I've Got 1099 Problems...

How did our tax system become so complicated?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 1:04Roman Mars?

  This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

• 1:09Roman Mars?

  On a hot summer day in 1799, French army engineers in occupied northern Egypt were sifting through the rubble of a centuries-old abandoned fortress. These soldiers had been tasked by their general, Napoleon Bonaparte, heard him? To repair the fort for proper use.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  And as they were laying the foundation for the walls and barracks, someone made a startling discovery.

• 1:31Roman Mars?

  That's producer Vivian Le.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  They stumbled upon the Rosetta Stone, possibly the most famous chunk of rock in human history.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  The reason it's famous and the reason you can see it when you go to the British Museum is that there was text in three languages.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  That's Joel Slemrod, professor of economics at the University of Michigan. The text on the Rosetta Stone had been inscribed with the same message in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian Demotic script, and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Which at the time, no one could decipher.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Based on the first two scripts, researchers were eventually able to crack the code for how to finally read hieroglyphics, a writing system that hadn't been used for about 1,400 years.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Question: What was so important to write about? And the answer is, well, among other things, the Rosetta Stone describes a tax break given to the temple priests of ancient Egypt. So the Rosetta Stone helped us unlock the secret of hieroglyphics by talking about something in Texas.

• 2:41Roman Mars?

  Taxes are essentially as old as human civilization, and they've been shaping it ever since. Historically, they've influenced everything from what our buildings look like, to what kind of cars we drive, to who we elect as our president, to whether we revolt.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  History has shown that tax codes can reveal so much about a society. And if you're an American, the revelation is that filing our income taxes sucks.

• 3:08Roman Mars?

  If you're listening to this episode on its release day, it is April 15th, aka Tax Day here in the United States. And we Americans tend to have a pretty fraught relationship with our tax system. The filing process has become so complicated that the average individual spends 13 hours preparing their income taxes. And that can feel twice as long when you want to put your fist through the computer screen the entire time.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  53% of Americans are very bothered by the complexity of our tax system. And one survey even reported that it makes 1 in 3 people, quote, "want to cry." Even Albert Einstein allegedly once said, "The hardest thing in the world is to understand the income tax." And he was famously smart. So on this, the final day of tax season, we are sifting through nearly 250 years of US tax history to figure out how things got so damn complicated.

• 4:06Roman Mars?

  Being mad about taxes is a quintessentially American experience. In fact, tax rage is a large reason why this country was created.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  The Boston Tea Party, a formative event in the American Revolution.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Most of us learned in middle school that the Boston Tea Party was an act of defiance over an increase in taxes on tea. But, fun fact, that's totally wrong.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Actually, though, that isn't what happened. Closer to the truth was that some tax on tea had been decreased.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  At the time, Britain had been taxing tea at such a high rate that nearly two-thirds of tea imported to the colonies was smuggled in illegally to get around the cost. In response, Parliament actually lowered taxes on legally imported tea to undercut this illicit tea trade.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  The new proposals from the British looked like they were going to deprive some prominent patriots of their livelihood through smuggling tea. And it got a lot of people upset.

• 5:12Roman Mars?

  That upset eventually led to the American Revolution and the founding of an entirely new country.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Given that tax overreach was a huge contributing factor to the Revolution, the early American government was very cautious when it came to taxation. It remained very low and extremely simple. And for many, many decades, federal revenue came mainly from things like excise taxes and tariffs.

• 5:36Roman Mars?

  For clarity, excise taxes are applied to certain goods and services, like fuel. And if you don't know what a tariff is, well, then, bless your heart, you clearly haven't been looking at the news.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  In those early years of the Republic, federal spending was low enough that the country could fund itself like this, until suddenly it needed a lot more money, and fast.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  During the Civil War, like all wars, a lot of revenue was needed.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  In 1862, President Lincoln signed into law an income tax to fund the war. This was actually the very first federal income tax in US history, and even led to the creation of the IRS, then called the Bureau of Internal Revenue. The income tax generated $55 million for the Union government, which was the equivalent of about $1.1 billion today. It was an innovative approach to raise federal funds.

• 6:24Roman Mars?

  Maybe a little too innovative for its time.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Sure enough, when the war ended, I think 1872, that income tax was eliminated.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  With the civil war behind them, kind of, the Grant administration repealed most emergency taxes and reverted back to the old way of tax collection: excise taxes, with a special focus on what were called "sin taxes."

