August 5 · This Day in America
The Union is at war and nearly out of money. Armies are not cheap, and a government cannot fight a rebellion on borrowed faith alone. On August 5, 1861, Abraham Lincoln signs the Revenue Act, which lays a 3 percent tax on annual incomes over $800 — the first federal income tax in American history. It is modest, temporary, and barely collected before the war ends. But the idea outlives the emergency: that a nation, in its hour of need, can ask its citizens to pay according to what they earn. Decades later it returns for good, written into the Constitution itself by the Sixteenth Amendment. Almost everything the modern federal government does — roads, soldiers, science, the safety net — traces back through that line to a desperate Treasury and a war that had to be paid for.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 1957
On August 5, 1957, a Philadelphia teen dance show goes coast-to-coast on ABC with a clean-cut 26-year-old host named Dick Clark. Teenagers rate records — "It's got a good beat and you can dance to it" — and a generation, North and South, watches the same kids dance to the same songs at the same time. For decades, Bandstand was where new American music met the rest of America.
Source: www.loc.gov