Franklin on Death and Taxes

Background and Context

Franklin wrote this on 13 November 1789, at eighty-three, within a year of his death, from Philadelphia to his old friend Jean-Baptiste Le Roy of the Académie des sciences — a correspondence the upheavals in France had interrupted. The Bastille had fallen that July; the French Revolution was underway. And the United States had just seated its new government: the Constitution ratified, Washington inaugurated that April. So an old man surveys two new republics at once — his own, freshly built and untested, and his friend's, already convulsing — and hedges his bet on permanence. The line welds civic optimism to mortal realism. Worth noting from the start: the pairing of death and taxes was already a stock proverb (Christopher Bullock, 1716; Daniel Defoe, 1726). Franklin did not coin it. He immortalized it by fastening it to the newborn Constitution.

Interpretation

The sentence turns on a hinge — a "but" that sets civic hope against cosmic certainty. The first clause grants that the Constitution "promises permanency"; the second demotes it beneath the only two things that actually possess permanence. That is the architecture of the joke: Franklin raises the prospect of a lasting republic precisely in order to rank it below death and taxes. This is not cynicism about the Constitution — he signed the thing and wanted it durable. It is a sorting of claims by their grade of certainty, and an honest verdict that the new document, for all its promise, is provisional.

The chosen pairing does the real work. Death is nature's levy; taxes are the state's — and Franklin yokes the metaphysical to the mundane as equals, which is both funny and deflating. Both are involuntary extractions, both come for everyone, both are simply the price of being: of being alive, and of being governed. Setting them side by side drags the grand machinery of the new nation down to the level of the tax collector — the one arm of government no citizen talks his way past. There is an irony a founder would relish: a charter written to secure liberty is certified permanent only in its power to take. The buried thesis is bleak and precise — the one permanence a government can truly promise is the certainty of its own claim on you.

And note how carefully he uses the words. Permanency is what the Constitution "promises"; certain is what only death and taxes are. Franklin will not grant the republic the second, only wish it the first. A promise is a hope with good posture; certainty is a fact. The whole sentence lives in the gap between the two.

Current Relevance

The line has flattened into the universal shrug of tax season, but its structure still cuts. Every era erects systems it calls permanent — institutions, currencies, platforms, empires — and Franklin's hedge quietly asks which of them can honestly claim certainty rather than mere appearance of it. Very few. Meanwhile the two he named have only tightened their grip: taxation has grown incomparably more pervasive than the modest imposts he knew — income, payroll, sales, capital gains, none of which existed in his ledger — and death, for all of medicine's advances, remains undefeated even as longevity-obsessed billionaires openly bet against it.

The modern twist is that both certainties are now contested at the frontier. Crypto, trusts, and offshore structures sell escape from taxes; life-extension research and cryonics sell escape from death. Franklin's proverb is the skeptic's standing rejoinder to both — the house always collects. And in a culture drunk on "this changes everything," his sentence is a useful corrective: most things that promise permanency don't have it, and the things that do have it are rarely the ones we're excited about.

Impact and Legacy

This is the most-quoted form of a proverb Franklin didn't originate — a clean demonstration that attribution follows fame, not priority. Bullock and Defoe said it earlier; Franklin said it memorably, because he pinned it to a specific, resonant object at a hinge of history. It has since detached from its letter to become an English-language idiom, invoked across tax law, estate planning, actuarial science, and everyday resignation, and spawning a whole genre of "two certainties" riffs. The legacy carries its own irony: a line about the impermanence of even a constitution has proved among the most permanent things Franklin ever wrote, outliving most of his scientific and political prose in public memory. It is a small monument to his signature move — the plain, funny sentence that smuggles a serious thought without ever raising its voice.

Contrasting Views or Controversies

• It wasn't his idea. Received as Franklin's coinage, the line is a misattribution of origin — the pairing is Bullock's (1716) and Defoe's (1726) by decades. He inherited a cliché and got the credit, which is itself a lesson in how the record rewards the memorable over the first.
• The certainties are less certain than advertised. Plenty of people and corporations do escape taxes — through avoidance, exemption, and offshoring — so "death and taxes" flatters the state's reach. In practice the burden falls hardest on those least able to dodge it, which turns a democratic-sounding truism into a quiet observation about who actually pays.
• It can breed fatalism. Read as pure resignation, the line discourages the very civic engagement Franklin embodied: if taxes are as inevitable as death, why argue over how they're levied or spent? But taxation, unlike death, is a human choice, endlessly negotiable — and naturalizing it as cosmic law hands power to whoever sets the rate.
• The deathless-future rejoinder. Transhumanists take the sentence as a gauntlet — both certainties, they argue, are engineering problems, not laws of nature. Hubris or foresight, it is a genuine challenge to Franklin's framing.

Practical Application

• For the individual: Treat the two certainties as planning anchors, not alibis for avoidance. Franklin's own life was relentless preparation — he drafted his epitaph young. Plan for taxes, because they will come, and plan for death, because it will too: a will, an estate plan, affairs left in order are the practical honoring of the line. The wisdom is readiness, not resignation.
• For organizations and leaders: Hold your "permanent" systems humbly. The sentence is a caution against believing an institution, product, or advantage is durable merely because it is established. Build as though permanency is a promise to be re-earned each year, never a fact already banked.
• For civic life: Remember that taxes are the one certainty that is actually a choice. Death you cannot vote on; taxation you can. The line should sharpen, not dull, a citizen's attention to how the state's single guaranteed claim gets set and spent.
• A caution to hold alongside it: Don't let the aphorism's charm launder passivity. Franklin was wry, not resigned — he named the certainties and then spent his life working within and against them.

Background on the Author

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was a printer, scientist, diplomat, and the only figure to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. What authorizes this particular line is the whole arc of the man. He was a working printer who understood the compressed, quotable sentence as a trade — Poor Richard's Almanack was, among other things, a machine for proverbs. He was a scientist at ease with probability, who knew certain and likely to be different words. And he was a statesman who had just helped build the very Constitution he here declines to call certain. He wrote the letter in French, at eighty-three, ill and within a year of his death — which lends the "death" half a personal weight it could never carry for a younger wit. He knew both certainties from the inside: a man who had spent a lifetime building systems, about to be collected by the one system that collects everyone.

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