Income taxation fostered via spillover effects increases in state-consolidation over time in Chile. The paper contributes in two ways. First, it studies the relationship between taxation and state building outside Europe. Second, the paper tests the theory using a novel approach. Exploiting the exogeneity of earthquake shocks, I create a novel hand-collected longitudinal dataset on Chilean earthquake death tolls. Under reasonable assumptions, the capacity for enforcing and monitoring building codes throughout the territory is a reflection of a state's overall capacities. Using a Bayesian Poisson regression the paper shows that death tolls decrease (state capacity increases) once the income tax law was implemented in 1924. To explore the causal mechanisms, I discuss the Chilean case since the 1920s.