Advocate wrote:The right is working very hard to kill the income tax, as well as the federal estate and gift taxes. This will be a great gift to the wealthy, whose income and wealth has been soaring.
As well as anyone else who has ever been subjected to the income tax or the estate tax.
Since before I was born my mother worked a good 50-60 hours a week first as a cashier, then as a bookkeeper and finally as a comptroller for a private country club. Her highest yearly income was never much more than $60,000 and she had worked a good 30 years before she came close to earning this much on an annual basis.
My mother had to take medical retirement in 2001 due to lupus, and after fighting the Social Security Administration for SSI disability for 3 years she was awarded back benefits going back to the time she retired. However, the federal government retained 1/3 of the back benefits to pay for its cost of the court fight and then my mother had to pay her own lawyer $5000, which is the government mandated fee. Social Security disability has been her only source of income except for 2005 when she inherited some cash from her brother's estate. Her brother had been a local haul truck driver and he left an estate worth maybe $150,000 in cash (IRA and other pension accounts) and real estate (his home). And the only reason my uncle had so much money when he died was because he didn't have children, worked 40-60 hours a week and never lived an extravagant lifestyle. But my mother had to pay not only estate taxes on what her brother left to her, she had to file an income tax return for that year. The IRS counted her lump sum retroactive SSI as a single year's income instead of dividing it among the years it would have been paid out. That income, paid out in yearly amounts, was not enough to be taxable, but because of the way the IRS is considering it the IRS says it is taxable. It all likelihood this is a clerical or arithmetic error on the part of the IRS (as some of the IRS agents she has talked to says it is). But even after giving the IRS the worksheets that show how the income should be considered for tax purposes, my mother cannot get anyone with the IRS to officially correct the IRS error.
Furthermore, my mother is in very poor health and is facing surgery that could be bad. When she dies I will have pay estate taxes on what she is able to leave me.
The estate tax is the most unfair tax imaginable and the income tax isn't much different. Both should be abolished.
Quote:The U.S. government collected income taxes for the first time during the American Civil War (1861-65) and again in 1894,
Unconstitutional both times since the taxes weren't apportioned among the states based on population as the Constitution originally required.
Quote:Tax rates have fluctuated since the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, reaching their highest mark during World War II (1939-45) when the rate soared to 91 percent.
Certain people were paying taxes at this rate as late as the 1970s. I've heard that Elvis Presley donated his entire income from his Hawaii concert to charity rather than pay taxes on it.
Quote:The war effort also brought the innovation of automatic withholdings, whereby taxes are deducted directly from paychecks.
Like I said, most Americans didn't pay any federal income taxes until World War II.
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