Steve Lamar

I mean, it was instated occasionally, like it was put up to fund the Civil War and a few other wars, but it was an aberration.

And it was in part because collecting income tax, like gathering all that paperwork and enforcing it, that's kind of logistically complicated for a young, growing country to manage.

Tariffs, on the other hand...

This is Steve Lamar.

We're just going to call him a tariff expert for now.

I'll tell you his real job in a little bit.

Tariffs are a really simple system for a scrappy, poorer country.

Like Alexander Hamilton could just send a thousand people with muskets to a U.S.

port and they'd be like, nothing's coming through until you pay.

This was, of course, super appealing to the founding fathers because taxation was a touchy subject at the beginning of the country.

So tariffs were a nice, simple system.

Our country will be funded by imports.

Great.

Put it in the Constitution.

And what was seen as an added benefit was that tariffs made foreign goods more expensive.

So then our goods could be more expensive.

And then once you had the cigars being passed around with $100 bills, it was clear who the tariff system was benefiting.

The way to keep capitalism competitive and to show that it could serve the public would be taxes.

A lot of them.

There was this push from lots of different people across the political spectrum to create the modern tax system.