I am responding to several points made by Eric Awerbuch in his letter Current programs stomp on Founding Fathers’ freedoms (SN 1/23).
The issue for the colonies was taxation without representation, so the Founding Fathers gave our representatives in Congress the power to lay and collect taxes (Article II, Section 8). They also wanted fair apportionment of representatives based on the number of people (Article I, Section 2). So the first census was carried out by Thomas Jefferson in 1790. Under the James Madison administration the census was expanded to obtain information on the manufacturing, quantity and value of products in 1810.
The Preamble to the Constitution includes promoting the general welfare. The Food and Drug Administration was created in 1906 in response to a series of incidents and deaths involving contaminated diphtheria serum and smallpox vaccines, poisonous food preservatives and ineffective patent medicines. The FDA prevented many birth defects by stopping the testing and distribution of Thalidomide in 1962 and eventually facilitated the testing of new HIV/AIDS drugs around 1990.
It is not true that the Internal Revenue Service takes “away up to half of the fruits of their labor” (earned income). The six current income tax brackets range from 10 percent to 35 percent, which are clearly less than half. A single person with an income between $40,601 and $85,850 after the standard deduction of $5,350 and the one personal exemption of $3,400 would pay 25 percent of the remaining taxable amount. The top, or 35 percent, bracket applies to individuals with taxable incomes of more than $349,701.
Harry Perlstadt
professor of sociology
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