When the Civil war erupted, the Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1861, which restored earlier excises taxes and imposed a tax on personal incomes. The income tax was levied at 3 percent on all incomes higher than $800 a year.
In 1913, the "Sixteenth Amendment" to the Constitution of the United States was ratified. This cleared the way for the modern income tax system in the USA.
The IRS employes 115,000 people. To put this in perspective, the CIA employs approximately 18,000 while the FBI employs about 29,000. This makes me believe that the US Government thinks it is more important to get money from its citizens than protect them from terrorist and illegal aliens. I have a suggestion, why not go to a flat tax of say 2% from everybody drawing a paycheck and have the employers deducting that amount from our paychecks and be responsible for sending the automatic deductions to the IRS each payday. Then there would be a lot less cheating on our individual taxes and we would not have to file each year. Small business making less than a certain amount would pay 5% of their gross incomes and corporations would pay 10% of their gross incomes which is a lot less than we are all paying now respectively. Then we could offer 90% of the IRS employees another job working with business that protect us from terrorist and illegal aliens. I'll bet if they work as hard at their new jobs as they work on US taxpayers, we will prevent some of the problems we are facing today in these two areas.
Nearly 300,000 trees are cut down yearly to produce the paper for all the IRS forms and instructions.
American taxpayers spend $200 billion and 5.4 billion hours working to comply with federal taxes each year.
My thoughts on the bailout issues are coming to the blog so check back occasionally to see what I have to say about bailouts.
