Tax season is here, and recent talk of massive tax reform has Americans even more focused on taxes. Yet even as tens of millions of taxpayers look to prepare their returns, tax reformers seek to put today’s tax rates into a longer-term context that looks back at the history of the American income tax system.
When you go back 100 years and look at the way Americans paid income taxes in 1917, you can see how the tax brackets a century ago in some ways stand in stark contrast to what we see today — yet they also have some interesting similarities.