TN's legendary Cordell Hull on income taxes

[Tanuki]

https://www.propublica.org/article/history-income-tax-history-16th-amendment-trump-tariffs-great-depression

..."Populists like Bryan didn’t give up. A young Democratic congressman from Tennessee named Cordell Hull said in his maiden speech on the floor in 1908, in which he proposed passing another income tax, that he was willing to risk the “odium and the funeral.”
...
Hull agreed with that analysis and was despondent. “It has long been understood that the Republicans never support a worthy cause until forced by public sentiment. Too stupid to devise and enact wholesome laws and to formulate and execute sound administrative policies, this piratical organization is wont to wait until Democrats point the way,” he said in a speech on the floor.
...
But Aldrich had miscalculated and Hull had been too gloomy. After a slow start for the ratification movement, political winds shifted and enough states came around. The amendment was ratified four years later. Then it fell to Hull to almost singlehandedly write what became the 1913 income tax law.

Hull’s plan proved prescient. He had foreseen that if the United States ever became entangled in a war that involved attacks on shipping, imports would dry up and tariff revenue would plummet. When the United States joined the war against Germany in 1917, Congress had to raise income tax rates to generate the money needed to pay for the expense of sending soldiers to Europe.

So no, President Trump, the origins of the income tax are not lost to history.".... (more on the origin of income taxes at link)

[cachukis]

1. Thanks.