Progressive Income Tax: Unequal Treatment Under the Law

"Hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things. And no good thing ever dies."
--Andy Dufresne (Shawshank Redemption)

Nice review of the history of progressive income tax in US. As the article notes, the founders entirely rejected the notion of income tax, as they had just fought a war in part to end a tax holocaust with Britain. The framers clearly saw taxes in light of uniformity (Article 1/ Section 8), later to be reinforced by the Fourteenth Amendment with the notion of equal protection of citizens.

We can be certain that the founders would not approve of today's progressive income tax--one specifying that the more you earn, the more you pay.

During the first 130 years following the Constitution, the federal government complied with the founding principles of uniformity and equal protection--with two exceptions. Lincoln instituted a progressive income tax to help pay for the Civil War. This was repealed in 1872.

The other exception was news to me. Congress passed an income tax law in 1994 aimed at the top 2 percent of all wealth holders. Subsequently, the Supreme Court put this law down as unconstitutional. Justice Stephen Johnson Field penned a prophecy as part of his opinion, stating that even a small progressive income tax "will be but the stepping stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich."

Marx and Engels (1848) knew this all too well, which is likely why instituting a progressive income tax was near the top of their list of actions necessary to overthrow a free society.

Field's prophecy would get in motion 20 years later with the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment. The progressive income tax opened a major pipeline of resources for use in the market for political favor.

The Sixteenth Amendment stands out as wholly inconsistently with the rest of the Constitutional framework. It violates the principles of equal treatment under the law and due process expressed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

It replaces rule of law with discretionary rule of men.

My sincere hope is to witness the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment in my lifetime. Absent its repeal, my fear is that we will instead engage in civil war in my lifetime.