Back in 1913, Congress passed and the states ratified the 16th Amendment allowing for direct taxes on income. How did they do this? The answer is simple: the income tax was sold as a tax on "the rich" that would only affect the wealthiest 2% of Americans. Since it didn't seem to apply to anyone else, there wasn't a lot of opposition to the amendment. America entered WWI in 1917 and the income tax was expanded to pay for the emergency so that almost everyone paid income taxes.

Funny how the taxes never went back down after the emergency was over, isn't it? But then, Congress passed a tax in 1896 on long distance phone calls to help pay for the Spanish-American war. At the time, it only a small number of the wealthiest people made long distance phone calls. Funny thing is, we're still paying that tax over 100 years after the Spanish-American War ended and it affects just about everyone.

Need another example? The Alternative Minimum Tax was written to apply to wealthy citizens who had too many deductions. Congress never adjusted the income limits to keep pace with inflation so it now applies to millions of middle class people who aren't anywhere close to being rich.

So, now we're back to whinning about the estate tax. Never mind that people have paid taxes on income all through their lives. If their investments, home, insurance, etc. put them over a certain threshold then some people believe they have a right to over half of the estate. Of course, the truly wealthy can afford to pay lawyers to shelter their estates from the taxes so it's the middle class person who saved or built a business that gets creamed by the "death tax." It would've been even worse had Congress not raised the lower limit for when the estate tax kicks in. There were many, all on the Left, who opposed raising that limit because they wanted the money to spend on their pet programs. How dare individuals believe that the money they earned is actually theirs!

The moral to the story is this - left to themselves, taxes on "the rich" soon end up being applied to just about everyone. Those who play the class warfare rhetoric game are playing people for suckers. Once again, an old saying proves true. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."