Explore "Government Ownership of Railroads, and War Taxation" by Otto H. Kahn on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Turning aside from this interrogation mark, I will only add, in returning to our general scheme of taxation, that there are numerous taxes of a tried and tested and socially just kind -- some of them applied in this country during the Civil War and the Spanish War -- which would raise a very large amount of revenue and yet would be little felt by the individual. Some of them have been suggested to our legislators, but have not found favor in their eyes. Their non-imposition, taken together with the entire character of our taxation program, the burden of which falls to an enormously preponderant extent upon the mainly industrial States and the business classes, not only proportionately, which, of course, is just, but discriminatingly, which is not just, seems hardly explainable except on the theory that the intention of those who were primarily in charge of framing that program was punitive and corrective and that they were influenced -- though I am willing to believe unconsciously -- by sectional and vocational partiality.
The fact that the revenue bill was passed in the House by a unanimous vote does not mean, of course, that it met with unanimous approval on the part of Congressmen. The debate shows this. The bill, as reported after months of labor, either had to be approved practically as it stood or rejected and returned to the Committee. It is not possible for a body of 400 men to deal in a detailed manner with a subject so complex as a taxation measure of the magnitude of the present one.