Elaine Mitchell, age 14, of St. ine, Fla., for her question:
WHEN DID TAXATION START?
In ancient days most members of ruling classes paid few if any taxes. However, the governments of the ancient world often depended on revenue from tribute, or direct cash payments from conquered peoples.
Taxation started on a regular basis in the Middle Ages when feudal governments forced the average person to pay dues, tolls, fees and taxes to support a feudal lord. During these times farmers had to give the lord part of their harvests and travelers often had to pay a lord a toll for the right to pass over various rivers and roads.
A major step toward modern forms of government happened when kings of Europe took the power to tax away from the lords and barons. The abolition of tolls on roads and rivers within a country helped the growth of commerce.
Just as feudal lords lost the power to tax, most European kings also lost the same power to representatives of the people. Many revolutions, including the American Revolution, were fought to defend the important idea of "no taxation without representation."
America's new government under the Articles of Confederation got its money from the state governments. But failure of the states to
provide enough money was one of the reasons the Articles did not work. The Constitution that replaced the articles gave Congress the right to set and collect taxes.
Through most of the 19th Century America's federal government got the major share of its money from customs duties and from the sale of land. After the Civil War, excise taxes became more important as the government's need for money and the peoples' demand for services ¬increased.
The 16th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913 gave Congress the power to tax income. The first income tax in that year had rates that went from 1 percent on taxable income of more than $4,000 to 7 percent on taxable income of more than $500,000. Since that time, of course, the government has many times increased the rates of the income tax.
About the time of World War I, state governments started to tax income. Wisconsin was the first state to levy an income tax, and it did so in 1911. Many other states followed in the 1920s and 1930s.
All but seven states today levy individual income taxes, which are collected in ways that ere very much like the federal income taxes. The states that don't have income taxes are Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming.
Pennsylvania became the first city in the United States to enact an income tax, and although the practice is followed in a number of other cities, these taxes actually supply less than 15 percent of municipal tax collections in the country.
The individual income tax is "progressive," which means that the larger a person's income, the larger his tax rate.