# Franklin D. Roosevelt — "Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay" > [!quote] "Here is my principle, and I think it is yours, too. Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle." > — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address at Worcester, Massachusetts, 1936 ## Context Spoken during FDR's 1936 re-election campaign, the year after the "Wealth Tax Act" (Revenue Act of 1935) raised top rates and the year Roosevelt ran openly against "economic royalists." Defending his record on financing the recovery, he reduced the case for progressive taxation to a single sentence. ## Why this matters The crispest one-line statement of the principle of progressive taxation in the presidential canon: not merely that the wealthy *should* pay more, but that levying taxes by ability to pay is "the only American principle" — placing fairness at the definitional center of American fiscal identity. FDR's formulation became the default frame of mid-century tax policy, the consensus that held through Eisenhower's 91% top rate and that the supply-side movement of the 1980s set out to dismantle. ## Verification - **Primary source:** [The American Presidency Project, Address at Worcester, Massachusetts, 1936](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-worcester-mass); also published in *Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936*, vol. 5. - **Status:** Verbatim from the official text. Undisputed. ## Related quotes - [[Theodore Roosevelt - a graduated income tax on big fortunes]] — the cousin who first put the graduated tax on the national agenda. - [[Harry S. Truman - the wrong kind of tax reduction]] — the successor who vetoed cuts that violated the ability-to-pay principle. - Featured in [[Presidents on Tax Fairness]].