| Sunday, April 18, 2004 |
14:12 - About that money of "yours"
http://www.interocitor.com/archives/000286.html
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Get a load of what The Interocitor has found (via Dean Esmay): the original 1040 form, the very first income tax form from 1913.
Imagine what this must have been like: all your life, the money you've made is the money you keep. No crap about "take-home pay" or "incremental payments" or W-2 forms. Your wage is your wage, and the government doesn't have to know a thing about it.
Then, one day in early '14, you get a form in the mail that says: THE PENALTY FOR FAILURE TO HAVE THIS RETURN IN THE HANDS OF THE COLLECTOR OF INTERNAL REVENUE ON OR BEFOR MARCH 1 IS $20 TO $3,000.
And right after that, it says we're the government, and we're here to help. So give us 1% of whatever money you earned. Or else.
(Or, if you made more $20,000, 2%, or higher, up to 6% for people making half a million bucks a year or more.)
We take this sort of thing for granted nowadays; we've had income taxes all our lives, and even though it now gets calculated at rates ten times what they were in 1913, it all gets withheld by the employer, and all we're doing at tax time is fine-tuning the last couple thousand bucks up or down.
What must it have been like, in 1913, for people to suddenly have to work out what one-one-hundredth of what they earned that year was, and dig it out of bank accounts or mattresses, under the baleful eyes of glowering, fedora-adorned agents in dark suits, and send it in to Washington?
I know it would have made me feel weird, no matter how many Interstate highways they promised me it would buy.
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Brian Tiemann
