Roscoe Bartlett: “our Founding Fathers not only did not permit personal income tax in the Constitution, they prohibited it with the…”

“our Founding Fathers not only did not permit personal income tax in the Constitution, they prohibited it with the original Constitution. So to get a personal income tax, we had to amend the Constitution. The numbers that the gentleman mentioned are very interesting. The lower 50 percent of taxpayers pay 4 percent of our taxes. The upper 50 percent of taxpayers pay, I think, 96 percent of our taxes. And the top 1 percent of taxpayers, I think, pay 34 percent of our taxes. So if we are going to give a tax cut to people who pay taxes, people who pay taxes are going to get a tax cut. And since 34 percent of the taxes are paid by the top 1 percent of wage earners, and the top 50 percent of wage earners pay 96 percent of the taxes, clearly those who earn money are going to get a tax cut because they are the ones who pay taxes.”