America had no income tax on wages until 1913 — how the country paid its bills

For a hundred and twenty-four years running, an American took home his entire paycheck — no withholding, no spring filings, no agency recalculating your income. And all the while the country was building ports, maintaining a navy, waging wars, and buying up from foreign empires territories the size of half of Europe. This video is about what the budget of a state that never reached into a worker's pocket was made of, and why that order came to an end in 1913. In the video: — 1783: the war of independence is won, the debt has climbed to 54 million, and the central government has no right to collect taxes — it can only politely ask the states, and the states calmly ignore those requests. — The clause the Founding Fathers built into the Constitution: they didn't forbid a direct tax with a single word, but attached a condition that left no one eager to take it on. — Why, under that formula, a Georgia farmer with a couple of acres and a mule and a New York merchant with warehouses at the wharf ended up in completely different positions — and how arithmetical absurdity closed the subject for a full century. — Alexander Hamilton, his Report on Manufactures, and the search for a second source of money: he understood that a treasury resting on a single support holds up exactly until the first war in Europe. — Whiskey, which beyond the Appalachians was neither a drink nor a vice but literally money — it paid for salt, for tools, and for the blacksmith's work. And the tax collector Robert Johnson, whom a crowd once came to visit with a barrel of tar. — And the strangest thing in this story: the income tax in America was first found to contradict the Constitution — and a few years later it turned out to be written into its text.