The Cold War and the Income Tax legal fees. His troubles lead him to investigate the history of the income tax in the United States, and to write extensively on how the assumptions the IRS makes about how and when people earn income map poorly to the actual way a literary man like Wilson makes a living. He dives into the tax code and discovers that "[t]he question of what ought to be taxed and how much and which deductions ought to be allowed has reached a point of fine-spun complexity that — working in terms of a different set of values — recalls the far-fetched distinctions
Legal history of income tax in the United States (1916), the 1913 Act was ruled to be constitutional. A separate excise tax was also imposed on corporations. Subsequent legal actions were concerned with what should be counted as "income" under the 1913 Act. In "Eisner v. Macomber" (1920), the Supreme Court ruled that proportionate stock dividends were not taxable as income, on the grounds that the dividend income was not "severable" from the capital holding from which it was derived. Later decisions, however, have tended to limit this view of "severability," and to uphold the federal statutes as exertions of the power of Congress to tax. The first attempt