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Ninety percent of all federal revenue came from taxes on liquor, beer, wine, and tobacco.

• 6:56Roman Mars?

  Although the income tax was effective, leaders remained resistant to the idea. Excise taxes seemed adequate to fund the government, plus they were a lot simpler to implement.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  They were simpler, but a lot of people thought they were very unfair.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Excise taxes are regressive, meaning they place a higher burden on lower-income individuals. If someone who makes very little money is paying the same rate as someone who makes a lot of money, then they are paying a higher percentage of their income.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  And most people would view that as patently unfair. So years go on, and there were a lot of people who were not happy with the fact that most of the revenue is coming from taxes on liquor, beer, wine, tobacco, and probably the burden was felt heavily by lower-income people. So picking up in the 80s...

• 7:43Speaker 01

  That's the 1880s.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  And especially the 90s, there was a lot of political support for instituting an income tax and therefore reducing these other taxes.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  This was all taking place during the Gilded Age, an era of profound wealth inequality and exploitation of the labor class. The tax burden was mainly shouldered by the vast majority living in extreme poverty. Meanwhile, robber barons were living in luxury and rubbing elbows with Christine Baranski.

• 8:13Roman Mars?

  So in 1894, against the odds, Congress passed the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act, which instituted the first-ever peacetime income tax. This tax specifically applied to the rich and only applied to anyone making over $4,000, which at the time was the highest-earning 1% of the population. It also lowered tariffs on imports, making them cheaper. So the law was very popular with the pro-free-trade wing of the Democratic Party.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  But unpopular with the Supreme Court.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  The Supreme Court had ruled that an income tax was unconstitutional because, you know, richer states, the tax burden would be higher than poorer states. So on that basis, it was ruled unconstitutional, even though it wasn't clear during the Constitutional Convention what a direct tax was, and still isn't entirely clear what was meant. Okay, so it's unconstitutional.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  And so how do you make a federal income tax not unconstitutional?

• 9:13Speaker 02

  You change the Constitution.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  The income tax slowly made its way through the ratification process, until finally, in 1913, it was solidified by the 16th Amendment.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  And the 16th Amendment basically says the federal government has the right to levy an income tax even though their revenues collected would not be proportional to population.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  The national income tax opened up the federal government to a whole new source of income, and was a huge change for people filing an income tax for the first time. But barely anyone had to file one. The exemption level was so high that it was actually thought of as a class tax, not a mass tax, because it applied to so few people.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  So in 1913, the exemption level was $3,000. Okay, that's about $90,000 in today's dollars, approximately. So in 1913, about 350,000 returns were filed, and that's in a country with a population just under 100 million.

• 10:16Roman Mars?

  Not only did the income tax only impact a narrow fraction of the population, the paperwork involved was wonderfully uncomplicated.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  As a tax nerd, you won't be surprised to know I have a copy of the original tax form framed in my office. The filing form of the new income tax was, and this is the form and the instructions, four pages long.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Despite how sparse the four-page form was, by the following year, some were already decrying its complexity. At the Annual Conference on Taxation, one speaker declared:

• 10:53Speaker 03

  It will hardly be denied that the federal income tax needs simplification. Its complexity is its distinguishing characteristic. To begin with, the language in which the act is couched is involved, and its rhetoric bewildering. Its terminology is confusing.

• 11:12Roman Mars?

  But of course, in terms of complexity, it was only uphill from there. And just a few decades later, the US reached an inflection point that changed the income tax for good.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  So, as we're talking, it's clear that wars play a big part in the story of taxation. It changed very precipitously in World War II.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  The sheer scale of the war meant that Americans would be taxed like never before. For one, the exemption level for filing taxes was lowered way down, meaning a lot more of the population actually had to deal with it.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  In 1939, 7.7 million returns were filed, okay? Six years later, 49.9 million. So that's an increase of, you know, more than six times. So that was the big change.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  It officially went from being a class tax to a mass tax. And the Department of Treasury plugged it as our patriotic duty to the war effort to file our taxes. They even commissioned Irving Berlin to compose a jaunty little number about it.

• 12:26Speaker 05

  I'm squared up with the USA. You see those bombers in the sky? Rockefeller helped to build them, so did I. I paid my income tax today.

