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When was the U.S. income tax system established?

The U.S. government collected income taxes for the first time during the American Civil War (1861–65) and again in 1894, but the income tax system was not officially established until 1913 by the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the document containing the country's laws. The law authorized the U.S. Congress (the country's law-making body) to set tax rates and to form the Bureau of Internal Revenue to oversee collection of taxes. Income taxes are graduated, that is, based on the level of a person's income. Tax rates have fluctuated since the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, reaching their highest mark during World War II (1939–45) when the rate soared to 91 percent. The war effort also brought the innovation of automatic withholdings, whereby taxes are deducted directly from paychecks. In 1953 the Bureau of Internal Revenue was dramatically...

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