[rayiner]

Very sharp reading. My quotation presents the two definitions as freestanding. But as you observe, the definition of “tax” isn’t freestanding. There’s additional context, which comes from the fact that this issue only comes up when you’ve got a payment that purports to be for some government benefit. If the government imposes a payment on you in return for nothing then that’s clearly a tax. So, for example, the ACA penalty on uninsured people was a tax.

By contrast, if the government is purporting to charge you a fee in return for some benefit, that can still be a tax when the benefit that you’re getting really is a benefit to the public at large. So you’re comparing the benefit of what you’re supposedly paying for to the benefit to the public at large for operating the government. An example would be the case that alleged that PACER fees for operating the electronic court filing system were impermissible taxes. There, what you’re paying for is putatively access to a specific document. But the cost is ($0.10 per page) is way out of line with how electronic access to documents is normally valued. What you’re really paying for is the existence of the electronic filing system itself, which is something that inures to the benefit of the public at large.