Law Commons^™

A New Understanding Of Tax, Edward J. Mccaffery

Michigan Law Review

Perhaps we should blame it all on Mill. A great deal and possibly all of the mind-numbing complexity of America's largest and least popular tax follows from the decision to have a progressive personal income tax. Proponents wanted an individual income tax notwithstanding - indeed, in large part because of - such a tax's "double taxation" of savings. This double-tax argument is an analytic point generally attributed to Mill's classic 1848 treatise, Principles of Political Economy. Historically, much of the support for the Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, came from Southern and Midwestern, progressive, agricultural interests, who wanted, in …