Hey, let’s celebrate the income tax

So maybe the federal income tax should get a birthday party. It has, after all, given us civilization.

In the days before a federal income tax, Andrew Carnegie was so impressed by what he read about the work Booker T. Washington doing at Tuskegee that he sent him a check to build a new library. Also in this era, John D. Rockefeller gave the money and Marshall Field the land so that a world class university could be built in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. (That’s right–the same university our class warfare president taught at for a dozen years.) So I’d say, Ms. Michaelmore, that we had some very fine civilization given to us by rich Americans before the income tax came and liberals started thinking that government was better than Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Field at deciding what was a worthy way of spending the capital earned by high achievers.

radjah shelduck on February 18, 2013 at 2:01 PM

After the Civil War, the federal government relied on a combination of consumption taxes and high tariffs to raise revenue. Both bore most heavily on regular people while doing little to tap the fortunes of the Gilded Age’s robber barons.

You folks want to know what’s funny? In these two sentences, she perfectly elucidates why we SHOULD have comsumption taxes instead of income taxes. Point taken, in the late 19th century we weren’t that much of a consumer society. America was still a land where lots of people paid the doctor with a chicken. But in 2013, we’ve got people standing in long lines to pay cash to get the latest model of I-Phone. Why not throw a tax on the purchase instead of the income that led to it?

radjah shelduck on February 18, 2013 at 2:09 PM