The U.S. is the country that invented progressive taxation of income and of inherited wealth in the 1910s and '20s.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
America is a land of taxation that was founded to avoid taxation.
1913 wasn't a very good year. 1913 gave us the income tax, the 16th amendment and the IRS.
The income tax is a twentieth-century socialist experiment that has failed. Before the income tax was imposed on us just 80 years ago, government had no claim to our income. Only sales, excise, and tariff taxes were allowed.
Inherited wealth, that is not what America is based upon.
It was under Wilson, of course, that the first huge parts of the Marxist program, such as the progressive income tax, were incorporated into the American system.
The United States could transform its property tax system into a progressive tax on net worth without asking permission to the rest of the world.
Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet.
Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt.
We didn't become the most prosperous country in the world just by rewarding greed and recklessness. We didn't come this far by letting the special interests run wild. We didn't do it just by gambling and chasing paper profits on Wall Street. We built this country by making things, by producing goods we could sell.
We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.