Rain levy: The weird-tax hall of fame has a new entrant from Toronto

livemint.com:

Taxes and death are two of life’s great certainties, we have always been told. The record of both, however, suggests they could also be great oddities, the kind that make jaws drop in wonder. Take taxation, the less morbid of these two.

The global club of weird proposals was recently joined by Toronto’s plan of a ‘stormwater charge.’ The idea is to scan all private property (say, with drone-cams), calculate every plot’s ratio of hard surface versus soft permeable land, and then impose a punitive levy on excessive hardness. As its name suggests, the motive of this tax—to be bundled in with people’s water bills—is to nudge land usage in favour of permeability and thus drainage, making the city less vulnerable to floods. As a solution to an evident problem of impervious concrete in urban zones, it sounds attractive.

It even resonates in India, where havoc has been played with natural ecosystems by eco-unfriendly structures popping up. Think of Kerala’s 2018 deluge, for example. But the fiscal devil is usually in the details.

Since land-use patterns usually respond only slowly to tax incentives, it could be years before any difference is made, especially if Canada’s urban living-space crunch worsens. In the meantime, Toronto’s rain tax could face stiff resistance from those stuck with concrete and feel unfairly soaked, financially. No wonder reports suggest the plan may fail to go through.

A glance at other inventive taxes would show that a ‘rain tax’ is not the oddest levy policymakers have come up with. Whether aimed at filling state coffers or altering what people do, weird taxes have caught taxpayers by surprise for centuries. In 18th century Czarist Russia, for example, a tax was imposed on beards.