Special to WorldTribune.com

By Bill Federer, April 15, 2024

On April 15, 1912, the Titanic sank. It struck an iceberg the night before. Among the 1,514 lives that were lost were millionaires John Jacob Astor IV, Benjamin Guggenheim and Isa Strauss, all of whom opposed the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank.

In 1954, April 15 became the deadline for filing Income Tax returns. Originally, the U.S. Constitution prohibited a direct Federal Income Tax on American citizens (Article I, Section 9):

“No capitation or other direct tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the census or enumeration hereinbefore directed to be taken.”

The Federal Government’s revenue was derived from Excise Taxes on specific items like salt, tea, tobacco, etc., and Tariff Taxes on imports.

Prior to the Civil War, most tariff taxes were collected at Southern ports, like Charleston, South Carolina. Tariffs made foreign goods more expensive so people would buy domestically produced goods, made mostly in Northern factories. ….

During the Civil War, Republican President Abraham Lincoln passed an emergency “Revenue” Tax on personal incomes which raised $750 million to help fund the Union. It was repealed in 1873 after the emergency of the Civil War was over.

The first non-emergency “peacetime” Income Tax was attempted in 1894, but the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in Pollock v Farmers’ Loan.

Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller understood income tax to exist only during the emergency of wartime: “The original expectation was that the power of direct taxation would be exercised only in extraordinary exigencies, and down to August 15, 1894, this expectation has been realized.” ….

Industrialists helped bring about the greatest rise in the standard of living for the average person, with more goods at cheaper prices, than ever before in world history. Industrialists then began to create monopolies, buy politicians, control political parties, and plot to gain control of the national banking system.

Republican President Theodore Roosevelt attempted to limit their power with an inheritance tax. Republican President William Taft yielded to mounting public pressure to tax the rich industrialists by placing a 2 percent tax on corporate profits, as only the wealthiest owned corporate stock.

With the emergency of World War I threatening, Democrat President Woodrow Wilson naively thought there would be world peace if tariff taxes between countries were eliminated. Wilson proposed replacing the lost tariff revenue with an income tax on the wealthy. This was passed in 1913 with the 16th Amendment.

Originally, the Income Tax Rate started as a one percent tax on the top one percent richest people. It maxed out with a seven percent rate on those making over $500,000 a year (equivalent to $15 million a year in 2022 dollars).

Honor their memory: The ‘shot heard round the world’

It was a “soak-the-rich” tax, only intended for industrialists such as: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Fisk, Flagler, Gould, Harriman, Mellon, J.P. Morgan, and Schwab.

Industrialists strategically avoided paying the Income Tax by transferring their assets into tax-exempt charitable and educational foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Foundation.

This tax-exempt category had previously been created for churches, which historically were the providers of social welfare through their: hospitals, medical clinics, orphanages, schools, soup kitchens, and care for orphans, widows, maimed soldiers, prisoners, unwed mothers, widows, shut-ins, homeless, juvenile delinquents, and immigrants.

Churches also provided a significant social service by starting schools and Sunday schools, being involved in education which instilled morals and virtues into students and the nation’s population at large.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, regular church attendance in the United States was over 70 percent. This helped strengthen marriages and families, meet community benevolence needs, and encourage youth to become responsible and caring adults. ….

What has happened, especially since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Welfare State, is that the government has usurped the responsibilities of the Church.

Where churches ministered to the poor for free out of religious motivations and generous voluntary charitable donations, government social welfare programs are an immense financial burden, in many cases the largest items on state budgets, which taxpayers have no choice but to involuntarily pay.

It is not charity when it is involuntary. Early Christian believers sold their property and laid the money at the feet of the APOSTLES for the CHURCH to redistribute; NOT at the feet of PILATE for the ROMAN GOVERNMENT to redistribute. ….

Over time, as church attendance declined, and media, the entertainment industry, and government-run public schools have replaced the church’s traditional morality, there appears to be a corresponding increase in social ills, domestic instability, crime, drug abuse, homelessness, sex-trafficking, divorce, broken homes, child abuse and sexual promiscuity,

Oxford anthropologist J.D. Unwin, in his 1934 book Sex and Culture, confirmed that after studying 80 civilizations over 5,000 years, that monogamous heterosexual marriage precedes cultural advancement, and sexual promiscuity always precedes civilizational collapse.

British historian Arnold Toynbee examined the development of 22 major world civilizations and found that they start to decay when they lose their moral fiber and deep-state cultural elites turn parasitic: “Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.”

