Timelines In Tax History: Moralistic Tax Policy In The 1930s

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

61% : As originally designed, Social Security provided monthly stipends to workers age 65 and older, with benefits based on previous earnings.
49% : In 1935 tax reform rose to the top of the New Deal agenda, when Roosevelt urged Congress to raise taxes on the rich, slowing the concentration of wealth and economic power.
48% : Still, Roosevelt began a gradual process of changing the politics of taxation.
48% : "The repeal of the undistributed profits tax and the reduction of the tax on capital gains to a fraction of the tax on other forms of income strike at the root of fundamental principles of taxation," FDR declared.
46% : After all, FDR had asked Congress to curb the advantages of "the few," and lawmakers responded with taxes on barely a handful of people.
45% : "Rich men of the country should not be able to escape income taxes at the very moment when the rest of the country is burdened with increased taxes and when the Government is so desperately in need of revenue," The Washington Daily News declared.
45% :"All are alike in that they represent a determined effort on the part of those who use them to dodge the payment of taxes which Congress based on ability to pay," Roosevelt contended.
43% : "The atmosphere of the New Deal carried some provisions of doubtful wisdom further than they would have gone in less disturbed times," they wrote.
42% : The revelation shocked Americans -- or at least the ones who had been paying income taxes.
42% : But the explanation for Morgan's failure to pay taxes was simple: He didn't owe any.
41% : "The widespread sense of injustice flowing out of this treatment impairs cooperation between taxpayers and the government in the administration of the income tax," complained Treasury expert George Haas in a departmental memo.
37% : Morgan's failure to pay taxes, in other words, was the result of legal tax avoidance rather than illegal tax evasion.

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