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19 1 The Origins of Republican Tax Policy [S]ocialism, communism, [and] devilism. —Senator John Sherman of Ohio (1894), denouncing the new federal income tax of 1894 It will be an evil day for us when we enter on confiscation of property under the guise of taxation. . . . [T]o have the Government undertake, for vindictive reasons, to punish a man simply because he has succeeded and has accumulated property by thrift and intelligence and character, or has inherited it honestly under the law, is entering upon a dangerous path. It would convert this tax from the imposition of a tax to a pillage of a class. —Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts (1913) The Republican party has enjoyed a long history and mixed fortune in American politics. The dominant political organization in the United States during the Civil War, and then again in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the GOP was reduced to a distinctly secondary role in the new national party system that emerged during the 1930s. Virtually without a presence in the solidly Democratic South, and elsewhere overwhelmed by the New Deal coalition of organized labor, immigrants, and racial minorities, the Republican party endured for decades following the New Deal by holding on in its enclaves in the Midwest and Northeast. Even after making significant inroads in the South and West in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as winning the White House in a majority of postwar presidential elections, the post–New Deal Republican party remained the perennial minority party in Congress. That would change dramatically in 1994. Within the Republican party itself, the conservative Right Wing (what used to be referred to as the “Old Guard”1) has generally been a minority faction dominated by a moderate center and checked by the liberal wing of the party. However, periodically the conservative Right Wing has held the reins of the party, and at times set the legislative agenda in Congress. That was the case in the 1920s, from 1946 to 1954, and then again following the 1980 Reagan electoral The Origins of Republican Tax Policy 20 landslide. It happened again in 1994 when the Republican party took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. It is from within this conservative faction of the GOP that the most vocal and committed antitax rhetoric has emanated. In prior decades, the Right Wing also obsessed over the Soviet Union and the spread of communism. Indeed, anticommunism was the dominant concern, as well as the bread-and-butter political issue for the Right Wing in the immediate postwar era. With the demise of East European Communism beginning in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union and its military threat, the Right Wing turned inward, focusing on domestic policy issues. By the 1990s, hostility to federal taxes emerged as the driving force of contemporary conservative ideology, which came to direct the thinking of the Republican party itself. Antitax sentiment in the GOP dates back to the Civil War, when Republicans from New England opposed a federal income tax, even while the majority of the party was willing to accept the impost as a necessary means of financing the Northern war effort. Likewise, in 1894 and 1913, Progressives and moderate “centrists” within the GOP supported, or at least acquiesced, in a relatively minor assessment on personal income. On the other hand, Old Guard conservatives remained firm in their opposition to any federal income tax or inheritance tax. For the next eighty years, conservatives in the GOP remained consistently opposed to federal income taxation. For much of that time, antitax conservatives were kept in check within their own party by the moderate center. However, that changed dramatically with the decisive election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency and then the unexpected and dramatic victory of conservative Republicans in the 1994 elections. With that victory, the conservative antitax faction came to the forefront of the party. By then, the liberal wing of the GOP was virtually extinct and moderates were reduced to a minority faction. The antitax campaign of conservatives got an additional boost when George W. Bush won the November 2000 presidential election. A major tax cut followed less than five months later. The current Republican antitax campaign has its origins and antecedents in the long and complicated history of the Republican party as it evolved after the Civil War. The party itself changed dramatically in the 1890s when it achieved preeminence...

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