This is part of Jack the Insiders article in today's Aus.
It's a tax anyway you look at it.
Call it a debt levy or call it debt tax. It doesn’t matter much. Broadly speaking a levy is temporary while a tax is enduring but British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger showed no abiding concern over linguistics when he introduced income tax in 1799 provisionally to pay for arms and armies in preparation for the Napoleonic Wars. When the war ended in 1805 guess what happened to that temporary impost? Put it this way, the British are still paying income tax 215 years later.
