Who really carried it: the millionaire, or the people who build the boats?

The tax took ten percent of every dollar above that line (a $200,000 boat paid $10,000), and Congress meant the wealthy to carry it. In 1872 an Edinburgh engineer, Fleeming Jenkin, drew a market as two curves to ask who really pays a tax. A tax opens a gap between what the buyer pays and what the seller keeps, and each side carries as much as its own price moves. His example: "If the demand falls off the landlord cannot remove his house."

A yacht buyer can walk away: wait, buy used, buy smaller. A boatyard can't: its sheds and skilled hands stay put. In the short run, the government's auditors wrote in 1992, little of such a tax reaches the buyer; the yards carry much of it, mostly as lost work. Honestly, sales were already falling from 1989 and a recession hit too, so nobody could measure the real split. The boat tax was repealed in 1993.

Whose name is on the bill doesn't decide who pays. Jenkin's first line: "many taxes do not fall ultimately on the person from whom they are in the first instance levied."

The curves are our sketch in today's layout (Jenkin put price on the horizontal axis); the job figures the industry quoted at the time are left out because they were never measured.

So, which did you pick?

Sources: Fleeming Jenkin, "On the Principles which Regulate the Incidence of Taxes", Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1871-72; US General Accounting Office, "Luxury Excise Tax Issues and Estimated Effects", GAO/GGD-92-9, 1992; Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Acts of 1990 and 1993.
Sounds: our own, made in code (earshot, CC0).