Dear Editor:
The rich bellyache loudly today that it would be un-American to raise their income taxes. Turns out the opposite is true. It has always been very American to tax the rich. The design of the original federal income tax program in 1913 fired up the working class for a long time because it protected the working class.
One award-winning historian says, “It was expected that income taxes would be levied to ‘soak the rich.'” That totally happened because the corporate income tax was the first step of the federal income tax, starting in 1909. The tax on ordinary income that was started in 1913 was sold and designed to impact only the rich. It was to be “for the benefit of the common man,” since “those taxes would never be collected from ordinary individuals.”
Once those taxes began to be levied on “ordinary” folks, their share was kept very low, and it always went progressively much higher for the rich, usually into the 60-90% range. And the economy still did very well throughout those many decades.
The rich have hidden the actual history of the federal income tax. Don’t believe them for a second that they can’t bear to be taxed higher than 37% today. Get an education, people.
Kimball Shinkoskey
Woods Cross, Utah
