David Cay Johnston

While only a minority of people was taxed during World War II, the politicians got a taste of the huge revenues... by expanding the tax base. After the war... the income tax was steadily expanded until it applied to most Americans...

Just as there is an underground economy of gardeners and handymen and petty merchants who get paid in cash and pay little or no taxes, there is also an underground economy among the super rich that lets them understate their true income and overstate their tax deductions.

[T]he majority of Americans are being duped into supplementing the incomes and extravagant lifestyles of the rich and powerful. ...[O]ur current tax system is manipulated for profit by the wealthy and well positioned.

Of each dollar people earned in 2005, the top 10 percent got 48.5¢... the greatest share of income pie since 1929, just before the collapsed into the Great Depression.

The government agencies, without nearly enough money to oversee safety... write superficial reports, and when it comes to accidents at rail crossings, they thoroughly investigate only 4 out of 3,000 cases.

[T]axes are at the core of our democracy.

Since the imperfect rules of the marketplace actually reward dangerous risk taking, the only thing that could prevent this lethal gamble is effective government regulation.

[I]n 1997... Congress passed what its sponsors promoted as a tax cut for the middle class... Buried in that law were many tax breaks for the rich... notably a sharp reduction... on long term capital gains, the source of two thirds of the incomes of the top 400. ...For years the IRS found big tax evaders by looking into people whose reported income did not seem sufficient to support their lifestyle... But the 1997 law stopped such inquiries. ...Lee Shepherd ...said the law "should be called the mobsters and drug dealers tax relief act of 1997." ...1997 cuts for the rich were not enough ...Under ...President Bush in 2001 ...their income going to taxes would slip further ...

After the Sixteenth Amendment... the federal government... enacted a regime to tax incomes, gifts and estates... with the explicit promise that the basic means of sustaining life would not be taxed. The original tax regime applied only to the economic elite, to... "surplus" incomes. ...[I]ncome from capital was taxed more heavily ...in the belief that it was morally offensive to take more from money earned by the sweat of one's brow ...

Congress lets business owners, investors and landlords play by one set of rules, which are filed with opportunities to hide income, fabricate deductions and reduce taxes. Congress requires wage earners to operate under another, much harsher set of rules in which every dollar of income... is reported to the government, and taxes are withheld... to make sure [they] pay in full.

A government that takes 90 cents out of each dollar above a threshold, as... in the Eisenhower years, is deciding to limit the wealth that people can accumulate... Likewise, a government that taxes the poor on their first dollar of wages, as the United States does with the Social Security and Medicare taxes, is deciding to limit or eliminate the ability of those at the bottom... to save... and improve their lot in life.

[T]he Internal Revenue Service in 2003 released its first public analysis of tax returns filed by the 400 highest income Americans... from 1992 to 2000. ...the federal income tax burden on Americans overall rose by 18 percent, it fell by 16 percent for the top 400, whose incomes soared.