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Comment by philistine | Hacker News Reader

There never was a point in the period of time when people filed taxes in the US that the government wasn’t entitled to know your salary. It used to take more time and effort to get the info, but better technology doesn’t change the game, it highlights that it wasn’t a « shared secret ». Your employer has a ton of paperwork to file related to your pay.

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Only if you're defining "filed taxes in the US" as "filed income taxes in the US," which would make your statement redundant. The first income tax in the US wasn't until the Civil War, and only existed for the length of it. The "first peacetime income tax" didn't come until 1894, only applied to income over $4000 (2023: $126,000), and thus only to the top 10% of the population.

Even the constitutionality of an income tax was in question until 1913 and the 16th Amendment.

People today assume the past was a lot more surveilled than it was. The government (at any level) often didn't even have a record of people's births until they needed to interact with the government for some reason, even in the early 20th century. That was largely changed by Social Security, and people at the time and since complained that its foothold would begin a slippery slope of government intrusion into every aspect of their lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...

Did you not just explain how the game changed from technology in your own post?

Before all of this unconstitutional collection of Americans information the government had to have a target and go out and collect and tabulate the information.

Now it’s a select where citizen does thing x over y threshold. How is this not changing the game?

The government having this information predated electronic systems. In 1935! when Social Security came into existence companies needed to pay a portion of their employees income directly to the federal government. IRS didn’t get computers until the 1960’s.

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