Something for everyone to ponder about the Federal income tax

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The advent of the income tax prompted some congressmen to note that this tax was designed not principally for revenue — the U.S. government had always had plenty of money from tariffs — but to manipulate the American people and their choices in the market. “The character of the argument which had been made,” Massachusetts Rep. Samuel McCall argued in a speech before the U.S. House of Representatives as Congress debated the 16th Amendment, legalizing the income tax in 1909, “leads me to believe that the chief purpose of the tax is not financial, but social. It is not primarily to raise money for the state, but to regulate the citizen and to regenerate the moral nature of man. The individual citizen will be called on to lay bare the inner-most recesses of his soul in affidavits, and with the aid of the Federal inspector, who will supervise his books and papers and business secrets, he may be made to be good, according the notions of virtue at the moment prevailing in Washington.”

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