An interesting claim

Apparently Joy Reid, in decrying an alleged plot by the GOP to end the income tax and allow people to earn as much as they want, is trying to connect efforts to end the income tax with Jim Crow and the like.

Which is interesting, because the architect of the income tax, Woodrow Wilson, is also the person who returned Jim Crow to the federal government.  So if I'm going to make a correlation, I'd argue that the income tax and Jim Crow go hand in hand.  Yes, there was pervasive discrimination even before Wilson, but Wilson further entrenched it in the federal government, and in doing so, probably gave Jim Crow a good portion of another 40 years of existence.  The large increases in the size of the federal government further gave Jim Crow new life.

That said, if only the GOP were going to end the income tax.  It costs close to half a trillion dollars per year just to administer and comply with it, and its heavily progressive nature discourages building businesses that would employ people--people like poor blacks that Reid claims to care about.  In doing so, it also introduces patently false ways of doing accounting which, again, put productive Americans out of work.

Regarding her notion that "you can earn as much as you want", quite frankly, if that were possible, I might have given it a try, and it's really basic economics that gets in the way.  Sad to say, I do not earn the wages that Michael Jordan and Tom Brady earned simply because I've never been able to handle a basketball or football the way they did, not because of a lack of desire to earn more money.