Victor Davis Hanson

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2,022 appearances 16 recordings 5 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 23 Mar

Victor Davis Hanson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

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The Victor Davis Hanson Show · History of Income Tax Amendment 16 and News of the Week · 1 Mar 2025 podcast

He said, we're going to now, we have the mandate and we've got people who want to have cheaper prices by lowering tariffs and making up the difference with an income tax and the income tax will affect not everybody. It was 1%, just 1%. And then he needed allies. There wasn't enough Democrats. So they went over to

The recently emeritus president, Teddy Roosevelt, and they said to him, essentially, if you have an income tax, it will be consistent with your progressive advocacy of helping people have lower prices and it will only be 1%. Okay. And actually had a gradation where it went up to 2%, 3% based on income.

But it will also give you the revenue to rearm because Roosevelt was a big, you know, the great white fleet and he wanted to warm and they could see already. This is a year before World War I broke out, and they could see what was going to happen, and they knew we were disarmed. So he said, we need to have a military-industrial complex, and we need bases in the South.

So this was a great period when they started to acquire land in the South for military bases to get Southern votes and to get the progressive Republicans involved. So it was very easy to pass. It wasn't that low. It was sold on the idea that it would give this huge amount of revenue and create a military for the first time that was permanent. And it would be very cheap, 1% to 2%.

1% for most people. 40% of the people would pay 1%. Okay. So they passed it. And that made it legal. And then that same year, they had the Revenue Act that they put the specifics into it. Now that the Polack decision had been reversed, it was okay to have an income tax without apportionment. So then they went in and said they decided that, okay.

And then they went back when we were on the eve of getting into the war in 1916 and said, ah, we need to go up to 2%. So you could see where this was going. This is all very relevant, everybody, to what we're discussing now, because Donald Trump is not stupid. They think he is. He's not. He's cunning. He's sly. He's really smart.

And he understood that before there was an income tax, this country, mutatis mutandis, the necessary changes being made, was able to have enough revenue to with tariffs. So he's got that on his brain that there has to be other sources of revenue other than these high income taxes.

I don't know if there is, but he has said in moments of candor that he wishes the income tax was either vastly reduced or non-existent, but we'll see. But that's how the government... Once you pass the 1913 and 1916 Revenue Acts, you could see where we are a century and 110 years later. It was going to be inevitable. There has never been one tax or one government program that ever got smaller.

They always get bigger. And that was the nature of it. And it changed everybody's life. And so every once in a while, when I was in high school, I'd meet a conservative teacher. And they'd say, oh, Victor, you think you know everything? You know that income tax is illegal. And I said, no, it's not. I was like 16. And I think his name was Mr. Dudley. He was a really good guy.

And he'd come and... Here is the Constitution, Article 1, Section 2. All taxes must be apportioned. I said, yeah, but... They passed the Revenue Act was illegal. I said, they passed the constitutional amendment. The constitutional amendment was illegal. They argued all for the original intent, et cetera. So that's where we are. And remember what we're doing, everybody.

We're trying to find iconic moments, key moments in the 20th century. We're going to go from... the very earliest that I talked about the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War that was more than just Russia being humiliated. The humiliation had helped spark

just a little bit more than a decade, the Bolshevik Revolution, because the Tsars had been, the Tsardom had been totally discredited by that catastrophic loss of their Baltic and Pacific fleets to the Japanese of all people. And by the same token, the Japanese throughout the government, because they negotiated from a position of strength as the victors in that war, They negotiated hard.

They didn't get very much territory. They didn't get the Sakonai. And so they were discredited. And that was the beginning of the authoritarian, militaristic Japanese warlords that would result in World War II. And then we went to the Panama Canal. We have all this recent discussion about the Panama Canal. But yes, that was an American brilliant engineering feat.

Mr. Lesseps and the French company that had been brilliantly successful in the Suez could not do it. No one could do it in Panama. It required two or three things as we talked about. You had to conquer yellow fever and malaria. The United States did.

And you had to create new technology of steam shovels, trucks, special railroad cars of a magnitude nobody had ever seen before to get rid of the earth. And we did that. And we had... And Donald Trump was right about that, that we would have exclusive rights that no other country had.

And so this China deal, I think, was a violation both of the letter and the spirit of that treaty, both the original treaty and the one that Jimmy Carter signed away in 1979 that was active 1999. And so now we have done the income tax, which I think changed the whole nature of the United States.

Without the income tax, you don't have a federal octopus, you don't have a military industrial complex, and you don't have people working from January to May to pay their taxes. And you don't have social tensions when 40% to 45% of the American people do not pay any federal income tax.

Next time, we're going to talk about the guns of August and what caused Europe to commit collective suicide in 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. And why did we get into it?

He does. You can't finish any description of Elon Musk. I'm exaggerating, but not necessarily that much. When he tells that anecdote. And then the rocket started to descend. And then this mechanical erector set arm grabbed it. Can you believe that? They grabbed a missile in mid-flight. Elon did that. And by the way, Elon, no one else can do it. Only you can do it.

And so, yes, he has genuine admiration. That's why the hatred of Elon is so bizarre. Because... Everybody understands that without Tesla, you wouldn't have an EV industry. It's a viable, working, reliable car, and the big three can't even emulate it. And then without Elon, you wouldn't have a space program. NASA has gone off the rails. I don't know what happened to it.

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