The Personal Income Tax at 100

Few areas of American public life are more in need of thorough reform — and, alas, more difficult to change — than the tax system.

Politics can have a very long reach.
Today the federal tax system is a national disgrace: 4 million words, tens of thousands of special favors to rent-seeking individuals and companies, hopeless complexity. It is contradictory, arbitrary, duplicative, and deeply injurious to the federal fisc, American democracy, and our place in the world.
But had Rufus King, a delegate from Massachusetts to the Constitutional Convention, received an answer to a reasonable question in 1787, or had a Supreme Court justice not changed his mind — for reasons unknown — in 1895, it’s possible that the American federal tax system in 2013 might not be the mess it is.

Read more: http://www.american.com/archive/2013/february/the-personal-income-tax-at-100