By Eric Felten
These are strange days, when we are told both that tax incentives can transform technologies yet higher taxes will not drag down the economy. So which is it? Do taxes change behavior or not? Of course they do, but often in ways that policy hands never anticipate, let alone intend. Consider, for example, how federal taxes hobbled Swing music and gave birth to bebop.
With millions of young men coming home from World War II—eager to trade their combat boots for dancing shoes—the postwar years should have been a boom time for the big bands that had been so wildly popular since the 1930s. Yet by 1946 many of the top orchestras—including those of Benny Goodman, Harry James and Tommy Dorsey—had disbanded. Some big names found ways to get going again, but the journeyman bands weren't so lucky. By 1949, the hotel dine-and-dance-room trade was a third of what it had been three years earlier. The Swing Era was over.
Dramatic shifts in popular culture are usually assumed to result from naturally occurring forces such as changing tastes (did people get sick of hearing "In the Mood"?) or demographics (were all those new parents of the postwar baby boom at home with junior instead of out on a dance floor?). But the big bands didn't just stumble and fall behind the times. They were pushed.
In 1944, a new wartime "cabaret tax" went into effect, imposing a ruinous 30% (later merely a destructive 20%) excise on all receipts at any venue that served food or drink and allowed dancing. The name of the "cabaret tax" suggested the bite would be reserved for swanky boîtes such as the Stork Club, posh "roof gardens," and other elegant venues catering to the rich.
But shortly after the tax was imposed, the Bureau of Internal Revenue offered this expansive definition of where it applied: "A roof garden or cabaret shall include any room in any hotel, restaurant, hall or other public place where music or dancing privileges or any other entertainment, except instrumental or mechanical music alone, is afforded the patrons in connection with the serving or selling of food, refreshments or merchandise."
The tax hit not just swells, but anyone who liked to go out dancing—which in those days included just about everyone who went out at all.
Read the rest here.
You know, I am beginning to think that anyone who collects enough signatures to get onto any ballot of any type should immediately be taken out and shot.
ReplyDeleteMany cultural changes have occurred as the result of some sort of government intervention, so this is just one more example, though an interesting one to me, personally.
ReplyDeleteWe certainly saw what happened in New York City when they had those ridiculous cabaret laws in place (since blissfully rescinded) a while back. Even more recently they've imposed a major tax on the Century Ballroom in Seattle, which is a major home of modern day swing dancing in that city.
I thought it was funny that so many of my fellow swing dancers got all bent out of shape at the injustice of it all, at the same time as the majority of them want more government spending on and interference with pretty much everything. I guess they figure that only the "rich" and "corporations" are supposed to pay to make all their wet dreams come true, that increasing taxes on those entities can actually make up the current shortfalls (yearly deficits to say nothing of long-term unfunded liabilities), and that their pure-of-heart little selves will never actually have to pay for very much on their own.
That's rich, I tell ya...
repealed in 1965.... everything government does, even when it is a clear disaster takes decades to undo.
ReplyDeleteHaving developed an interest in swing dancing I wondered why it just evaporated for fifty years. Now I know. A true american art form and piece of culture essentially destroyed by the government for no good reason at all. People were probably having too much fun or something.