I Paid My Income Tax Today

Here’s a song for everyone’s favorite time of year…tax season!

Does this song make you want to dance? Sing?  How about… pay taxes?  Irving Berlin hoped it would when he wrote it in 1942.  Performed here by Dick Robertson and His Orchestra, it’s called I Paid My Income Tax Today.

Before World War Two only five percent of Americans had to pay income tax.  But President Roosevelt thought everyone should help pay the rising cost of war.  He called it “the greatest tax bill in American history”. 

Ultimately, the song proved no more popular than… well, taxes themselves.

When was the first income tax collected? The United States imposed its first personal income tax on August 5, 1861, to defray costs of the Civil War.