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> For various reasons, it has been decided that a person's income should be a portion of those revenues. In order to ensure that people are paying their dues, t
by lesuorac 3y ago
> For various reasons, it has been decided that a person's income should be a portion of those revenues. In order to ensure that people are paying their dues, the government needs to collect some information. Are there other ways the government could get revenues? Sure, but all of them are going to be problematic in some form or other.
No, just a singular reason: Prohibition.
- superb_dev 3y agoTaxes existed before prohibition, right?
- Turing_Machine 3y agoSure, but before that most taxes were in the form of excise taxes and import duties, at least in the US. Alcohol taxes were a big portion of that. When the prohibition amendment was enacted in 1919, that money went away -- in theory because people were no longer purchasing alcohol, in reality because they were purchasing untaxed bootleg alcohol. The effect was the same: a big hole in Uncle Sam's revenue stream. Enter the shiny new income tax, passed just a few years before (1916). This had been sold to the public using Bernie Sanders-style "millionaires and billionaires" rhetoric, but, as is the inevitable way with such things, it was soon being applied to thousandaires and hundredaires. :-)