Posts mislead on history of US income tax

"Did you know? Income tax was supposed to be temporary to fund civil war, and was promised to be abolished in 1866," says a February 12, 2022 Facebook post.

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Screenshot of a Facebook post taken on February 14, 2022

The claim -- which also circulated on Twitter here and here -- circulated online as Americans prepared to file their income taxes in 2022. But it misrepresents the history of the US taxation system.

It is true that the 1861 income tax was a temporary levy and was repealed after 10 years. A national income tax approved by Congress in 1894 to raise funds for the government was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court.

This led to movement for a constitutional amendment permitting the federal government to levy an income tax, which was passed by Congress in 1909 and ratified by the requisite 36 states between August 1909 and February 1913.

Taxes were collected by the Bureau of Internal Revenue, which became known as the Internal Revenue Service in 1953 -- the name it bears today.

AFP Fact Check previously debunked claims that the US income tax was designed as a temporary measure to fund World War I.

Both sets of claims failed to mention the popular movement in the late 19th and early 20th century to create an income tax as a way to address income inequality and fund a growing government.

Ajay Mehrotra, a Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law professor who has authored several books on US tax history, told AFP for a previous fact check that the 1894 Supreme Court decision led to an "immediate backlash... that consisted of social movements mainly in the South and Midwest."

"A key group of economists and lawyers at the turn of the twentieth century dramatically changed the concept behind taxation away from the notion that taxes were for the direct benefits provided by government to the more progressive notion that taxation was based on one's 'ability to pay,'" Mehrotra said.

That effort culminated in the passage of the 16th Amendment and the establishment of the modern system of taxation in the United States.