Opinion: Critics have called a wealth tax 'un-American,' but the idea is as old as the American Revolution
A long historical precedent
During the Revolutionary War this progressivism continued, but only on the state level, since national taxation was out of the question for a revolution whose trigger phrase was "no taxation without representation." Only curmudgeons like the Philadelphia pamphleteer Pelatiah Webster grumbled that the new country was getting itself and its currency in a bind by refusing to levy direct taxes.
The first Congress elected under that Constitution agreed with Alexander Hamilton's plan to fund the government entirely from tariff income. Pelatiah Webster had long advocated placing the heaviest import duties on goods "the consumption of which are least necessary to the community," and the lightest on those "the use and consumption of which are the most necessary to the community.
In embedding progressive taxation into its central-government funding, the early Congresses were honoring an idea central to the Revolution: that this country depends for its survival and growth as much on the thriving of its non-wealthy as on the enrichment of its already-wealthy citizens. In mid-1798, with a possible war with France looming, Congress passed the most far-reaching and progressive of taxes in this era.
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