I don’t want to worry you, but historically this is a bad week for freedom.<\/p>\n
Among the worst events, 97 years ago this week a progressive income tax was made possible in the United States. Prior to this time the Federal Government paid all of its bills (including the salaries of congressmen, presidents, federal judges, et al) from the levies and duties it collected. There was no tax on individual citizens.<\/p>\n
For more than 150 years the country was spared a progressive income tax because (a) the Constitution specifically forbade one and (b) the courts upheld the Constitutional prohibition.<\/p>\n
But neither was able to deter the domestic advocates of this plank right out of the Communist Manifesto forever, unfortunately, and on Feb. 3, 1913, the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. A federal income tax and the authority to enforce it—the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)—soon followed.<\/p>\n
Today, almost a century later, the average American toils for nearly five months to earn the money to pay the federal behemoth. It’s still not enough to balance the books, however, as the national debt is growing by $1.4 trillion a year.<\/p>\n
—Chip Wood<\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t want to worry you, but historically this is a bad week for freedom. Among the worst events, 97 years ago this week a progressive income tax was made possible in the United States. Prior to this time the Federal Government paid all of its bills (including the salaries of congressmen, presidents, federal judges, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5109,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-268423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5109"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}