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What Taxes Are (cont.)
The ruling in the Pollack vs Farmers Loan and Trust Co. has never been overturned. But in a series of events that followed that ruling, the Sixteenth Amendment was introduced.
On February 12, 1913, it was added to the Constitution. What it said was:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the
several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
This amendment was sold to the people with assurances that it would be fair to everyone, it would be simple to calculate, and it would never apply to any part of your incomes that was needed to maintain a decent standard of living.
It was supposed to start at the top taxing the corporations, then the wealthy themselves, followed down the ladder of income until the poor would have to pay. What it created was a legion of tax professional who try to understand a code so complex that it has become almost indecipherable.
Henry George wrote in Progress and Poverty:
If I have worked harder and built myself a good house while you have been contented to live in a hovel, the taxgatherer now comes
annually to make me pay a penalty for my energy and industry by taxing me more than you. If I have saved while you wasted, I am [milked]
while you are exempt.
If a man built a ship, we make him pay for his temerity as though he had done an injury to the state; if a railroad be opened, down comes
the tax collector upon it as though it were a public nuisance.... We punish with a tax the man who covers barren fields with ripening grain;
we fine him who puts up machinery and him who drains a swamp.
To abolish these taxes would be to lift the whole enormous weight of taxation from productive industry.... The state would say to the
producer, "Be as industrious, as thrifty, as enterprising as you choose. You shall have your full reward!"
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