Jesse Eisinger
speaker
287 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 29 May
Jesse Eisinger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I'm like, you know, among the seven people in the world who find it fascinating. and then tried to figure out why is this private? Why is it a secret? It turns out that's a policy decision and that originally in the Civil War, it wasn't secret, it was public. In the 1920s, it was public.
So at each step of the way, we were realizing, oh, there are these decisions, it's all contingent, there's a lot of accidents, and we got to a system that actually is totally wrong for the current economy.
So the first income tax was passed in the Civil War. And the way the government had raised money before that and then after that for a long time was through tariffs and levies, you know, fees on tobacco and alcohol largely. And that was a regressive system.
Right. Right. So it's a higher percentage of your overall income or wealth if you're a working person than if you're really wealthy.
That's the central argument. Okay. That is at the heart of it, that the wealthy are not paying their fair share, that they think they're exempt from taxes.
There are blockades and trade is really curtailed. The economy slows down. So everything kind of comes to a halt and we need to fund it somehow. So we passed this income tax and the express purpose of it was so that the wealthy were going to contribute to the war effort. because this was a class war and you could buy your way out of your position in the army.
You could buy your way out of the draft. And so there were accusations that only working men were dying. And so Lincoln said, we're going to have the wealthy contribute to this and it's going to be public so that people can see how much they're contributing to the effort. And of course, they hated it. They hated it then.
I think they hated it for, yeah, very similar reasons. They hated paying anything, and they hated being exposed.
So what happens is the country is being run in the aftermath of the Civil War by Republicans, you know, famously. This is like the party of Lincoln Republicans.
Well, they're the party of Lincoln's Republicans, but they're morphing into the party of George H.W. Bush's Republicans. So over that course of the second half of the 19th century, it becomes a party dominated by Northeastern wealthy interests, wealthy Republicans. The whole country is being run by those interests.
It's an incredible story. It's an incredible accomplishment. I think it's the single greatest victory of average Americans against the wealthy class in American history to get an income tax. And as I say, it's a complete accident.
So what happens over the next decade after the Supreme Court has rejected the income tax is there are huge debates about how they could possibly bring this back and resuscitate it. And my hero of this story is this guy Cordell Hull, who's a young Tennessee congressman. And he's the kind of single-minded, obsessive about the income tax. He's a Democrat from the Hill Country in Tennessee.
And he talks in his memoir about how members of the Democratic Party, his own colleagues, run away from him in Congress because they're so bored. of him, like, cornering them and talking about the income tax all the time. And so this is his obsession. And it was the Gilded Age where we're seeing fortunes that only have been matched by today's figures.
And he's constantly giving speeches on the floor about how the wealthy, you know, how the Rockefellers at the time don't pay their fair share and feel like they're exempt from taxes.
So they pass a corporate income tax for the first time. And there's essentially no debate about it. And they pass it to try to cut the knees off of the movement for the income tax. And so it's like he has to do something, but he wants to do as little as possible. Exactly. And he's trying. So what he they passed the corporate income tax, which is a huge victory for taxation in America.
And then what happens is that doesn't succeed in cutting off the momentum for the income tax.
And so they embrace it as a legislative gambit, and Hull, who has been the great champion of the income tax, is against it because he knows that it's going to be the death knell for the income tax and his dream and his obsession. They pass the income tax amendment, and they pass the tariff bill, and then the Republicans have wildly miscalculated it.
and it goes through the states and passes, and then we get the 16th Amendment.
Because we are in a moment where our politics are totally calcified, where we have horrific wealth inequality, where our democracy is fragile, where people feel like they have no voice or ability to change anything. And so I have been obsessed with this period of time that looks very similar to our current period, but was a time of extraordinary reform.
And I'm trying to understand why they were able to change things, and we can't.
Showing 261–280 of 287 · page 14 of 15
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