"We need to get rid of the 16th amendment, and return to the original system that funds government with a variety of tariffs and duties."
— Alan Keyes, Republican primary campaign, 1999
Ratified in 1913, the 16th Amendment gave Congress the power to tax incomes directly, without apportionment among the states. Before it, Washington ran on tariffs, duties, and excise taxes — money collected at the border and the point of sale rather than claimed from a man's wages before he ever held them.
Keyes spent the 1999 primary season arguing that this was not a quaint limitation the country outgrew but the actual constitutional design, and that the income tax's real innovation was giving the federal government first claim on every dollar earned. A quarter-century later, whether that trade was worth making is once again an open question in American political life.
