Talk:Revenue Act of 1861

Untitled
I am quite sure this is incorrect:

income above $800 (equivalent to $115,000 in 2002 dollars)

The accurate number is more like $15,000. I'm deleting that part of the article for now...

69.19.2.225 22:55, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Minor quotation correction
I checked the text of the United States Statutes at Large and found that there were some minor discrepancies between the quotation in the article and the actual verbatim text of the statute. I made the changes to conform quotation in the article to the actual text of section 49 of the Act, and I added a footnote. Famspear (talk) 18:51, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

I also removed the ungrammatical, unsourced commentary about notability and constitutionality and the Sixteenth Amendment. Aside from being unsourced (and although I partially agree with the commentary), the commentary could actually create confusion, especially for normal readers not versed in federal income tax law. If there had been any doubt about the constitutionality of the 1861 Act, that doubt probably would have been removed by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Springer v. United States -- although the Springer case really dealt with the Revenue Act of 1864, not the 1861 Act. By contrast, the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified in 1913 to negate the holding in the Pollock case of 1895, which dealt with an 1894 statute. Essentially, the purpose of the Amendment was to prevent income taxes on dividends, interest and rents from being treated as "direct taxes" for purpose of the apportionment requirement that generally applies to direct taxes. Famspear (talk) 19:13, 27 February 2009 (UTC)