End the Tyranny of Income Tax : The 16th Amendment is the most invasive intrusion by the government into citizens’ lives.

I was once on a television show with Fred Goldberg, who was then the Internal Revenue commissioner. I had the opportunity to ask him: “Do you use an accountant to help you prepare your taxes?” I confessed that I did, even though I once taught tax law at Harvard. He admitted that he, too, needed help to do his taxes.

It’s no wonder: The eight volumes of the Internal Revenue Code and Regulations now run more than 14,700 pages. That’s not counting another 200,000 pages of decisions and interpretations. Perhaps that’s why our Founding Fathers wisely prevented against an income tax in the Constitution. It took the 16th Amendment in 1913 to permit one. Yet, even the amendment’s sponsors would be horrified to see what the income tax has become: the most invasive and hated interference of the federal government in the lives of ordinary citizens.

The chief Republican sponsor of the 16th Amendment, Rep. Sereno Payne of New York, supported it only because he believed that the country should have the option of taxing income in time of war.

“As to the general policy of the income tax,” he said, “I am utterly opposed to it. I believe, with Gladstone, that it tends to make a nation of liars . . . . It is, in a word, a tax upon the income of honest men and an exemption, to a greater or lesser extent, of the income of the rascals.”

The leading Democratic sponsor, Minority Leader Champ Clark of Missouri, offered his support for the amendment in the context of the income tax bill that was then being debated. The bill contained a $5,000 exemption, meaning that nobody who earned this amount paid any income tax at all. I’ve adjusted these figures for inflation, so you can understand what it was like to hear Clark’s remarks on the floor:

“I do not believe that the [$82,000] exemption is too much . . . I certainly would increase it rather than diminish it, and for this reason: $82,000 is not an unreasonable amount for a man to support a family on and educate his children; $99,000 would not be an unreasonable amount; $115,000 would not be an unreasonable amount. But I say that when a man’s net income rises above $1.65 million a year, it does not make any difference to him, practically, whether you take 1%, 2%, 5% or 25%.”

It is easy to see why the income tax law was passed: Everyone believed that someone else would pay. As recently as the eve of Pearl Harbor, only one in seven Americans was even required to file an income tax return. The last time we had a Republican Congress, in 1954, the federal tax burden on the average American family was one-tenth of what it is today.

But today, if you’re like most people, you pay several hundred percent more in income taxes than your parents did. More than 95% of all taxpayers who are forced to file income tax returns are people who were promised by the sponsors of the 16th Amendment that they would never be taxed at all.

Because of the twin evils of the income tax and the endlessly expanding welfare state, middle America now bears a much greater government burden that when I was a child. In the 1950s, government did not consume the 40% of our gross domestic product it does today, but half that. As a result, the average American family, making the average national income, paid an income tax rate of just 2%.

That average family of my parents’ generation could afford a three-bedroom home, even though the norm was that only one spouse had to work. They paid only 4% interest on their 30-year mortgage. Their FICA payroll taxes were just 1.5%. All of this was possible because the federal budget was balanced in a low-tax environment.

That kind of freedom and opportunity is again possible. But it will become reality only if we are actually willing to reduce the size of government, and only if we recognize that the income tax is an experiment that has miserably failed.

On July 12, 1909, Rep. Samuel McCall of Massachusetts looked into the future and asked a troubling question about the 16th Amendment, which the House approved later that day:

“Why drag every government power to Washington so that a vast, centralized government may devour the states and the liberty of individuals as well? I say this amendment should be more carefully considered than it has yet been considered.”

In the intervening decades, the American people have had ample opportunity to consider the income tax, and they have found it sorely wanting. It has become exactly what McCall feared. It deserves to die.