Abstract:
This article examines the 1918 Revenue Act designed by Chairman Claude Kitchin of the House Ways and Means Committee. The act, created during U.S. wartime, sought to collect a high, graduated excess profits tax from those netting profits in excess of a just rate of return. Kitchin believed that the country should finance the war by collecting as large taxes as possible and mortgage as little as possible. Failure to do so, Kitchin said, could send the country into a post-war depression. Conservatives saw the tax as part of an attack on business and wealth, and the tax was repealed in 1921.