In 1942, during World War II, Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt expanded the Federal Income Tax with “the greatest tax bill in American history,” even instituting paycheck withholding. Billboards displayed: “Smash the Axis, Pay Your Taxes.”

John F. Kennedy explained April 20, 1961: “In meeting the demands of war finance, the individual income tax moved from a selective tax imposed on the wealthy to the means by which the great majority of our citizens participate in paying.” ….

Businesses gradually became subject to: Higher Taxes; Higher Wages & Benefits; More Lawsuits; More Governmental Bureaucracy; More Environmental Restrictions; and Political Favoritism or “cronyism” toward some companies who hired expensive lobbyists and were politically connected, while others companies were not. ….

As companies outsourced jobs to stay competitive globally, patriotic attachments diminished, giving rise to financial globalists.

John F. Kennedy noticed this, February 6, 1961: “I have asked the secretary of the treasury to report on whether present tax laws may be stimulating in undue amounts the flow of American capital to the industrial countries abroad.” ….

To remedy this, Democrat President John F. Kennedy proposed a stimulus plan of lowering taxes across-the-board, as he stated September 18, 1963: “A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced Federal budget. Every taxpayer and his family will have more money left over after taxes for a new car, a new home, new conveniences, education, and investment. Every businessman can keep a higher percentage of his profits in his cash register or put it to work expanding or improving his business, and as the national income grows, the Federal Government will ultimately end up with more revenues.”

Kennedy stated January 17, 1963: “Lower rates of taxation will stimulate economic activity and so raise the levels of personal and corporate income as to yield within a few years an increased — not a reduced — flow of revenues to the federal government.” ….

Kennedy stated, November 20, 1962: “It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now ….

Where Kennedy wanted to reduce taxes to stimulate the economy, economist John Maynard Keynes had proposed stimulating the economy by going in debt. John Maynard Keynes reasoned that: If the government went in debt spending money in the private sector to create jobs, those jobs would pay taxes and pay off the debt.

Unfortunately, politicians were always tempted to continually increase debt in order to funnel money to constituencies, supporters, and pork projects in their districts so as to help them get reelected, leaving the next Congress with the responsibility to pay off the debt, which, unfortunately, they never do.

James Buchanan, Jr., observed this phenomenon. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986, for his examination of how politicians make economic policy decisions. …. Buchanan indicated that, rather than being disinterested public servants, a large percentage of career bureaucrats are primarily interested in getting re-elected. ….

The Keynesian debt-stimulated economy model has resulted in an unsustainable $30 trillion U.S. National Debt, which makes the United States the most in debt nation in world history. Many civilizations, empires and republics throughout history accumulated enormous amounts of debt right before their decline:

Roman Empire under Diocletian; Mongolian Empire under Yuan ruler Toghan Temür; Florence under Italian Medici banking family; Spanish Empire under Philip III; Holy Roman Empire during Thirty Year War; French Empire after Seven Years War, and finally under Louis XVI; The Confederacy during Civil War; Ottoman Empire under Abdül Hamid II; Russian Empire under Tsar Nicholas II during World War I; British Empire after World War i & II. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics tried to keep up with Reagan’s U.S. military spending during the Cold War “arms race.”

The Soviet economy was overwhelmed with debt and collapsed, resulting in the Berlin Wall coming down. In an ironic twist, in the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States has followed in instituting upon itself similar debt spending policies. ….

President Donald J. Trump stated February 18, 2019: “The more power they get, the more they crave. They want to run healthcare, transportation, finance, energy, education … Socialism is not about justice, it’s not about equality, it’s not about lifting up the poor … it’s about one thing only: power for the ruling class.” ….

World War I fighter Ace Eddie Rickenbacker, who owned the Indianapolis Speedway and Eastern Airlines, wanted to repeal Woodrow Wilson’s 16th Amendment Income Tax, stating: “When Woodrow Wilson told us of the evils of concentrated power, less than 9% of our entire national income was enough to keep all of the federal and local governments going.” ….

(By 1960, taxes took) one third of all our earnings, and the Federal Government … spent 70% of that …. The entire gross income of every American is subject to complete Federal confiscation …” …..

Commenting on the tax burden of a growing government, President Ronald Reagan remarked at the National Space Club Luncheon, March 29, 1985: “Personally, I like space. The higher you go, the smaller the Federal Government looks.” ….

Reagan stated in 1988: “I believe God did give mankind unlimited gifts to invent, produce and create. And for that reason it would be wrong for governments to devise a tax structure that suppresses those gifts.”

  do you know where your money went? History of income tax, It’s April 15, WorldTribune.com