Tax: Income

Tax: Income

The income tax is determined by applying multi-tiered tax rates based on income (the rates increase as income rises). The income tax as we know it was instituted in 1913, when the Sixteenth Amendment overturned the Supreme Court's 1895 ruling that outlawed the policy.

Cry Wolf Quotes

[In 1981] we, as a nation, finally recognized that it is patently unfair to take more and more from a worker simply because he or she works harder, or longer, or takes more risk, or displays more innovation.

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Reagan Treasury Secretary Donald Regan’s Address to the Business Council, 1984.
01/01/1984 | Full Details | Law(s): Tax: Income

[A tax on incomes exceeding $4,000 will drive] rich men to go abroad and live.

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Letter to the editor, New York World by Ward McAllister, a prominent figure in high society.
01/30/1894 | Full Details | Law(s): Tax: Income

When a man has accumulated a sum of money within the law, that is to say, in the legally correct way, the people no longer have any right to share in the earnings resulting from the accumulation.

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John Davison Rockefeller.
07/27/1909 | Full Details | Law(s): Tax: Income

[The Court must] bring the Congress back to a true sense of the limitations of its powers….[such a tax on wealth will lead to] communism, anarchy, and then, the ever following despotism.

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George F. Edmunds, former Republican senator from Vermont. March 7, 1895.
03/07/1895 | Full Details | Law(s): Tax: Income

Evidence

Backgrounders & Briefs

Taxes Not Seen as Making the Rich Flee New York

Almost everyone agrees that raising taxes on the rich does not induce mass upper-class migration.