TR wanted a progressive income tax, which was not enacted in his term, but eventually evolved into the monster that it is today. It is not a good argument to vilify a person who did not foresee how a small program could grow into something so evil, but in some part, that is what Beck does to TR. I’m not sure exactly how TR would have written the 16th amendment. We can hope it would have been written more carefully than the Wilson version. However, prior congresses had passed income tax bills (without a Constitutional amendment), so maybe the IRS monster would have been hard to restrain in any case.
I get in trouble with other good faith conservatives when I say that Reagan signing the 1986 amnesty bill was a mistake (but he was still a great POTUS), and I still think I am right about that. But how could RR have known how he and the nation would be swindled by Kennedy and Co.?
“I get in trouble with other good faith conservatives when I say that Reagan signing the 1986 amnesty bill was a mistake (but he was still a great POTUS),”
Nobody is perfect and unanticipated consequences are often.......unanticipatable.