Tornado Alley (PROG)

[janice shell]

So, Tax or Tariff
That is the question Lincoln posed

And? Was Lincoln always right? I don't think so. Obviously, a graduated income tax is fairer to ordinary people. Tariffs on ALL imported goods hits the poor and the middle class like a ton of bricks.

But in fact, Lincoln DID impose an income tax:

In order to help pay for its war effort in the American Civil War, Congress imposed the first federal income tax in U.S. history through passage of the Revenue Act of 1861.[75] The act created a flat tax of three percent on incomes above $800 (which was 5.6 times the 1861 nominal gross domestic product per capita of $144.31; the corresponding income in 2021 is $384K). This taxation of income reflected the increasing amount of wealth held in stocks and bonds rather than property, which the federal government had taxed in the past.[76] The Revenue Act of 1862 established the first national inheritance tax and added a progressive taxation structure to the federal income tax, implementing a tax of five percent on incomes above $10,000.[77] Congress later further raised taxes, and by the end of the war, the income tax constituted about one-fifth of the revenue of the federal government. To collect these taxes, Congress created the Office of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue within the Treasury Department.[78] The federal income tax would remain in effect until its repeal in 1872.[79]

In 1894, Democrats in Congress passed the Wilson-Gorman tariff, which imposed the first peacetime income tax. The rate was 2% on income over $4,000, which meant fewer than 10% of households would pay any. ($4,000 was 19.3 times the 1894 nominal GDP per capita of $207.23; the corresponding income in 2021 is $1.3M.) The purpose of the income tax was to make up for revenue that would be lost by tariff reductions.[80] In 1895 the United States Supreme Court, in its ruling in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., held a tax based on receipts from the use of property to be unconstitutional. The Court held that taxes on rents from real estate, on interest income from personal property, and other income from personal property (which includes dividend income) were treated as direct taxes on property, and therefore had to be apportioned (divided among the states based on their populations). Since apportionment of income taxes is impractical, this had the effect of prohibiting a federal tax on income from property. However, the Court affirmed that the Constitution did not deny Congress the power to impose a tax on real and personal property, and it affirmed that such would be a direct tax.[81] Due to the political difficulties of taxing individual wages without taxing income from property, a federal income tax was impractical from the time of the Pollock decision until the time of ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment (below).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#:~:text=President%20Abraham%20Lincoln%20and%20the%20United%20States%20Congress%20introduced%20in%201861%20the%20first%20personal%20income%20tax%20in%20the%20United%20States.

If you want to know more, try this:

Abraham Lincoln and the Tariff

https://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/abraham-lincoln-in-depth/abraham-lincoln-and-the-tariff/