The Boston Tea Party’s main theme was “no taxation without representation”. At the time, Great Britain was taxing the colonies and not giving them representation in Parliament. I think that a similar sentiment can be applied to the graduated income tax. The wealthy are taxed much higher than the poor and middle class and therefore get (or feel they deserve to get) a say in government that is commensurate to the amount of taxes they pay. I am nowhere near wealthy and I do not think it is right that some are taxed more than others. The wealthy are going to get theirs either way, and it is the poor and middle-class people, who cannot afford formal tax help, that end up losing out.
An earlier poster mentioned that the first tax returns were the size of a postcard. The Declaration of Independence, the document that freed our country, can fit into a shirt pocket. The IRS tax code, meanwhile, is over 40,000 pages and growing.
