Thanks. It looks like you were mixing up two different time periods then. The US income tax was only ratified in 1913, which would put its creation to just a y

Thanks. It looks like you were mixing up two different time periods then. The US income tax was only ratified in 1913, which would put its creation to just a year before World War 1. So the US "survived" just about 124 years of modern civilisation without an income tax. I don't realistically think that anyone is talking about returning to the days of the "Confederacy" that lasted what 2-3 years back in the 1700s, but the fact of the matter is that you have a lot of latitude in how you can separate powers between different governmental bodies and not collapse as a country. If you were to replace the direct federal income tax with a levee on individual states (whom then go on to decide how and when to tax their residents), I doubt the government will 'collapse'. Now to be fair, the US is a lot more decentralised than many European countries yet it is still more centralised than its northern neighbour Canada.