Politicians and Their Logic

I was reading a LA Times article today published after the ratification of the sixteenth amendment and I came across a quote I just had to share with the nobody people who will read this. This piece of wisdom comes from long former Tennessee representative Cordell Hull:

"One of the important results on an income tax will be a curbing of unnecessary federal expenditures. When a great part of a government's income is derived by direct tax upon the citizens of the nation, they will scrutinize more carefully the appropriations made by congress."

To which of course the only appropriate response is lol or perhaps a rofl. Now I don't believe that Hull actually spoke such absurd words truly meaning them; I'm sure he was giving his best Billy Mays to the public trying to push ratification. Apparently he did a good job making people think giving a government more power as a means to curtail power is a good idea. Given America's mental dependence on the federal income tax as a sacrosanct, eternal fixture of our law, it seems the idea really took.

Of course the amendment was a long time coming after the tax's first "necessary" establishment during the Civil War, but still that idea that all but 6 of the then 48 states voted for ratification a mere 137 years after the revolution amazes me.

What bothers me the most is how anyone who attempts to bring the morality or necessity of the federal income tax into public debate is automatically labeled a nutcase and instantly discredited. How did we come so far?