If It Weren’t For Woodrow Wilson, We’d Be Colonizing Uranus by Now

David Neiwert points us Lucky Duckies to the predictable news that the Bush team is floating the idea of a national sales tax to replace the income tax. The Armies of Compassion seem to be adherants of the “burn the village in order to save it” school of strategery.

Neiwert mentions one of the sponsors of a bill introducing the measure was John Linder, a brilliant thinker and economic sage. He says:

“If Congress had planned a tax code in 1912 that was destructive of capital formation, punitive against work and savings, and incomprehensible to the very government employees charged with the responsibility of enforcing it, they could not have done a better job than what we ultimately achieved. They also would have been laughed out of town. The code must go!”

Wednesday, August 15, 2001

Rep. John Linder (R-GA)

Boy, has he got that right. Why, if we’d only had the right tax system, who knows how far this country could have gone? We could have even wound up being the richest country on the planet someday! I’ll bet we might have even become the world’s only superpower. Imagine that.

If only they hadn’t saddled us with that destructive, punitive incomprehensible tax system back in 1912 this nation might have accomplished something.

Perhaps it’s not too late for us. Pray for a VAT.

Update:

Patrick Nielson Hayden points out in the comments that Democrat Wilson wasn’t in the White House in 1912. This is true, but John Linder had the date wrong. Wilson passed the graduated income tax in 1913 as part of the Underwood Tariff act that lowered tariffs on items that could be produced more cheaply in the United States than abroad. They “attached” the income tax to the act in order to make up for the loss in revenues.

(‘Course, Republican Teddy Roosevelt introduced a federal income tax in 1906, but it died in the congress…)