The Year Persistence Edged Plutocracy

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



The Year Persistence Edged Plutocracy
SEPTEMBER 29, 2013

Exactly a hundred years ago, decades of progressive struggle finally paid off and outfitted America with a tool for braking the unlimited accumulation of grand private fortune.

By Sam Pizzigati




The federal income tax this week turns a century old. A hundred years ago, on October 3, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the first modern federal tax on income.

John Buenker has been researching and writing about the events — and attitudes — that led to that signing for a good bit of the last 50 years. His 1985 book, The Income Tax and the Progressive Era, remains the single most insightful history of the years of struggle that led to federal income taxation.

That history clearly matters to Buenker, an emeritus historian at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. But should this history also matter to the rest of us?

Actually, John Buenker’s income tax history may matter more today than ever before. Here in 2013, after all, Americans face almost the same exact challenge our counterparts in 1913 faced. They lived amid a staggeringly intense concentration of wealth and income. We do, too.

Today’s plutocrats, in fact, strike Buenker as even “more dangerous than the Robber Barons of yore.”

The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/the-year-persistence-edged-plutocracy/#sthash.cktUy1Py.dpuf