nothing can be said to be certain except death in taxes And I'd argue maybe Transformers movies, but what are taxes and why do we have them? So we were gonna do a normal tangent video on like taxes, but it turns out taxes are kind of boring like every Recorded civilization has had taxes to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society. So instead we were gonna try something different and just list off some funny Facts about tax tax facts tax tax tax fact facts tax We'll come up with a cool title right now Here's some things that have a lower word count than the US tax code the combined works of the Iliad in the Odyssey The Bible the Harry Potter series and 50 Shades of Grey. I have only read one of those books The ancient Greeks had an interesting tax policy called is for a Ra is for a I Just put it put it underneath. I'll keep going In this policy they would tax the wealthy but only in times of war and then would actually repay them with the spoils of victory Something tells me that Leonidas didn't get his cut back Now let's talk about the beard tax You might be saying which beard tax, but more likely you're saying there was more than one beard tax in England in 1535 the bearded King Henry the 8th instituted a beard tax to ensure that a man's facial hair would match his social status I'm probably just slightly above a surf at this point Meanwhile in 1700s Russia Peter the Great and beardless though. He did have a sweet stash Look at that stash that stash dope That's a good stash Check it out. Like it's a nice stash. I'm just saying like people don't rock stashes like that anymore As a business it's good. It's a good mustache. All right. He introduced the opposite beard tax He wanted everyone to be clean-shaven because he thought that the clean-shaven man represented a modern society if you're not getting a theme through this this show yet like Everything's been taxed at some point the Rosetta Stone even mentions taxes And I'm not talking about the computer program that I'm going to use as a write-off on my taxes for learn in Spanish It's mucho gusto. We're talking about the stone slab that let modern scientists translate ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs It's basically a piece of propaganda from the Egyptian pharaoh in 196 BC it tells the temple priests all the great things that the pharaoh has done for them One of which is exempting them from taxes The Boston Tea Party was an exciting moment for the American Revolution When the Americans push back against paying taxes on tea imposed by the British Today I bought a tea at the store and paid sales tax The 24th amendment to the US Constitution outlawed poll taxes a common practice used to suppress the underprivileged vote But one state still has a poll tax Texas they just spell it differently and use it for different stuff This fact will soon be out of date because I bet half the people watching don't get newspapers The newspaper format that you know called Broad Street is due to taxes in 1712 the British crown decided to levy a tax on newspapers based on the page count in response Newspaper printers just started printing on bigger pages making them able to deliver the same amount of news in less pages Well, that was a fun list Let us know if you like this format or you want us to go back to the other one if you didn't like this format Don't worry. We've already filmed the next one if you did like this format We already filmed the next one so it's not it's gonna be the old way But all this talk of taxes has really gotten me thinking I should probably get paid sometime soon, right John John John