Early income tax exempted most black Americans because they were too poor

Evidence

But while the department tasked with carrying out the new Revenue Act worked to diminish its black employees, it wasn’t thinking of black Americans as taxpayers—a policy rooted in prejudice that nonetheless worked to black Americans’ advantage. The system had been designed by whites (in Congress) to tax certain (working-class) white taxpayers less, and other (wealthy) white taxpayers more. Under the new law, only those who earned more than 3,000 as individuals, or 4,000 for a husband living with a stay-at-home spouse, were required to pay federal income tax. Between 1918 and 1932, this amounted to an average of 5.6 percent of Americans paying federal income tax each year. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 46

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The stay-at-home-spouse exemption in 1913 is a direct earlier echo of the joint return’s single-earner preference discussed at paragraph 37.

Related

• Post-1913 income tax exempted all but a tiny fraction of Americans (similarity 0.89)
• The 1913 Revenue Act benefited black taxpayers only by excluding whites (similarity 0.80)
• The joint tax return rewards one-income couples and punishes dual-earner black households (similarity 0.79)
• Tax policies encode assumptions from an era of legalized black exclusion (similarity 0.79)
• Foundational tax laws were crafted when racial bias was legal and normal (similarity 0.79)
• Black married couples trail white peers due to tax policy decisions made long ago (similarity 0.78)