Why the income tax is worth celebrating

The federal income tax celebrates its 100th birthday this month. With so few fans of the tax in and outside Washington, few are likely to celebrate.

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.

Popular hostility toward these moneyed interests helps explain the initial popularity of the income tax ...

Added to the Constitution in February 1913, the 16th Amendment gave Congress the power to “lay and collect taxes on incomes.” ...

At first affecting very few, the tax was temporarily expanded in 1916 to offset the costs of World War I ...

The government’s insistence that the “real authors” of the new tax burden lived in Berlin and Tokyo ...

Problem is that too many Free Trader Globalists like Income Taxes too. And there are too many of those in the GOP....unfortunately. And Obama is now pushing for expanded Free Trade....like all liberals do

Before 1913.....the Federal Government raised revenue via tariffs on foreign goods....and it worked since our founding as a nation. Talk of replacing the income tax with tarriffs (and its modern version called FairTax)....and the Free Trader Globalists will whine like Chairman Mao at a shopping mall food court.

Income Taxes just punish the productive.....and even a flat income tax is progressive because it forces those who make money to give up more of their money

“In the late 1920s, Republican Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had defended taxes as “what we pay for civilized society.” The author later concluded that the income tax has brought us civilization.

Au contraire: taxes are what people pay for failing to behave in a civilized manner. Absent war, crime, sloth, and irresponsible promiscuity, there would be very little need for taxes.

Unfortunately, civilized people end up paying taxes to subsidize and indemnify uncivilized people.

The trouble is that senators adore it, because it makes them free agents, indifferent to their home state except for every six years when they go there to buy the election.

John McCain is an excellent example. He’s not even an Arizonan, but his wife, the very wealthy beer heiress is, and she will subsidize him any amount of money to keep his seat, so the two of them can live the high life in Washington.

In the last election, he got a serious challenger, former congressman J.D. Hayworth, who was very popular in the state, and it did not matter. McCain spent billions of his wife’s, and Republican “big money”, to utterly ruin Hayworth with mostly slander.

No way in heck he, or senators like him, would vote to return power to their states, because they know they would be pitched out with due haste.

A year ago I proposed a solution to this problem, however, with a constitutional amendment to create a “Second Court of the United States”, ostensibly to reduce the 8,000 a year case bottleneck of the SCOTUS.

But the 2nd court would not be a federal court, but modeled after the original US senate. Two judges appointed by each state, on concurrent terms with their US senator’s terms.

And its purpose would not be constitutional review, which is the job of federal courts, but *jurisdictional* review.

That is, a simple majority of them could say that a federal case taken from a state court, is *not* a federal case, so must be returned to its state of origin for decision. This would strip an enormous amount of judicial power from the federal courts to “federalize” state issues.

The other purpose of the court would be original jurisdiction, to be the first court to hear cases between the states and the federal government. This would mean that as soon as the feds passed some oppressive law, they would be sued and the case heard by a court of the states.

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