(HOST) As the income tax filing deadline approaches, commentator, storyteller and contractor Willem Lange has been thinking about one of the best quotes about taxes – ever; Ben Franklin – who said it first; and how taxes have been around for a very long time.
(LANGE) In 1789 Benjamin Franklin to a friend: "Our new Constitution…promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." – which describes perfectly our grimly humorous attitude toward taxes:
Hagar, horrible as he is, is nevertheless subject to dozens of grossly unfair and whimsical taxes, collected by black-robed functionaries with battle axes. That expresses pretty well the way we sometimes feel about the Internal Revenue Service.
We’ve had one form of tax or another since the dawn of organized society. When it first became necessary to organize for defense against freebooters and outlaws, we combined forces. Combined forces have to be fed and armed somehow; thus were born the levee and the levée en masse, a raising of taxes in the first case and a draft of the citizenry in the second. The imposition of taxes has almost invariably been connected with defense and war, right through the present day.
The major complaint of the American colonies concerned taxation. Still smarting from the treatment they’d gotten from the gentlemen of the British Army during the French and Indian War, the colonists conceived the notion that a person old enough to pay taxes ought to have some say in how they were spent. Parliament found that notion quaint, and imposed more taxes, and in no time the colonists, who till then had been amusingly revolting, became serious revolutionaries.
The United States got along for many years with excise taxes on sugar, tobacco, whiskey, bonds, and slaves. The War of 1812 necessitated an increase in the number of items taxed; but afterward Congress fell back on import tariffs. These were sufficient till the Civil War, when the first graduated income tax was enacted.
The income tax has always been unpopular. In 1872 Congress dropped it and went back to taxing cigarettes and booze. About this time of year, I wish they’d left it that way.
But they went back to it in 1894. The following year the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. Not till 1913 did the 16th Amendment give Congress the right to enact an income tax on individuals and corporations.
In his bestseller "Don’t Think of an Elephant!", author George Lakoff records how the current administration hijacked the debate about taxes. The day it took office, the phrase, "tax relief," began to appear in the president’s speeches. This is called "framing." It assumes there’s an affliction — taxes — and anyone who can cure it is a hero. Anyone who tries to thwart him is a villain. That frame spread like wildfire; soon tax relief was on everyone’s lips, even those of the Democrats, who took the bait and began to describe their own tax relief plan, which, of course, was a pale shadow of the real thing.
Personally, though I don’t enjoy paying taxes, I consider it the privilege of an employed, solvent citizen of the republic. I only wish a smaller percentage of them would go to building bombs and bullets.
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta go do my 1040.