Excise (redirected from General excise tax)

excise

1. a tax on goods, such as spirits, produced for the home market

2. a tax paid for a licence to carry out various trades, sports, etc.

3. Brit that section of the government service responsible for the collection of excise, now the Board of Customs and Excise

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Excise 

one of the forms of indirect taxation, primarily on objects of mass consumption (such as salt, sugar, and matches), and also on municipal, transportation, and other widely used services. Excise tax is included in the price of goods or as a tariff on services; thus, it is, in effect, shifted to the consumers, mainly workers. In prerevolutionary Russia, excise taxes, along with the spirits monopoly, produced 47.5 percent of the total income of the budget in 1904. Excise taxes are an important source of revenue for the state budgets of contemporary capitalist countries. In England and the USA, for example, from 1929 to 1958 excise taxes yielded between 14 and 30 percent of all tax receipts. In the USA, the total excise collections grew from $.5 to $12.4 billion per year over the period 1928–59. The excise tax on many goods is as high as half or even two-thirds of their price.

In the USSR the excise system was abolished by the tax reform of 1930; in other socialist countries it was abolished by the tax reforms of 1948–49.