Today is tax day. How messed up is our tax system in the US?

What this episode covers

00:00 And welcome to the program on your Wednesday afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, it is tax day. Oh, that's my favorite day of the year. I love tax day. I really do. It is awesome. Tax day is just just so glorious. Oh, Charlie, I love paying taxes. I really do. It's wonderful. Yeah, today's the day. 00:29 that it really is because um we, I don't want to say celebrate, commiserate paying taxes to a government who wasted on ridiculous spending. One thing they need to teach in schools, and I'm talking about in high school. 00:51 You need to take a class, some people do in economics, but I don't know if they really cover how taxes work. Because I will guarantee you, if you were to ask the average high school student, how long have we had a federal income tax in this country? When did that start? 01:15 They'd probably go, oh, well that started in 1776 because that's when the nation was founded and I am learning all of that in school at the Learing Center. I'm at the Learing Center learning. Well, that hasn't the case. In fact, our founding fathers, these guys who had just come off fighting a revolution over taxation without representation, they wrote the constitution with very, very clear limits. 01:44 Article 1, Section 9, direct taxes had to be apportioned by population. No national income tax, period. And the federal government ran just fine off tariffs and excise taxes, kind of like what President Trump wants to do now. That's how the framers intended all of this. Small, limited, out of your wallet. Well, then we fast forward to the Civil War, even then when Lincoln 02:13 had little income tax. It was small and it was temporary. A wartime income tax in 1861, that was 3 % on incomes over $800. It's sunset in 1872, crisis over, tax gone. That's how it's supposed to work. But then the progressives at the time who never sleep. 02:39 In 1894, they slipped a permanent income tax into the Wilson-Gorman tariff act. The Supreme Court took one look at that and said, nope. Then they tried it again. Pollock versus Farmers Loan and Trust Company, 1895. Five to four decision ruled it unconstitutional. You see, back then, the justices actually defended the Constitution. Can you imagine that? So then what did the progressives do? They went around the Constitution. 03:09 In 1909, they ran through the 16th Amendment. But what did they say? Well, they said what they always say, what they still say today. Don't worry, it's only going to tax the rich. Woodrow Wilson signed the Revenue Act of 1913. Top rate was 7 percent, and that was only over incomes, only on incomes over $500,000 in today's money. Seven percent. 03:38 Could you imagine only paying 7 % taxes and that was the top rate at the time? The bottom bracket, 1 % if you made over $3,000. Well, they said it was only gonna be temporary. Within four years, World War I, the top rate shot to 77%. Then we had FDR and the New Deal that turned it into a permanent wealth distribution machine. 04:06 By World War II, the top marginal rate hit 94%. Think about that, % during World War II. 04:15 94 % 04:17 They took almost everything that successful Americans had. 04:23 That's pretty unbelievable. And once they had the power to tax Americans, uh incomes directly, uh they had the power really to control everything. The IRS became the enforcement arm of the administrative state. The tax code ballooned from just a few pages in 1913 to 70,000 pages of rules and loopholes and penalties today. 04:50 This is literally how the big government exploded. Every great society program, every green energy BS, every bureaucratic empire, all funded by taking more and more of your money before you even see it. Now, the way they sold that, you know, them going in and taking money out of your paycheck was, oh, this is going to be ease and convenience, ease and convenience. That's what it's going to be. But it really wasn't. 05:22 It was to make sure that there was no possibility of a tax rev ...

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