Tax: Income

Tax: Income

The income tax is determined by applying multi-tiered tax rates based on income (the rates increase as income rises). The income tax as we know it was instituted in 1913, when the Sixteenth Amendment overturned the Supreme Court's 1895 ruling that outlawed the policy.

Cry Wolf Quotes

[In 1981] we, as a nation, finally recognized that it is patently unfair to take more and more from a worker simply because he or she works harder, or longer, or takes more risk, or displays more innovation.

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Reagan Treasury Secretary Donald Regan’s Address to the Business Council, 1984.
01/01/1984 | Full Details | Law(s): Tax: Income

If once you give the power to the nation to tax all the incomes…you give them the power to tax the states, not out of their existence, but out of their vitality.

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Associate Justice Stephen Brewer. 1909.
01/01/1909 | Full Details | Law(s): Tax: Income

[The Court must] bring the Congress back to a true sense of the limitations of its powers….[such a tax on wealth will lead to] communism, anarchy, and then, the ever following despotism.

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George F. Edmunds, former Republican senator from Vermont. March 7, 1895.
03/07/1895 | Full Details | Law(s): Tax: Income

No honest man can make war upon great fortunes per se. The Democratic Party never has done it; and when the Democratic Party begins to do it, it will cease to be the Democratic Party and become the socialistic party of the United States; or better expressed, the communistic party, or quasi communistic party, of the United States.

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Democrat Senator John Sharp Williams (D-MI).
08/27/1913 | Full Details | Law(s): Tax: Income

Evidence

Backgrounders & Briefs

Taxes Not Seen as Making the Rich Flee New York

Almost everyone agrees that raising taxes on the rich does not induce mass upper-class migration.