In just over four years Abe Lincoln can TRIPLE the U.S. tariff schedule, impose the nation's first-ever income tax across the board on everybody who is in the middle class or higher, double the rates of that tax and lower the income threshold of its upper brackets only three years later, and enact a complex system of additional internal excises, duties and other taxing schemes and it's all okay because it's only a "war measure."
But if Ronald Reagan signs a bill that includes, among its minor provisions, a section that gradually increases the Social Security tax by a mere sixty-five hundredths of a single percentage point over the course of seven years it's treated as the most horrible and burdensome tax increase to hit the United States since FDR!
Well, the obvious problem with his embarrassing statement is that the Morrill Tariff was far from a (temporary) "war measure": it was the raison d'etre of both the Whig and Republican Parties, going back to the days of Henry Clay's "American System". Tax, tax; spend, spend.
The Civil War was just the occasion that allowed Lincoln and the Black Republicans to get the Morrill Tariff passed. They wanted that tariff, and the ideas behind it, as a major policy objective in and of itself. Ditto their railroad and homesteading bills.
Well, it was!
War does require high taxes.
But if Ronald Reagan signs a bill that includes, among its minor provisions, a section that gradually increases the Social Security tax by a mere sixty-five hundredths of a single percentage point over the course of seven years it's treated as the most horrible and burdensome tax increase to hit the United States since FDR!
That 'minor'tax increase was the third largest peacetime tax increase in our history.
Now the point of this discussion was that Reagan had no qualms about raising taxes if necessary, as did Lincoln.