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Like acne on prom night, taxes are an unfortunate but absolute certainty. To find out how the dreaded income tax got its start, we jumped on the tax-free (for now) Web. Income taxes are a relatively new annoyance. The bane of the working person didn't become law until the 16th Amendment was ratified in February 1913. You'd think this amendment, the granddaddy of tax laws, would have been written in a needlessly complicated manner. Not so. In fact, it's only 30 words long: The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard
to any census or enumeration. So the modern federal income tax didn't become law until the early 20th century. However, a similar law known as the Revenue Act was introduced decades earlier during the American Civil War. Its purpose was to help pay the North's war expenses. The act was repealed 10 years later, but the income tax eventually made a comeback, thus proving that Ben Franklin was right all along.
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