• 12:41Speaker 05

  I paid my income tax today.

• 12:45Roman Mars?

  And it wasn't just the tax base that evolved during this time. The way we collected them changed as well.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Before 1943, individuals filed once a year for the one lump sum that they owed. Ideally, taxpayers would plan ahead and save enough all year in order to file and pay their taxes in the spring.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  But 1943, the federal government changed the rules. It said, no, now the employers have to be sending money to the government while you're earning it.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  If you earn a living as an employee of a business, or a corporation, or a government agency, you know, you report to the man, then you are already fully aware of employer withholding. Your employer is required by law to withhold a portion of your wages to pay into taxes you owe.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  That was a major change in how the income tax system worked.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  This modernized tax collection in some very important ways. For one, most citizens stopped being slammed by a larger tax bill once a year since they were already paying into it incrementally through their paychecks.

• 13:47Roman Mars?

  Also, there were fewer people to shake down.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  It makes the administrative burden and the burden on the IRS much lower. They don't have to track down all the employees. But, you know, history shows that this has been the biggest innovation in how tax systems work. Almost every country of the world with an income tax does this.

• 14:10Roman Mars?

  When World War II ended and government spending declined, you might have expected the income tax to be abolished once again, like what happened after the Civil War. But instead, it just stuck around.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  The level of tax didn't decline precipitously after World War II, sometimes called the "ratchet effect." And, you know, why that happened is not entirely known. You know, one story is that people had become familiar with it. The government had gotten good at it during World War II. And so it stuck around and has stuck around since then.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  During the war, the role of the federal government had permanently expanded in a way that made going back to the old tax structure impossible. Government spending had ramped up from increased Social Security to the GI Bill to defense spending.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  So it's just been a huge increase in the amount of money collected and spent. After World War II, in up to the 50s and early 60s, the top rate of income tax in the US and in the UK was over 90%.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Vivian, I don't know if you're a fan of pop or music, but The Beatles had a song, "The Taxman," right? It's "One for you, nineteen for me, I'm the taxman." So that's a 95% rate.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  World War II made filing income taxes nearly every Americans' problem. But there are two big reasons why filing taxes became a much more complicated problem.

• 15:46Roman Mars?

  One reason is that after World War II, policymakers more and more started using the tax code to socially engineer taxpayer behavior.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  There's no question that the tax system can affect behavior and legislators have noticed this, and there's a lot of things in the tax system which are there not particularly to make the tax system fairer, but to change people's behavior.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Using tax law to drive behavior was not new or unique to the United States. In fact, historically, it's been used in some kind of bizarre ways.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  In Russia, Peter the Great, when he was modernizing Russia to look more like Western Europe, he noticed that the nobility in Russia had these full beards. In Western Europe, that was kind of out. And so, what did he do? He could have banned beards, you know, having a beard, but instead, he cleverly had a tax on beards. So if you were out in public with a beard, you had to have a little medallion that was proof that you'd paid your beard tax.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  In post-World War II America, the income tax now applied to so many more people that it became a useful tool for lawmakers to nudge the masses into certain socially beneficial behaviors. Tax credits can encourage you to save for retirement, or discourage you from buying a gas-powered vehicle, or encourage you to renovate a historic building, or discourage you from buying tobacco and alcohol.

• 17:13Roman Mars?

  Another big reason why the income tax code has become so complex is ironically for a very simple reason: because we want it to be fair.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Our tax system, any tax system, could be made much simpler, but the issues in deciding how much simpler, I think, are best illustrated by talking about what's the simplest tax system you can think of? The simplest tax system I can think of is what economists call a lump sum tax.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  A lump sum tax is basically the same flat monetary amount owed by every person, regardless of how much they make.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  It would be darn simple. Why would this never happen? Because most people would find that to be completely unfair, that the richest person in America owes exactly the same tax as a single mother struggling to get by.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  We do not have a lump sum tax here in the United States. We have a progressive tax where our tax rate increases alongside our income. But even that doesn't truly account for fairness.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Somebody says, "Well, that's not enough. Somebody with the same income as somebody else, but with a lot of medical expenses, they're not really as well off. All right, so let's have a deduction for medical expenses. More complicated. And dot, dot, dot. The more we try to fine tune the fairness of the tax system, that inevitably makes it more complicated.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  This opens the door to a lot of questions. Like, doesn't a single mother of three deserve a larger tax refund than a single person with no children? Or can you deduct a ransom payment? Or why should a whaling ship captain have to pay the same amount as a sailing hobbyist when it's a business expense?

