Essay History of Taxes in the United States

These taxes were passed from business to business and eventually to the consumer, ending with higher prices. Along with raised taxes for the working class, this effect happened because there was little encouragement to work if more was going to be taxed. Many people were also not willing to put money into savings accounts or stocks because the interest was highly taxed or had a higher interest rate.

One popular method of tax reform that some of the experts in this field think is worth considering is implementing a flat tax also known as a consumption tax. J. D. Foster says that “any tax with a single tax rate could be considered a flat tax.” An article from the website Tax Policy Center defines consumption as being “income less savings” (Gale). The major difference between an income tax and a consumption tax is the way savings are taxed. With an income tax all income is taxed when it is earned and again when interest is earned on any savings. Critics of an income tax say that this is double taxation and

The taxes were a huge part of the Revolutionary war and they caused one of the key rebellions in the British Colonies that sparked major conflict. This rebellion is known as the Boston Tea Party. In the Boston Tea Party, a group of Patriots who called themselves the Sons of Liberty dressed themselves as Native Americans and went to the Boston Harbor. Once there they went aboard ships that were carrying tea and they threw 92,000 pounds(340 chests) of tean into the harbor. This act changed the world as the colonists knew it. It sparked the Coercive acts, known as the intolerable acts in America to be

Americans that support higher taxes on the one percent believe that this will help contribute large amounts of money to the federal government. According to Patricia Cohen, in a New York Times article, she claims that the top .1 percent of Americans have an average income of about $9.4 million. If the government were to raise taxes to 45 percent on the top .1 percent this would produce about $109 billion in revenue in the first year (Cohen). The federal government could use this money for education, health care programs, and social and income security. Taxing the top .1 percent creates a significant revenue increase, but taxing the top one percent at 45 percent would create about $276 billion in revenue (Cohen). This tax rate will bring in a sizable increase which is why many Americans believe that the top one percent should have a marginal tax rate of 90 percent.

1862 - President Lincoln signed into law a revenue-raising measure to help pay for Civil War expenses. The measure created a Commissioner of Internal Revenue and the nation 's first income tax (Internal Revenue Service, 2013).

The arguments regarding federal progressive income tax has been represented to us through the United States Supreme Court, on the floors of congress, and in media. The revenue from taxes reached the objective of financing wars from the Civil War through World War II. At the same time deteriorating the economy with fewer dollars that could be used on imports, exports, and services (Henchman). Today, the United States deficit is $18,800,241,350,538.12 this is a grand total of 58,405.32 owed by every man, woman, and child (Brown). The legal illusion is presenting the question, is income tax legal? There are Americans today who believe income tax is not legal and stand by their beliefs in a movement that has cost many individuals considerably. I am interviewing such a person, his name is Bobby Ray and the history he presented to me was interesting, and has left me with more questions than answers.

"They say power to tax is a necessary part of every supreme legislative authority and that if they have not that power over America they have none and the America is at once a kingdom of itself" [Raising Money and Rising Anger. 22]. later many started complaining that the king had no right to tax them this much. Other than the Americans don't like their duty of being taxed the British were also being taxed as well. Colonist got used to their taxation within their own government.

2. Before the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, there was no valid Federal income tax on individuals.

In 1763 the British were among the most heavily taxed people in the world, where as the colonies in the Americas were prospering, Greenville, the British finance minister asked, “Why shouldn’t these colonists begin to pay some of the costs of their own government and defense?” The British then passed the sugar and quartering acts as well as the stamp act which all basically were designed to bring in more income from the colonies.

After the French and Indian War, the government was millions of pounds in debt and Parliament needed a way to pay back the debt without taxing the already heavily taxed British citizens. So, naturally they turned to the colonies, who were already unhappy with their mother country, and imposed many unwarranted taxes on the colonists. According to Mary Beth Norton, Carol Sheriff, et al. A People & A Nation 9th ed. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2012, 2008 print, Parliament passed the first tax in the colonies, the Sugar and Currency Acts, in 1764; these two acts were used to discourage colonists from smuggling molasses from a French company and to outlaw the inflated colonial money that the Americans were paying their debts with, respectively. These two acts were placed on an economy that was already in the midst of a depression, therefore angering the colonists even more than before. Despite the colonists attempts to repeal the Sugar Act, George Grenville, the acting prime minister, kept the act and continued on with even more hazardous

The first proposal to impose an income tax on Americans occurred during the War of 1812. After two years of war, the federal government had accumulated a whopping $100 million of debt. To fund the war against Britain, the government doubled the rates of its major source of revenue, customs duties on imports, which obstructed trade and ended up yielding less revenue than the previous lower rates. At the height of the war, excise taxes were imposed on goods and commodities, housing, slaves and land were taxed. Finally when the war ended in 1816, these taxes were abolished. A high tariff was then passed to retire the accumulated war debt. Thankfully, the notion of an income tax was conquered (Young, 2004). However, the thought of the income tax reappeared as an idea to fund the Union armies in the war to prevent the secession of the Confederacy. The war was expensive, costing on average $1,750,000 a day. Struggling to meet these expenses, the Republican Congress borrowed heavily, doubled tariff rates, sold off public lands, imposed a maze of licensing fees, increased old excise tax rates and created new excise taxes. But none of this was enough to fund the debt (Young, 2004)..

After the French and Indian war the British went into a lot of debt. They had to pay all the people back that supplied them with good and ammo. They started to tax the colonists because they thought that they should pay some of the debt. The colonists really didn’t like British taxing them and they started to revolt. Here are a couple of the acts that imposed taxes on the colonists.

The origin of the income tax on individuals is generally mentioned as the passage of the 16th amendment, which was passed by congress on July 2,1909. The history of individual income tax in the U.S.A goes back to 1861. During the civil war, congress passed the revenue act of 1861, which included taxing on personal incomes to help pay the expenses of the war. This tax was repealed after the war. In 1894, congress made a flat rate federal income tax, but the U.S Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. During the following

The Sixteenth Amendment is still doing its job today as all people are required to pay the government a portion of their income. Most of the government’s money comes from the taxes of the people. Without these taxes the government would be unable to function and our system that runs our country would be very different. We also wouldn’t have plans like Social Security or Medicare if paying income tax was not in place. Although taxes play a good part for our nation, there is another hand that can come in and play a bad part depending on what party is running our country. Taxation can be made so that everyone has to pay the same amount regardless of your income. This effects the lower income classes the most and the higher income classes the least as they have the money to pay it. It depends on who you ask and what their specific viewpoint is on taxation. It is a good that our country put this law in place for the sake of our government, we all just hope that the person running our government doesn’t make it out of control.

Throughout history, taxation on United States citizens has proven to be a necessary component of a growing economy as means of generating revenue for the federal budget. The federal budget funds the many government programs implemented to keep the disabled, elderly, and unemployed from falling bellow the poverty level. Unfortunately, this fund is not always available when catastrophic evens, such as an economic recession, deplete the revenue coming in and create a budget deficit. In order to regenerate money coming in and replace the deficit, the government calls on money gained from taxes. What happens when tax money is already appropriated to other programs? A tax reform. A tax increase has many times been the