Excise (Excise Duty), a variety of indirect tax, predominantly on articles of mass consumption, such as wine, spirits, tobacco products, salt, matches, petrol, and mineral oil. Excise is paid to the state by producers and dealers in these commodities. It is included in the retail price of commodities or service tariffs; thus the load is shifted onto the consumer, mostly belonging to the less affluent sections of the population. Lenin wrote, "indirect taxation affecting articles of mass consumption is distinguished by its extreme injustice. The entire burden is placed on the shoulders of the poor, while it creates a privilege for the rich. The poorer a man is, the greater the share of his income that goes to the state in the form of indirect taxes" (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 336). In the period when capitalism was taking hold, the system of excise duty was all-embracing. Eighteenth-century England had around 200 kinds of excise duty. In tsarist Russia, excise duty, together with the state monopoly of the wine trade, yielded up to 50 per cent of budget revenues. Modern capitalism also shows a tendency to expand the range of commodities subject to excise duty. Socalled universal excise, when the whole industrial and trade turnover is subject to taxation, is widespread. Excise duty remains a major source of revenue for capitalist states. In the US federal budget, the share of indirect taxes and dues reached about ten per cent of total revenues in the 1976/77 fiscal year. A considerable part of indirect taxes in the USA is concentrated in the budgets of individual states and local government bodies, where they serve as a major source of revenue. Excise duties are widespread in a number of developing countries. Available data show that, in the mid-1970s, the share of excise duty in state revenues was 53 per cent in India, 51 per cent in Argentina, and 70 per cent in Brazil. In the USSR, excise was applied during the New Economic Policy. In 1930-31, the taxation reform abolished this system; in the other European socialist states, it was abolished in 1948-49.