A Brief History On May 3, 1921, the state legislature of West Virginia enacted the first Sales Tax in the United States, although problems in creating the mechanism to administer the tax precluded enforcement for several years. In 1930, Kentucky and Mississippi followed suit, enacting broad based sales tax, although Kentucky repealed the legislation in 1936, possibly due to the effects of the Great Depression. During the 1930’s many states jumped on the sales tax bandwagon. Digging Deeper While broad based sales tax is now common in the US and in Canada, the original application of sales tax pertained to…
Author: Major Dan
Major Dan
Major Daniel Zar is a retired veteran of the United States Marine Corps. He served during the Cold War and has traveled to many countries around the world. Prior to his military service, he graduated from Cleveland State University, having majored in sociology. Following his military service, he worked as a police officer eventually earning the rank of captain prior to his retirement.
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A Brief History On May 2, 1945, an American Artillery Battalion intercepted a death march of concentration camp inmates being taken from the Dachau concentration camp to the Austrian border, in turn saving the lives of hundreds of the starving inmates. The rescuers must have seemed like angels sent directly from heaven to the doomed inmates, and even more surprising to those lucky survivors, the Americans that saved them were all of Japanese ancestry, part of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, a subunit of the 442nd Infantry Regiment that was composed of Nisei, second generation Japanese Americans. Digging Deeper While…
A Brief History On May 1, 305, the Co-Emperors of the Roman Empire, Diocletian and Maximian, teamed up to become the first Roman Emperors to ever resign voluntarily. As incredibly difficult as it is to have two leaders of the same empire, it is all the more remarkable that both would agree to retire on the same day. One of their successors, Constantius I, also known as Constantius Chlorus, served only a year before dying and leaving the throne open to whomever could win the ensuing battles. Digging Deeper Diocletian was born in 244 in the Roman Province of Dalmatia,…
A Brief History In 1642, Bilsener Gilde was established in Germany as the first insurance company in Europe. At first thought, the world of insurance might not seem like the most exciting subject to dig into; yet a quick glance through history throws up some interesting insights into human evolution. We can trace the development of the insurance industry way back to early human society, before money-based economies even existed! In these early civilizations, insurance usually took the form of mutual aid among people living in the same community. If somebody’s house was destroyed in a fire, for instance, the…
A Brief History On April 29, 1483, the Kingdom of Castile captured the main island of the Canary Islands, Gran Canaria, leading to Spanish ownership of the islands to this day. Consisting of many smaller islands as well as the 7 “main” islands, the largest island is Tenerife, and Gran Canaria is the third largest island with an area of 600 square miles. (For comparison, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, home to Cleveland, has an land area of 457 square miles, and Cook County, Illinois, home to Chicago, has a land area of 945 square miles. With 596.7 square miles of land,…