From: Secret Squirrel <nobody@secret.squirrel.owl.de>
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 1997 08:28:41 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: Further costs of war
Message-ID: <39a04ee4329a5fe9efe92ce1e2fadd23@squirrel>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Jim Choate wrote:
>			       ARTICLE XVI. 
> 
>	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. 
>[25 February 1913.] 
> 
>Notice the date of implimentation, considerably before WWII, it is in fact
>the year before the US became involved in WWI. Perhaps you meant WWI instead
>of WWII? Citizens of the US have been paying taxes since 1914.

True, but a lot less citizens were paying income taxes in 1914 than in 1941.
Following are some figures that I extracted from the "Historical Statistics 
of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970", published in 1975 by the US 
Dep't of Commerce's Bureau of the Census:

[Note: in a previous post I had said that the initial income tax was 1% on 
any person earning more than $4,000 per year.  This is incorrect.  It was 1% 
on any person earning more than $20,000 per year, or roughly $400,000 in 
today's money.  Hardly the makings for a public outcry to the new 
"constitutional amendment."  Let's face it: the American public was just as 
complacent toward unconstitutional legislation then as it is now.]

In 1916, this figure was increased to 2%.  The total US gov't income tax 
revenue for that year was $68 million.  By 1940, the first income tax 
bracket had reached 4.4% on any person earning more than $4,000 per year for 
total yearly income tax revenue of $982 million.  The numbers increased 
dramatically during World War II:

Year		%	Income	Total Individual Income Tax Revenue
- ----		--	------	-----------------------------------
1941		10	2,000			$1.4 billion
1942		19	2,000			$3.2 billion
1943		19	2,000			$6.6 billion
1944		23	2,000			$18.2	billion
1945		23	2,000			$19 billion

That's an increase of roughly 2000% in a very short span of time (1940-45).
Who says war is not a lucrative business for gov't?

>Monty Cantsin wrote:
>> I doubt very much that income tax withholding would have been accepted
>> if the War were not used to justify it.  ("You don't want to pay
>> taxes?  What are you, a traitor?")
>
>What war? The taxes came about because of issues other than fighting a war
>which hadn't even happened yet.

Withholding was not implemented until 1943, smack in the middle of WWII.  In 
1943, $686 million of the $6.6 billion was collected by withholding, or just 
over 10%.  By 1945, $10 billion of the $19 billion was collected by 
withholding, more than 50%.  In 1970, $103 billion was collected in 
individual income tax, $77 billion by witholding (75%).

In summary, WWII was a convenient way for the US gov't to tighten the screws 
on its citizens, and it continues to do so to this day.  But I've discussed 
this already in a previous post.  "Check the archives." :-)

Nerthus

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0
Charset: noconv

iQA/AwUBNHtaqRa1d3zm4nqOEQIQKgCeN48fnrn5pDzUe/LZhvjJxzU3DKMAn2lT
ZTERt+yWGwZTI6xV3qbQ/MsL
=DpCh
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----