A century of taxing government

Opinion: February 27, 2013 at 12:00a.m.

“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”

— The 16th Amendment

Monday marked the 100th anniversary of the day that U.S. Secretary of State Philander C. Knox took pen in hand and affirmed that the 16th Amendment, having been passed by Congress and ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states, was part of the U.S. Constitution.

The income tax is 100 years old. Got any big plans to celebrate? Probably not.

The First Amendment has a lot of fans. The Second Amendment is huge. The 13th Amendment was a star on Oscar night. Chicks dig the 19th. We’ll drink to the 22nd, which overturned the 18th. But few people love No. 16, which is strange, considering how much we all benefit from it.

Civilized society

From the air we breathe and the water we drink to the security we feel at night, from the teachers in the classroom to the meat on the table to the airplanes that do not crash, from FEMA and CIA, FBI and BATF and dozens of other alphabet agencies and programs, taxes — as Justice Holmes observed — are what we pay for civilized society.

Most Americans will admit that, albeit grudgingly. We’d just rather that somebody else pay a bigger share. The late Senate Finance Committee Chairman Russell Long, D-La., put it best: “Don’t tax you. Don’t tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.”

It’s amazing to realize, but the passage of the 16th Amendment wasn’t even close. Lincoln had briefly imposed an income tax to pay for the Civil War. Congress passed a 2 percent tax in 1894, but the Supreme Court threw it out two years later.

So the only way to get one on the books was to the amend the Constitution. It passed the Congress in July 1909 and whizzed through legislatures in Southern and Western states.

Harvard historian Jill Lepore, in a short history of the income tax published in The New Yorker last November, wrote, “The tax was intended to answer populist rage at the growing divide between the rich and the poor.”

A panic that followed the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 had created a deep recession. Congress created the Federal Reserve to shore up failing banks. People thrown out of work were outraged that the richest 1 percent of households held more than a third of the nation’s wealth. One percent of taxpayers held a third of wealth — land, stocks, bonds, art, savings accounts, jewels, cars, boats, the whole kaboodle.

Today it’s 43 percent. The next-richest 4 percent hold another 29 percent of the wealth. That’s 5 percent of households controlling 72 percent of the wealth.

And what have we got for public outrage? Anti-tax crusaders. Tea-party Republicans. We’ve got people chained to the oars in one of those “Ben-Hur” Roman galleys, rooting for Caesar.

Safety net program

How is it that the Americans of 1913 were so much smarter than Americans of 2013? My theory: We’ve got a better quality of not-rich now than we did back then. We’ve got television and the Internet to distract us and delude us and social safety net programs to preserve us from the worst effects of income inequality.

We see a guy on TV settling into a leather seat on his Gulfstream-V, we identify with that guy, not the people who pump the fuel or empty the toilets or serve the drinks. We are an aspirational people, not a realistic one. It’s part of our charm.

Also: We are easily bamboozled. Lepore’s piece in The New Yorker recounts the long effort that began with Andrew Mellon, Treasury secretary under three Republican presidents, to convince Americans that the income tax was the spawn of Satan. She recounts the effort by Robert B. Dresser, the Grover Norquist of his day, to repeal the “Marxist” 16th Amendment. She describes the brilliant Republican strategy, quickly adopted by Democrats, of describing Americans as “taxpayers” instead of “citizens,” pitting them against “tax-eaters.”

You know who should celebrate the tax’s birthday? Republicans. Lepore quotes the late liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who suggested that by defusing populist rage and giving wealthy Americans the right to say, “See, we’re paying our share,” even if they aren’t, the income tax might have saved capitalism.

Kevin Horrigan is a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.