--- title: Tax Day History: Why You're Still Paying for World War II description: In 1942, TIME called the Revenue Act "the biggest piece of machinery ever designed to separate dollars from citizens" canonical: https://time.com/4289687/1942-tax-day-history/ author: Lily Rothman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-04-14T16:00:43.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:55:54.504Z article:section: History og:title: Tax Day History: Why You're Still Paying for World War II og:description: Yes, you can blame the war effort og:url: https://time.com/4289687/1942-tax-day-history/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf85349a6a5087b2d/69888ea1524fc0a0a7df787a/taxes.jpeg?branch=production&width=626&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 626 og:image:height: 352 og:image:alt: Tax Reminder og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Tax Day History: Why You're Still Paying for World War II twitter:description: Yes, you can blame the war effort twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf85349a6a5087b2d/69888ea1524fc0a0a7df787a/taxes.jpeg?branch=production&width=626&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # How World War II Still Determines Your Tax Bill > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The 5 Most Common Tax Scams, According To The IRS [Watch (HLS stream): The 5 Most Common Tax Scams, According To The IRS](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/wQTNpTGF.m3u8) (0:47)  _Published 2016-01-19. Tax season is upon us and so is the threat of scams. How prepared are you for what the IRS says are the five most common?_  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Apr 14, 2016 4:00 PM UTC  A 1945 poster reminders readers that, if they earned more than $500 during the 1944 tax year, they must file an income tax return. A 1945 poster reminders readers that, if they earned more than $500 during the 1944 tax year, they must file an income tax return.Hulton Archive/Getty Images  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Apr 14, 2016 4:00 PM UTC Tax Day–which is April 18 this year, not April 15–is one occasion in which history offers little consolation. As you tally up your withholding and deductions, it may not help to know that you’re also paying into a system created to fund World War II. When the modern income tax was[ introduced in 1913](http://taxfoundation.org/blog/americas-first-income-tax-form), it was constructed as a tax merely on the very top earners and was essentially irrelevant to most Americans. [_Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter_](http://time.com/newsletter) That changed in 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor. The entire nation was mobilizing for war, and money was desperately needed. At the time, the idea of running a deficit was seen as disastrous, says Joseph J. Thorndike, author of _Their Fair Share: Taxing the Rich in the Age of FDR_ and director of the [Tax History Project](http://taxhistory.org/www/website.nsf/Web/AboutTheProject?OpenDocument). To pay for the war, Congress passed a new Revenue Act that nearly doubled the number of Americans who would have to pay income taxes. TIME [called](http://time.com/vault/issue/1942-10-19/page/23/) it “the biggest piece of machinery ever designed to separate dollars from citizens.” Though the amount raised was important in the short run, it was the expansion in the number of people paying that fundamentally altered U.S. tax structure. The middle class had pitched in before—paying a tax on a purchase was seen as totally normal—but most people had never written a check to Uncle Sam. Now that link would be set in stone. TIME’s coverage of that looming date was headlined [_The Ides of March, 1943_](http://time.com/vault/issue/1943-03-15/page/65/). “This week the U.S. citizen faces a hard and stubborn fact of wartime living…” the article began, “the U.S. Treasury on March 15 will demand and get more money from more people than at any time in the history of the republic.” Going into tax day that year (about a decade before the big day moved to April), the government expected to receive 40 million returns from citizens—far more than the 26 million that had been filed the year before. **_Read more:_** [_How April 15 Became Tax Day_](http://time.com/3772455/april-15-history-tax-day/) Citizens unaccustomed to paying up left their taxes for the last minute (which you, reader, surely know nothing about) and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau guessed that those late-payers were waiting for some imaginary last-minute government reprieve. Still, there was reason to believe that the nation, if not exactly _eager_ to pay, was ready to fork over the cash. “If the American citizen does come through,” TIME noted, “it will be more because of inherent patriotism than because of sound tax policy.” That patriotism—the moral imperative to at least sacrifice dollars while others sacrificed their lives—was enough to carry the Revenue Act through Congress, just as it had carried taxes like the temporary tax imposed during the Civil War. But after World War II, the 1942 tax structure stuck around. Even under Republican administrations like that of Dwight Eisenhower, balancing the books was prioritized over cutting taxes. Both sides of the aisle were resigned to the fact, Thorndike says, that “the war sort of permanently expanded the size of American government and there really was no going back all the way.” Even major tax reforms that followed, like the Reagan-era cuts in the 1980s, didn’t overhaul the foundation. So, in Thorndike’s view, we are still living under the structure created to serve the needs of World War II. Not that that’s a bad thing. He sees public willingness to pay taxes not as a matter of concrete numbers but rather of return on investment. Though nobody likes to pay taxes—Americans are hardly unique there—people of all brackets are generally willing, he says, to pay for value they get back. In nations with extremely high taxes, like those in Scandinavia, citizens pay up not because they like taxes but because they can see what they get in return. In the U.S., people are also generally fine with paying specific taxes for specific goods, like Social Security. He traces any unwillingness to pay to the feeling that the money is going to waste. “It’s misleading to say we’re uniquely anti-tax. Americans have long recognized that taxes are the price we pay for civilization,” he says, quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes. “Nowadays Americans are skeptical of the value they’re getting for their tax dollars, and _that_ erodes their willingness to pay taxes.” Willing or not, however, the time has come. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4289687/1942-tax-day-history/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4289687/1942-tax-day-history/"},"headline":"How World War II Still Determines Your Tax Bill","datePublished":"2016-04-14T16:00:43.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:55:54.504Z","description":"In 1942, TIME called the Revenue Act \"the biggest piece of machinery ever designed to separate dollars from citizens\"","url":"https://time.com/4289687/1942-tax-day-history/","keywords":["Economy","Economics","Taxes","tax day"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf85349a6a5087b2d/69888ea1524fc0a0a7df787a/taxes.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Lily Rothman","jobTitle":"Rothman is managing editor at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/"}],"articleSection":"History","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf85349a6a5087b2d/69888ea1524fc0a0a7df787a/taxes.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Tax Reminder","caption":"Tax Reminder","creditText":"Hulton Archive/Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/history/","name":"History"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/economy/","name":"Economy"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4289687/1942-tax-day-history/","name":"How World War II Still Determines Your Tax Bill"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"The 5 Most Common Tax Scams, According To The IRS","description":"Tax season is upon us and so is the threat of scams. 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