The passage of an income tax in the early twentieth century was an enormous shift toward a far more centralized and powerful US state.

Original Article: "The Income Tax: Lessons from the Sixteenth Amendment"

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The income tax is “undoubtedly the most totalitarian of all taxes.1
—Murray Rothbard
At the founding of our country, the framers of our Constitution wisely withheld the right to tax incomes from the federal government. With the recent Revolutionary War in mind, the States were reluctant to cede strong taxing powers to a central state.
Given the enormous change in how this country regards the income tax, it is instructive to consider its origins. Studying this evolution may result in lessons that illuminate current debates.
The Founding
The constitution originally limited the federal government’s power to tax. Article 1, Section 2 stated that direct taxes shall be uniform among the States. Direct taxes were generally considered to be taxes such as head taxes or

Recently, the Treasury Department reported a 26% increase in the federal budget deficit with a 2019 deficit of $984 billion. The reported data on the budget can be misleading. You might think that a budget deficit is the amount of spending that exceeds budget revenue, in other words, the amount of borrowing needed to make up for this shortfall. However, in the world of Washington D.C., not all spending is counted as spending and it’s possible for the government to borrow money from itself. Let’s look at the actual Treasury Department budget numbers.
The Treasury reports the Total Public Debt Outstanding of almost $23 trillion, which is the sum of the Intragovernmental Holdings and the Debt Held by the Public.
There is roughly $6 trillion of Intragovernmental