6 ms·

I didn't know this was the case, thank you for sharing. For anyone else reading, it appears federal income tax was first implemented in 1913, more reading here

• pdwetz 8y ago
  Not quite; from same link, "President Abraham Lincoln and the United States Congress introduced in 1861 the first personal income tax in the United States." It was declared unconstitutional in 1895 by the Supreme Court, prompting the constitutional amendment.
• wahern 8y ago
  Tariffs were a source of bitter controversy between Northern and Southern states from the very beginning. It wasn't until the 1840s or 1850s that controversy over slavery became the dominate dynamic. Northern manufacturers wanted high tariffs on manufactured goods and low tariffs on agricultural products. Southern farmers wanted high tariffs on agricultural products and low tariffs on manufactured goods--to placate Europeans so they'd buy Southern agricultural products, and to check the economic power of the North. And of course the Federal government relied on tariffs for income--the Articles of Confederation being considered a failure largely because the Federal government had no independent source of income--and as a foreign policy tool. Everybody was at odds. (Note that it was also common back then to impose export tariffs, which added considerable complexity to the debate. Today export tariffs are largely unheard of in the U.S. but perhaps ripe for rediscovery. Though we recently loosened restraints on the export of crude oil and natural gas, so it probably won't happen any time soon.)