Thomas Olenik

Income tax is theft. The Sixteenth Amendment passed in 1913 as a wartime revenue measure, sold to Americans as a modest levy on the very wealthy. The top rate sat at 7 percent. Wilson's government promised restraint. That restraint didn't even last a decade. By 1944, the top marginal rate hit 94 percent. Today the federal income tax alone reaches 37 percent at the top bracket, and that figure ignores payroll taxes, state income taxes, and the inflation tax the Federal Reserve quietly runs in parallel. You hand over, depending on your state, somewhere between 40 and 55 cents of every marginal dollar earned. The mechanism is simple: governments never surrender revenue streams voluntarily. What legislators frame as temporary always calcifies into permanent infrastructure, complete with its own bureaucracy (the IRS now employs 90,000 people) and its own enforcement apparatus. Your labor is property. Compulsory extraction of that property at gunpoint is confiscation. Who receives the payment does not change the nature of the transaction.