3 ms·

There was specifically an amendment to the constitution to allow for the collection of income tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni

• wahern 8y ago
  > apportioning the federal tax burden out to the states to collect for it Under the Articles of Confederation the Federal government was funded (or not funded, as was the case) by the states directly. It's the biggest reason we ended up with a self-funded Federal government under the subsequent Constitution.
• s73v3r_ 8y ago
  That sounds like what was tried under the Articles of Confederation, and it didn't turn out well.
• jcranmer 8y ago
  Fun fact: the Sixteenth Amendment does not give Congress the right to tax income; Congress already had that right. The sole purpose of the Sixteenth Amendment is to override the Supreme Court's Pollock decision, which held that a tax on rental income was effectively a tax on property, and as a property tax, it needed to be apportioned to the states in accordance with population. So the Sixteenth Amendment isn't "we can collect income tax", it's "we can do whatever we want with collected income tax." Which makes the tax protestors' arguments that the Sixteenth Amendment wasn't actually properly passed utterly hilarious.