• 19:01Roman Mars?

  Whether or not our tax system is actually fair is a whole other story. But we are constantly tinkering with it to account for these unique questions and circumstances.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  It is the eternal struggle for fairness and the resulting credits and deductions and exemptions that has ratcheted our tax code into a labyrinthine experience. The Form 1040, which started out as four pages in 1913, has become a whopping 106-page document in 2025.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Well, I think it could and should be simpler. I think the tendency is too much to try to fine tune the tax system for fairness and to use the tax system to change behavior and incentivize various things. I think we've gone a little bit too far. So I would take seriously making the tax system simpler than it is now.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  There have been plenty of attempts to reform our tax code with varying levels of success, and policymakers will continue fighting over the best ways to do it until the end of time. The United States has a complex economy that, for the most part, requires complicated tax law.

• 20:12Roman Mars?

  But just because we have a convoluted tax code doesn't necessarily mean that average Americans need to suffer while navigating it. The government could make the income tax filing process a lot simpler, and in a lot of other countries, that's exactly what happens.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  So in a lot of countries, most households don't have to file tax returns.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Thirty-six countries, including the UK, Spain, Denmark, and Estonia, all have a variation of a system called return-free filing.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  What happens is, come January or February after the tax year, they get an email from the government, and it says, hey, we've gotten information from your employer and your bank, et cetera, and based on what we know, here's what your tax return looks like, and here's what you owe. So all we ask you to do is look it over. If we got it all right, you know, click this box and you're done.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Of course, the tax code in the United States is long, winding, and complex. But there are plenty of other countries with complicated tax codes that have made filing easier and free for taxpayers. In the US, the IRS already has a lot of the information needed to pre-populate our tax forms for us, which could save us a ton of time and money.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  That sounds like a pretty important simplification in the tax filing system, and you can guess who doesn't think it's a good idea. It's the makers of tax software.

• 21:38Roman Mars?

  Tax software providers and related special interest groups have a vested interest in keeping tax forms as intricate and intimidating as possible.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Filing an income tax without the help of a professional is daunting. A 2024 survey indicated that 44% of Americans plan to use tax software provided by companies like H&R Block or TurboTax in order to cut through that confusion.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  The companies that sell tax software do better when the tax system is complicated. Because if, as it gets complicated, you worry you're not doing it right and you worry you're not getting every, all the credits and deductions you deserve.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  ProPublica reported that for decades, Intuit, the parent company of TurboTax, has spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying against new tax systems that would have made filing free and easy for average Americans.

• 22:33Roman Mars?

  There's also another cost outside of time and money when it comes to this issue. Filing an income tax return is one of the most common ways that the average American directly interacts with the federal government. When that interaction is a perpetually bad experience, people lose trust in the government.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Despite the resistance, there have been some major moves over the past few years to transform the taxpayer experience. One development in particular has been especially promising.

• 23:02Speaker 06

  And a new tool is available to make filing your own taxes easier. Starting this year, taxpayers have access to something called the IRS Direct File Tool. It's free, user-friendly. The online service allows eligible--

• 23:15Speaker 01

  In 2024, the IRS rolled out a direct file pilot program in 12 states, which allowed qualifying taxpayers to file returns electronically for free without the use of commercial tax prep software. Participants were able to file in as little as 30 minutes, and 86% of respondents reported that direct file increased their trust in the IRS. The program has been widely seen as a good start for making taxes a lot simpler and a lot cheaper for a wide swath of Americans. But unfortunately, it does face an uphill battle.

• 23:47Speaker 07

  The latest casualties of Elon Musk chainsawed thousands of IRS workers. The layoffs hit roughly 7% of the agency's 100,000-person workforce this week, just as millions of Americans prepare to file their taxes.

• 24:01Roman Mars?

  Although the Treasury Secretary committed to keeping and even expanding the direct file program through the 2025 tax deadline, its long-term future is uncertain. Congressional Republicans and private tax firms have criticized the program as unnecessary and unsustainable. Elon Musk even posted that he had already, quote, "deleted the government agency that worked on the program." So who the hell knows what will happen?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  And until we know what the hell will happen, every April 15th filing an income tax will continue making me want to cry alongside a third of Americans and Albert Einstein. We're supposed to be doing our taxes right now. Do you have any tips for people who have not done their taxes just yet?

