How we wound up with the income tax

Imagine a world without income tax; if you were an American citizen before 1913, with a few exceptions you didn’t have to deal with an April deadline and the IRS. Today, no one really knows how big the tax code is. February 3rd is the anniversary of the ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913. Its champion was President William Howard Taft, and its ratification was an effort to make sure more higher-income people paid taxes, and that the government wasn't wholly dependent on tariffs and taxes on goods. It wasn’t the first national income tax that was enacted. In fact, it was the third. But this third attempt had the power of a constitutional amendment behind it, and it’s still in force today. The Founding Fathers and the generation of leaders that followed them weren’t big on the idea of an income tax. Tariffs and sales taxes helped fund the federal government in the early days. But the financial needs of the Civil War led to the first…

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