SOCIALIST!!

[Political Tiger]

"The collection of taxes... has been as yet only by duties on consumption. As these fall principally on the rich, it is a general desire to make them contribute the whole money we want, if possible. And we have a hope that they will furnish enough for the expenses of government and the interest of our whole public debt, foreign and domestic."
--Thomas Jefferson to Comte de Moustier, 1790. ME 8:110

"The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied. ... Our revenues liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings."
--Thomas Jefferson to Thaddeus Kosciusko, 1811. ME 13:41

"The great mass of the articles on which impost is paid is foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance and application to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of federal powers."
--Thomas Jefferson: 6th Annual Message, 1806. ME 3:423

"We are all the more reconciled to the tax on importations, because it falls exclusively on the rich, and with the equal partition of intestate's estates, constitutes the best agrarian law. In fact, the poor man in this country who uses nothing but what is made within his own farm or family, or within the United States, pays not a farthing of tax to the General Government, but on his salt; and should we go into that manufacture as we ought to do, he will pay not one cent."
--Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1811. ME 13:39

http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1330.htm

[TheWatcher]

1. Come See The Violence Inherent In The System!

[bean fidhleir]

2. He was a very great, very conflicted man. He usually understood what was right and good, but

all too often was in conflict with it on a personal level, as here. He knew that taxing the wealthy rather than the poor was the ethical thing to do, but he also knew that the people he kept enslaved were all that stood between him and being poor, so he remained a slaveowner til the end of his life and even beyond (his will only freed 5 people).

He was so threatened by his knowledge that slavery is wrong in general but necessary to him personally that not only didn't he support Haiti's independence, he couldn't even admit that Phillis Wheatley wrote good poetry!