A day that will live in infamy!!!

Today is the 144th anniversary of the creation of the Internal Revenue Service. Originally it was intended to help pay for the Civil War but could anyone have imagined that by a century and a half later, it would have turned into the single greatest tool for controlling Americans by government?

The Revenue Act of 1862, formally cited as Act of July 1, 1862, Ch. CXIX, 12 Stat. 432, was passed by the United States Congress during the American Civil War and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. The law established the first federal income tax in United States history....

And it was all down hill from there.

Income between $800 and $10,000 was taxed at a 3 percent rate. Higher income was taxed at a 5 percent rate.

To me, the progressive tax structure is the single greatest economically damaging encroachment into the lives of Americans by our government. It punishes achievement and innovation, and rewards laziness and incompetence.

The income tax was to be withheld by the employer...

That's because the government rightly assumed that no free American would voluntarily give up a huge percentage of his hard earned wages to add to an enormous pile of money to be used by politicians to buy votes in order to get re-elected.

A permanent tax collection agency and the office of the Commissioner of Internal Revenuewere established.

There you have it folks...144 years ago today, the politicians created the mechanism by which they can control the lives of the citizens they pretend to represent by seizing their income before it even gets to the person who earned it and redistributing it in a way that insures their continued grasp of power.

Dec 7, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, is the recognized Day of Infamy, but the day the IRS was created had far more dire implications for the lives of Americans than a war with the Japanese.