# Presidents on Tax Fairness *Part of the [[Presidential Consensus Series Hub]] — five presidential-consensus collections and their modern-right ruptures.* For most of American history, presidents of both parties agreed on a basic fiscal proposition: that taxes should be levied according to ability to pay, that the wealthy should contribute at least as large a share of their income as working people, and that a tax code captured by privilege is a betrayal of self-government. The specific policies varied enormously — Jackson fought a bank, Lincoln signed the first income tax, the Roosevelts built the progressive structure, Eisenhower kept a 91% top rate, Reagan cut rates but closed loopholes — yet the underlying *principle* of fairness held remarkably steady. This collection assembles nine presidential statements of that principle, on the same logic as its companions [[Presidents on the Nation of Immigrants]] and [[Presidents on the Rule of Law]]: to put the consensus on the record so its abandonment can be measured against the presidents' own words. The RWKB stake is the rupture. The modern right has not merely preferred lower taxes — a defensible position with a long pedigree — it has repudiated the fairness principle itself. The [[Americans for Tax Reform]] pledge to never raise any tax under any circumstances, the [[Starve the Beast]] strategy of cutting revenue to force spending cuts, [[Supply-Side Economics]] and [[Trickle-Down Economics]] as governing doctrine, and the [[Tax Cuts and Jobs Act]]'s tilt to corporations and top earners together mark a movement that no longer accepts ability-to-pay as a goal at all. The sharpest evidence is that the receipts cut across party: it was Republican presidents — Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and above all Reagan — who stated the fairness case most memorably. When [[Ronald Reagan - the free rides are over]] denounced millionaires paying less than a bus driver, he was making, nearly verbatim, the argument his own party would later brand "class warfare." The dark mirror of this collection is the anti-tax movement's own canon — see [[Grover Norquist - drown it in the bathtub]]. ## The founding principle (1832–1861) - [[Andrew Jackson - make the rich richer]] — 1832. Vetoing the national bank, Jackson states the test that underlies all later tax-fairness arguments: government must not use law to grant "exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer," or the "humble members of society" have "a right to complain of the injustice of their Government." - [[Abraham Lincoln - labor is the superior of capital]] — 1861. The first Republican president supplies the moral premise — labor is "prior to," and "the superior of," capital — the same year he signs the first federal income tax to fund the war. ## Building the progressive structure (1910–1947) - [[Theodore Roosevelt - a graduated income tax on big fortunes]] — 1910. Three years before the income tax was even constitutional, a Republican ex-president campaigns for a graduated income tax *and* a steep graduated estate tax on "swollen fortunes." The most explicit GOP endorsement of progressive taxation on record. - [[Franklin D. Roosevelt - taxes according to ability to pay]] — 1936. The principle reduced to one sentence: taxing by ability to pay is "the only American principle." - [[Harry S. Truman - the wrong kind of tax reduction]] — 1947. Truman vetoes Republican tax cuts as tilted "to the high income brackets to a grossly disproportionate extent," establishing the distributional test: a cut is judged by who it helps. ## Reform and its high-water mark (1976–1993) - [[Jimmy Carter - a welfare program for the rich]] — 1976. Carter's populist indictment of a loophole-ridden code as redistribution *upward* — "a welfare program for the rich." - [[Ronald Reagan - the free rides are over]] — 1985. The patron saint of tax cuts insists the wealthy and corporations "not paying their fair share" must finally pay, and calls it "crazy" that loopholes let "millionaires pay nothing while a bus driver" pays 10%. The load-bearing Republican receipt. - [[Bill Clinton - those who benefited the most]] — 1993. The last time a top-rate increase was enacted as the centerpiece of a president's economic plan, justified by "asking the most of those who benefited the most." ## The principle becomes partisan (2011) - [[Barack Obama - the Buffett Rule]] — 2011. Obama makes Reagan's 1985 argument almost word for word — a millionaire shouldn't pay a lower rate than his secretary — and is denounced as a class warrior. The Buffett Rule's defeat marks the point where tax fairness stopped being a shared baseline. ## Milestones between the quotes Two policy landmarks sit between these statements and complete the arc. [[Woodrow Wilson]] signed the Revenue Act of 1913, making the income tax permanent after the [[Sixteenth Amendment]] and shifting the federal revenue base from regressive tariffs (which taxed consumption) toward a progressive levy on income. And [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] — a Republican — declined three terms of conservative pressure to cut taxes, presiding over a top marginal rate of 91% in the name of fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget. Neither man left a single quotable line on fairness as crisp as the nine above, but both governed by the consensus the quotes describe. ## Analytical throughline Read end to end, these receipts trace a principle that survived 179 years and every kind of administration: that a just tax system asks the most of those most able to pay, and that a code engineered to spare the wealthy is "injustice" (Jackson), "un-American" — Reagan's own word for tax avoidance by the privileged — and "a welfare program for the rich" (Carter). The remarkable feature is the bipartisanship: Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Truman, Carter, Clinton, and Obama on one side of the aisle, but Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Reagan on the other, all converging on the same fairness standard. That convergence is what makes the modern break legible as something more than ordinary policy drift. Lower taxes are a respectable preference; the wholesale rejection of ability-to-pay is a different thing. The pledge never to raise any tax, the strategy of starving public revenue, the doctrine that cuts for the top "trickle down," and a major tax law skewed to corporations and high earners do not adjust the consensus — they discard it. Staged together, the quotes turn that shift from a partisan talking point into a documented departure from what presidents of both parties, for nearly two centuries, said a fair tax system required. For the doctrine that replaced it, follow [[Supply-Side Economics]], [[Starve the Beast]], and [[Trickle-Down Economics]]; for the anti-tax movement's defining vow, see [[Grover Norquist - drown it in the bathtub]].