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

The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but the stepping stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich; a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness.

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Justice Stephen Field, concurs with the majority opinion against the income tax.
05/20/1894 | Full Details | Law(s): Tax: Income

It should have been obvious from experience—but wasn’t—that additional hard work, genius, creativity and risk-taking were all discouraged by high marginal tax rates.

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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

[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

[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

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.