FDR had this to say about paying taxes:

"Taxes, after all, are the dues that we pay for the privilege of membership in an organized society. And as society becomes more civilized, Government - national, State and local government - is called on to assume more obligations to its citizens.

"The privileges of membership in a civilized society have vastly increased in modern times. But I am afraid we have many who still do not recognize their advantages and want to avoid paying their dues."

Yes, we definitely do, and in fact FDR continues along those lines here:

"On the one hand, there has been the vast majority of citizens who believed that the benefits of democracy should be extended and who are willing to pay their fair share to extend them. On the other hand, there has been a small, but powerful group which has fought the extension of those benefits, because it did not want to pay a fair share of their cost."

Which is just boiling it down to the essential issue here, which is that FDR wanted to use tax dollars to expand things like Medicare. Well, it wasn't Medicare back then. Social Security, certainly, unemployment insurance, things like that.

And the equivalent of the Koch brothers of that day, the wealthy conservatives of his day were saying, "wait a minute, this is socialism, you're helping people out and they didn't work for the money and they didn't inherit the money and you have to do one or the other, right?"

-Thom

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