Since this thread relates to history, does anyone know the historical account of how the US came to be one of the only countries to tax it's citizen's incomes no matter where in the world they live?
Just another reason to thank loathe Abe Lincoln. When Abe decided to make war against the south, who were availing themselves of their perfectly legal right to secede, he of course needed soldiers to use as cannon fodder to implement his plan to free the slaves collect import taxes. The south had no problem with obtaining recruits because their soldiers signed up without being prodded. But in the north, Abe had a problem. They wouldn't sign up for this travesty of a war. So they implemented a draft. Even this didn't work, as scores dodged the draft and fled the country and took their money with them. So, coming to the same conclusion that any tyrant would come to, Abe and the boys decided to tax citizens incomes no matter where they lived. And that's how it came to be.
In Abe's zeal to collect taxes from the south, we got a draft, an income tax, a law to collect taxes on worldwide income, and supremacy of the federal gov't over the state. And of course the fable that he did it to free the slaves. He really did it to collect taxes, but then got into the slave freeing business in the middle of the war because he needed reinforcements from northern abolitionists.
Not to mention a law called the ' act of 1871' which resulted from the overindebtedness of the country from the civil war. Turning the US into a corporation from a country.
