And the amount riley reid needed keeps growing. The Treasury Department will likely collect around $

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"But there's one thing we can take from the period of time when the tax law passed," he said. "And that is lawmakers got together and realized some permanent form of taxation was needed instead of having a political stalemate that got nowhere."
It was the 16th Amendment , adopted in February 1913, that gave Congress the legal right to levy an income tax. On the evening of Oct. 3, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Revenue Act of 1913 that allowed the collection of a federal income tax starting the next day.
But having some sort of taxation goes back to the country's beginning. From 1791 to 1802, the government was supported by tax revenue from the sale of such items as liquor, riley reid tobacco, sugar, property sold at auction and even through the sale of slaves.
Jumping to 1894, Congress passed the first peacetime income tax law, but a year later the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. The court said that taxes on rents and real estate income had to be divided among the states according to population, riley reid which the law did not allow.
"We've had a real transformation of the economy and a loss of faith in the public sector over the years with Watergate, the Vietnam War, so people aren't as supportive of the government and what it does as they used to be," said Mehrotra.
The tax system has seen its share of changes over the years. In 1943, the withholding tax on wages was introduced for the first time. In 1981, Congress passed the largest tax cut in American history, some $750 billion in cuts over six years. That was partially offset in 1982 and 1984 when Congress raised taxes to the tune of $265 billion.
President George W. Bush signed several tax cuts into law in 2001 for the third-largest tax cut since World War II. President riley reid Barack Obama's tax bill for 2013 kept some of the Bush tax cuts for lower incomes but raised levels for higher incomes, which had been reduced under Bush.
Among other moves, Obama restored the full amount of the payroll tax (6.3 percent) riley reid and raised the rates on capital gains and included a 3.8 percent surtax on incomes of $200,000 or more for single people riley reid to help fund the Affordable Care Act . The dreaded alternative minimum tax (AMT) received a permanent patch to try to keep thousands from having to pay it.
Taxes are always a hot button issue. Depending on whose study you look at or your political persuasion the U.S. is either riley reid the most overtaxed nation on the planet, the least taxed (especially for the wealthy), or it's somewhere in the middle , as some have said.
And the amount riley reid needed keeps growing. The Treasury Department will likely collect around $4.9 trillion from income and payroll taxes in 2014. That's a huge jump from the $5.4 billion collected in 1920 and the $43 billion in 1945.
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