The archive.

A wealth tax can tax presumed income rather than wealth itself—a distinction that anchors Richard Reisch’s 1893 examination of N. G. Pierson’s Dutch fiscal reform. Reading legislation, explanatory memoranda, and parliamentary debates, Reisch asks how burdens can shift from consumption to wealth without increasing total state revenue. The assumed four-percent return on assets makes the design concrete: it separates capital income from entrepreneurial earnings and helps coordinate the wealth tax with the proposed business and professional tax. Reisch welcomes relief for labour-dependent incomes but challenges rules that burden foreign competitors and risk turning taxation into protection. His account shows how the pursuit of ability-to-pay taxation depends on administrative knowledge, and how a reform’s domestic principles can falter at the national boundary.

Decades of failed attempts to replace Austria's obsolete Erwerbsteuer patent of 1812 and the provisional income-tax patent of 1849 came to rest in the reform law of 25 October 1896, which Reisch here presents alongside the smaller statutes that remained in force. More than a bare edition, it reconstructs legislative intent from the motives, committee reports, and Reichsrat speeches, tracing the abandoned Dunajewski project, Steinbach's 1892 bill, and the roles of Plener, Böhm-Bawerk, and Biliński. The commentary follows the law's architecture: the general Erwerbsteuer assessed by repartition among tax societies rather than numerical net yield, the new Rentensteuer on capital yields, and the modern personal income tax with its progressive scale, household aggregation, and safeguards for business secrecy — a foundational text of the modern Austrian tax state.

Mit aller Entschiedenheit stand für die Regierung das Eine fest, daß die bisherige Methode der Besteuerung nach dem ziffermäßigen Reinerträge hier zunächst nicht fortgesetzt werden dürfe.

English translation: “For the government one thing was firmly established with all decisiveness: that the previous method of taxation according to numerically determined net yield could not, for the time being, be continued here.”

Austria’s direct-tax reform promised to redistribute burdens without increasing state revenue or diminishing it. Richard Reisch’s 1897 article, in all three installments, examines what that constraint means for taxpayers and public finances. His analysis connects legal definitions to economic consequences: whether taxable capacity belongs to an individual or a household, and why a business’s balance-sheet surplus need not equal its taxable return. These distinctions make the allocation of relief intelligible rather than merely technical. Reisch also identifies a cost of the settlement: restricting direct-tax receipts could leave future expenditure dependent on indirect taxation, an outcome he criticizes on social-policy grounds. Readers can discover how a revenue-neutral reform changes not only who pays, but the financing options available to the state afterward.

An accounting number carries authority only through orderly recording, documentary proof, and valuation rules fitted to the purpose of the balance sheet—the governing premise of this postwar Viennese handbook, which treats bookkeeping as at once a technical system and a legal-economic discipline. Kreibig and Reisch move from elementary entries through double-entry bookkeeping as a dual representation of enterprise life—each transaction seen once from the side of assets, once from that of capital—to inventory, account frameworks, valuation, reserves, audit, and special balance sheets. They ground valuation in the subjective value theory of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, make the Austrian uniform chart of accounts turn on separating financial from operating bookkeeping, and warn that familiar labels conceal unlike contents. Balance-sheet truth, on their account, is exact in method yet controlled, relative, and institutionally framed.

Jede Eintragung in die Handelsbücher muß durch einen Beleg begründet werden.

English translation: “Every entry in the commercial books must be substantiated by a supporting document.”

A cash payment for taxes or a loss through theft tests what double-entry bookkeeping actually explains: not every entry can be understood as an exchange of one value for another. In this jointly authored reply to Seidler’s criticism of their Bilanz und Steuer, Richard Reisch and Josef Clemens Kreibig defend two coordinated series of accounts—one recording the components of wealth, the other net wealth and results. Their central puzzle is why an increase appears as a debit in some accounts and a credit in others. Through concrete disputes over expenses, capital, and losses, they show why balanced postings require more than a rule of paired entries. The reply offers a focused way to examine how bookkeeping connects movements of assets with changes in wealth and profit.

