section_path: History/Forms
section_name: Forms
paragraph_text: Forms
  
  In monetary economies prior to fiat banking, a critical form of taxation was seigniorage, the tax on the creation of money.
  
  Other obsolete forms of taxation include:
  
  Some principalities taxed windows, doors, or cabinets to reduce consumption of imported glass and hardware. Armoires, hutches, and wardrobes were employed to evade taxes on doors and cabinets. In some circumstances, taxes are also used to enforce public policy like congestion charge (to cut road traffic and encourage public transport) in London. In Tsarist Russia, taxes were clamped on beards. Today, one of the most-complicated taxation systems worldwide is in Germany. Three-quarters of the world's taxation literature refers to the German system. Under the German system, there are 118 laws, 185 forms, and 96,000 regulations, spending € 3.7 billion to collect the income tax. In the United States, the IRS has about 1,177 forms and instructions, 28.4111 megabytes of Internal Revenue Code which contained 3.8 million words as of 1 February 2010, numerous tax regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations, and supplementary material in the Internal Revenue Bulletin. Today, governments in more advanced economies (i.e. Europe and North America) tend to rely more on direct taxes, while developing economies (i.e. several African countries) rely more on indirect taxes.