• 24:50Speaker 02

  No, I don't. As I said, I'm not a lawyer. I'm an economist, so I guess I don't have any tips for you.

• 25:04Roman Mars?

  Joel Slimrod is a professor of economics at the University of Michigan and the co-author of the book Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue: Tax Follies and Wisdom Through the Ages. If you're a 99PI fan, I highly suggest you check it out because it is right up your alley. When we come back from the break, Kurt Kohlstedt gives an Architectural Digest tour of how taxes have shaped the world's buildings. Stay with us.

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• 28:09Roman Mars?

  So one of the things we mentioned briefly in Vivint's piece about tax code was that taxation influenced what our buildings look like. And so I'm here with Nine NPI's own Kurt Kohlstedt to talk about that, how the built environment around us was shaped by taxation.

• 28:23Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's right, Roman. And, you know, we tend to think of buildings as being the product of regional styles and architectural designers and maybe on the more mundane side, things like the availability and cost of certain materials or of course, building codes. But tax code can leave incredible marks on buildings that last for centuries.

• 28:44Roman Mars?

  Okay, give us an example.

• 28:46Speaker 09

  Well, after the Revolutionary War, Britain was massively in debt. So King George III introduced the British Brick Tax in 1784 to like raise revenue and pay off those bills, you know? And of course, brickmakers, they learned of this and they saw that they'd be taxed on a per-brick basis. And so they responded by simply making bigger bricks.

• 29:08Roman Mars?

  Right. And so with bigger bricks, you can make as big a wall with fewer bricks and therefore you're sort of, you're paying the same, you know, per-unit tax, but you get, you know, a bigger

• 29:19Speaker 09

  More material out of it.

• 29:20Roman Mars?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 29:21Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, that's the idea. But of course, the Crown caught on to this and responded both by increasing the taxes per brick, but also adding a tax for bricks above a certain size. And this move actually caused some businesses to go under because they couldn't afford the higher taxes. They had all this larger stock on hand and they just couldn't pay that. But a lot of those larger bricks made during that era made it out into the world and can be seen on buildings to this day. And in some cases, you could even see both the pre-tax and the post-tax bricks on a single wall. So I just shared you this photo of a high street in England. And yeah, maybe you can just describe what you're seeing.

• 30:05Roman Mars?

  Sure. So there's, there's the Seine High Street. It's a brick wall and there's a vertical line dividing two parts of the wall. And on one side, the bricks are quite a bit larger than the other side, the smaller side. There's like kind of a mosaic side and the kind of big brick side.

• 30:21Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, totally. And so you can imagine like a historian can literally just look at this and understand that like this part of the wall dates back to this era and this part of the wall, you know, it dates back to a different era, just from looking at the brick sizes.

• 30:36Roman Mars?

  That's so cool. Okay, what else you have for us?

• 30:38Speaker 09

  Well, a few years later, British lawmakers introduced a per window tax.

• 30:42Roman Mars?

  Yeah. And if this follows the same logic of the brick tax, you would just have like really big windows, which, which I don't think I've seen.

• 30:50Speaker 09

  No, no, alas, no. Um, I imagine that would have been super expensive. And so instead, people actually just started boarding or even bricking up the windows that they considered like less important. And even though that tax has like long since been repealed, you can still see windows around the country that were bricked up in that era.

• 31:09Roman Mars?

  Yeah, because you know, that's something that's easy to do, but that's kind of hard to undo.

• 31:14Speaker 09

  Right, right. Because then you have to install a window, right?

• 31:17Roman Mars?

  Exactly.

• 31:19Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah. And, um, and so I imagine that's part of it. And then in some cases, I could see people just getting used to it, right? Like those areas have become walls over the centuries. And so they've just taken on a completely different use. And, you know, those were deemed the least important windows. So that would make sense. Now, we've been talking a lot about Britain, but in some places like Amsterdam, taxation has really fundamentally shaped the entire character of the city. And I'm specifically referring to those really prominent canal houses for which Amsterdam is really well known.

• 31:54Roman Mars?