When does relief for landlords become relief for tenants? In this brief intervention at the building-tax reform hearing of 2 December 1903, Richard Reisch presses an expert on two apparent inconsistencies. If rents follow neighbouring properties rather than landlords’ costs, why should tax exemptions for new buildings lower peripheral rents? And if reducing the underlying tax benefits only owners, why should abolishing its surcharges serve the public differently? Reisch offers no rival reform programme: his distinctive contribution is to demand that attractive proposals withstand the same test of who actually gains. The exchange gives a compact example of how questions about rent-setting can expose gaps in the justification of tax relief.

A cut in building taxes need not mean lower rents. In this brief intervention at the official hearing of 23 November 1903, Richard Reisch presses an expert on who would capture the saving. Could owners selling before rents adjusted pocket its capitalized value? And would businesses tied to prime locations ever secure a rent reduction? Against the example of Vienna’s Kärntnerstraße as an exceptional case, Reisch suggests that every larger city has sites protected from effective competition. His questions make a precise distinction between promised relief for tenants and gains realizable by landlords—especially those already enriched by urban growth. This short exchange offers a concrete test of tax-reform expectations through the timing of transactions and the bargaining power conferred by location.

Who gains when a building tax is reduced—the tenant, the builder, or the seller of the land? In these interventions at the official inquiry of 1 December 1903, Richard Reisch presses experts to explain how relief would reach its intended beneficiaries. If anticipated tax savings immediately raise building-site prices, he asks, what incentive remains for additional construction? If concessions arrive in small, retrospective increments, why should landlords lower current rents? Acknowledging houseowners’ mortgage distress without accepting every proposed remedy, Reisch distinguishes financial relief from its promised social effects. These exchanges offer a concrete view of tax reform under interrogation: the timing and capitalization of a concession matter as much as its nominal size.

Does taxing both a business and its premises amount to taxing the same earning capacity twice? In these two interventions at the building-tax reform inquiry of 11 December 1903, Richard Reisch challenges that claim by comparing manufacturers who rent their factories with those who own them. Tenants, he argues, already bear building tax through their rent; exempting owners could therefore create a privilege rather than remove an injustice. His defence turns on proper assessment, including the practical security owners enjoy when adapting their premises. This brief exchange offers a concrete distinction between unequal tax bills and unequal treatment—and ends with a pointed warning: abolishing a tax borne by tenants does not guarantee that landlords will pass the saving back to them.

A reduction in state building tax need not mean an equivalent saving for taxpayers: municipalities dependent on surcharges may have to raise their percentages simply to preserve revenue. In these interventions at the inquiry of 25 November 1903, published in 1904, Richard Reisch tests reform proposals against this fiscal constraint. His questions distinguish nominal rates from actual payments and expose the difficulty of compensating one municipality with building growth occurring elsewhere. He also challenges cheap estimates for a property-value cadastre: valuing millions of buildings would require local investigations, not merely the reuse of income-tax machinery. These exchanges offer a concrete encounter with reform as an administrative problem—where attractive calculations must survive municipal budgets, uneven development, and the cost of obtaining reliable information.

Whole villages could escape the valuation records on which building-tax reform might rely. In these two interventions at the inquiry of 26 November 1903, Richard Reisch tests expert reasoning against both administrative gaps and the logic of property prices. Estimating a building’s use value may be easier than establishing its construction value, he observes, but income-tax records cannot supply evidence for localities without income taxpayers. He also presses a pointed consistency question: if tax exemptions raise property values, why should longstanding taxes and surcharges not already be reflected in them? These brief exchanges show how distinguishing existing burdens from subsequent tax changes can alter an argument about what property owners actually bear.

Does a tax on rental income necessarily set off an endless spiral of higher rents and higher taxes? In these four brief interventions at the building-tax reform inquiry of 30 November 1903, Richard Reisch challenges that claim through precise distinctions and elementary arithmetic. He separates high surcharges from rising ones, citing Lemberg’s figures, and treats the landlord’s desired net return as a finite calculation rather than a self-perpetuating cycle. His example shows how a rent can already incorporate the tax payable on it. These compact exchanges expose the difference between calculating the rent needed to secure a given return and establishing whether tenants could actually pay it—the latter remaining outside Reisch’s demonstration.