The 16th Amendment was neither a mistake nor an accident.
by 100%. It was fully intentional.
The historians who are claiming this idea in their terrible published history books that they have embedded into our schools are committing historical malpractice and actively covering up for progressivism with this notion.
The progressives wanted it. The progressives set out to get it. The progressives won. We lost.
There was a lot of support for the amendment rooted in antipathy to the millionaire class and a desire to make them pay, but did that mean the bill would get the necessary 2/3rds vote from Congress in 1909? That’s less likely.
If Congress had just passed an income tax law the courts could have overturned that. If the conservatives had fought the amendment in Congress, they might have defeated it.
Probably the amendment would have been passed in the next Congress or the one after that, since the Democrats took over Congress in the midterms, but we got the amendment when we got it because of a technical miscalculation by the conservatives.