ABSTRACT
From the beginning of the Federal Republic, taxation has been handled almost exclusively at the federal level. This occurred because the Bund used its concurrent power under Art 105(2) of the Basic Law to cast its legislative net over the entire catalogue of Länder taxes. This was done, perhaps unintentionally, under Art 123(1) of the Basic Law, which adopted the tax structure of the former Reich as a temporary measure. This gave the power to alter all tax rates to the central level (there were no Länder under the Reich), thus allowing them to occupy the field almost from day one (Biehl, 1989, p 377). Despite the statements of many distinguished academics to the contrary (Engel, 1993), even the beer tax is uniform throughout the Federal Republic (Federal Ministry of Finance, 1993).
