Many happy returns.

• Position: LETTER FROM THE CHAIRMAN

THIS APRIL 15TH marks a century of federal income tax returns. One hundred years ago, the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified authorizing a federal income tax on individual earnings. The amendment revived our nation's first personal income tax, imposed by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and repealed in 1872. An 1895 Supreme Court ruling severely limited the government's ability to administer a federal income tax, thus necessitating the 16th Amendment.

In 1913 the highest tax rate was 7%, which applied to incomes above $500,000 ($11 million in 2013 dollars). The tax applied to only a sliver of the population, and the Judiciary, state employees, and even the President exempted themselves. It wasn't until 1934 that a President agreed to pay his fair share.

Today, individual federal income taxes raise approximately $1 trillion from 150 million tax returns. The top 10% of earners pay almost three-quarters of this amount. Or put another way, the top 2% of taxpayers pay more in federal income taxes than the bottom 90% combined! Twenty years ago, 27% of Americans did not pay federal income taxes; today it's almost half, the "47%" infamously cited by Mitt Romney.

Although many of these citizens do pay payroll taxes as well as state and local taxes, only about half of Americans pay the taxes that provide for our national defense, the NIH, and PBS. Despite President Obama's protestation to the contrary, the declining percentage of people who pay federal income taxes carries a danger of dividing the country into makers and takers, where the latter have no skin in the game when it comes to federal budget policies.

To avoid the "fiscal cliff" and help reduce our nation's annual trillion-dollar...