  Yeah, these are beautiful. They're like these super thin buildings. They're, they're usually like four, maybe five stories tall, give or take. And they sit, you know, side by side, like wall to wall, uh, along a lot of blocks, uh, in, in, in canals. And, and between their narrowness and their crowdedness, I mean, I, I find them like delightful, like storybook, beautiful.

• 32:16Speaker 09

  Absolutely. They look like something out of a fairy tale. And one could argue that they're like the most defining physical feature of Amsterdam. And somebody visiting the city could look around, see like how consistent they are in a certain way. And maybe imagine that there was a master plan to build the whole city like this. Or maybe there are just building codes that say, you know, you have to have this kind of shape. Or whatever. But no, it was taxes. Amsterdam chose to tax buildings. Based on the width of a building's front facade.

• 32:50Roman Mars?

  Wow. And once you know that, that like, it all makes sense because that one tax encouraged people to build exactly what we see today, like really skinny buildings, pretty tall for a residential place, you know, like quite, quite a few stories and, and, you know, they're really deep. They go back as far as possible to get the maximum space they can, but with minimum width, so therefore reducing their taxes.

• 33:13Speaker 09

  Exactly. It's all about the bottom line. And then as a result of this thinness, the interior staircases became really narrow too. And that made it difficult, if not impossible in some cases, to bring furniture up or carry up goods to be like stored on higher levels. So another iconic feature of these buildings are these hoist and pulley systems that stick out over the sidewalks and they sit below, right below like the gabled roof at the very top. And they're, I mean, they're very prominent.

• 33:44Roman Mars?

  Right. And, and these are because like, say you got this gigantic couch to move or, you know, a heavy sack of grain or whatever. I don't know. But you just hook a rope on it and you pull it up and then you swing it like, you know, like into an upper story window.

• 34:00Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And some of those have been removed to, you know, in the intervening centuries, but a lot of them are still around. And some are purely decorative, but others are still very much in use because it's not like the constraints have changed, right? They still have these really narrow staircases and people still really need furniture.

• 34:20Roman Mars?

  And if I lived in one of those buildings, I would totally keep the hoist in working order.

• 34:25Speaker 09

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:25Roman Mars?

  I mean, it's really like, it's a kind of iconic part of the building. It's as iconic as the narrowness of the building.

• 34:31Speaker 09

  Yeah. And that's, and that's what's wild about all of this to me because you've got this beautiful canal city and it draws tourists for this amazing architecture. And, you know, it'd be easy to imagine that it was planned down to every detail. Like they intended to have these narrow buildings and they intended to have these hoist systems. But like so much of it, like it, it's all driven by taxation.

• 34:54Roman Mars?

  Right. And if these types of stories like excite you, we have a whole book full of them. It's called the 99% Invisible City that Kurt and I co-authored about five years ago. At this point, it's like the five year anniversary.

• 35:04Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's coming up on that five year anniversary and we're going to have some special content around that too. But I'm going to keep that piece a surprise.

• 35:12Roman Mars?

  Excellent. But in the meantime, you can go check out the 99% Invisible City, or just keep listening to the show. We'll talk about this stuff again.

• 35:20Speaker 09

  As always, we'll keep nerding out about this.

• 35:24Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was produced this week by Vivian Le and edited by Delaney Hall, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real and APM, fact checking by Graham Hesha. Again, Joel Slimrod's book is called Rebellion, Rascals and Revenue: Tax Follies and Wisdom Through the Ages. There's a ton of really fun, very 99PI tax stories in there that we didn't get to that we know you'll love. Oh, this is really important. 99% Invisible is up for three Webby Awards this year, and I'm really feeling the need to win them. We're up for Best Arts and Culture Podcast for the Power Broker Series, Best Arts and Culture Episode for Rocketman, that was produced by Chris Berube, and Best Limited Series for the Power Broker Series. We'll have a link in the show notes to the Webby Awards, or you can just search for Webby Awards, and then search for 99 to get to our categories. Thank you so much.

• 36:10Roman Mars?

  Kathy Too is our executive producer. Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeone, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, LaSham Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us all on Blue Sky as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

• 37:22Roman Mars?

  Hello, beautiful nerds. It's Roman here. If you're loving 99% Invisible and you want to hear new episodes ad-free and get access to exclusive bonus content, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts, or visit siriusxm.com/podcastplus to start your free trial today.