A History of the Income Tax

Four score and seven years before the turn of the Millenium, the Income Tax was established in the United States. This video shows the evolution of income tax rates on married couples filing jointly. The x-axis represents the filer's income, the y-axis the corresponding rate. The yellow bar represents an income equal to $1million current (2010) US Dollars.

Along with the tax rates, GDP and Inflation growth figures are listed for each year, as well as the party which controlled the House, Senate, and Presidency. The joint income tax shown here is a basic rate and 1) is subject to various deductions that may result in lower rates for some people, and 2) is not the only tax that earners pay to multiple programs and layers of governement. The history is intriguing, and I hope will encourage thought about taxation in society.

Data come from various sources:

Tax Rates were researched from a number of sources down the years, including the laws themselves, but the most comprehensive source I found for tax bracket data is from the work of the Tax Foundation: http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/151.html
They do excellent work and I would encourage donations to help them in their efforts.

Inflation data was taken from the average annual inlation figures at http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/historicalinflation.aspx

For GDP I researched the US' BLS and other sources for numbers, but wanted a standardized set to compare years on as equal terms as possible. In order to include harder-to-pin numbers, such as GDP before WWII, I reference British Economist Angus Maddison's extensive work on global historical GDP estimates, which use an internationally standardized Geary-Khamis method of aggregation to index GDP to the real value of 1990 G-K dollars. Quite coincidentally, Angus Maddison passed away about 10 days after the publication of this video, and only about 10 miles from where it was compiled in France.
http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/content.shtml

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Taxes
• Income
• Obama
• Bush
• Cuts
• United
• States
• History
• IRS
• Government
• 16th
• Amendment
• Filing
• Statement
• April
• 15
• Tax
• Day
• Bracket
• Joint
• Couple
• GDP
• Inflation
• Republicans
• Democrats
• House
• Senate
• President

[coulie27]

@Toshinben Glad you enjoyed it! Sorry for the delay in responding, I've been quite busy lately. I wanted to take my time and go back through all the research I used to make the video -- to get as standardized a picture as possible, a few sources are most helpful and I've included them in the description (thanks for pushing for it, I should have included them from the beginning !). Thanks for checking it out!

[Toshinben]

Wow, this was a nice summary of the statistics. It's like a giant PB&J sandwich of easy-to-use tax info. I had to watch it twice just to follow the tax rate, the ratio of money at an era as compared to 2009 money, political party control of office, and GDP and inflation numbers, but that's fine. It just goes to show how much you put in here. But! I'd like to know the sources of the numbers, only because like every article I read has a different value and interpretation of those numbers...