Every president since 1914 has added to the national debt. Is this a coincidence?, page 2

originally posted by: Chalcedony
Congress attempted in 1894 to pass a flat federal income tax, but that was ruled unconstitutional for the reason that the 16th amendment was ratified to fix in 1913.

Based on your post, you may be interested to learn that the 16th amendment didn't change anything with respect to the federal governments powers of taxation:

""...the proposition and the contentions under [the 16th Amendment]...would cause one provision of the Constitution to destroy another;

That is, they would result in bringing the provisions of the Amendment exempting a direct tax from apportionment into irreconcilable conflict with the general requirement that all direct taxes be apportioned;

This result, instead of simplifying the situation and making clear the limitations of the taxing power, which obviously the Amendment must have intended to accomplish, would create radical and destructive changes in our constitutional system and multiply confusion…

…Moreover in addition the Conclusion reached in the Pollock Case did not in any degree involve holding that income taxes generically and necessarily came within the class of direct taxes on property, but on the contrary recognized the fact that taxation on income was in its nature an excise entitled to be enforced as such unless and until it was concluded that to enforce it would amount to accomplishing the result which the requirement as to apportionment of direct taxation was adopted to prevent, in which case the duty would arise to disregard form and consider substance alone and hence subject the tax to the regulation as to apportionment which otherwise as an excise would not apply to it.

…the Amendment demonstrates that no such purpose was intended and on the contrary shows that it was drawn with the object of maintaining the limitations of the Constitution and harmonizing their operation.”

…the [16th] Amendment contains nothing repudiating or challenging the ruling in the Pollock Case that the word direct had a broader significance since it embraced also taxes levied directly on personal property because of its ownership, and therefore the Amendment at least impliedly makes such wider significance a part of the Constitution -- a condition which clearly demonstrates that the purpose was not to change the existing interpretation except to the extent necessary to accomplish the result intended, that is, the prevention of the resort to the sources from which a taxed income was derived in order to cause a direct tax on the income to be a direct tax on the source itself and thereby to take an income tax out of the class of excises, duties and imposts and place it in the class of direct taxes...

Indeed in the light of the history which we have given and of the decision in the Pollock Case and the ground upon which the ruling in that case was based, there is no escape from the Conclusion that the Amendment was drawn for the purpose of doing away for the future with the principle upon which the Pollock Case was decided, that is, of determining whether a tax on income was direct not by a consideration of the burden placed on the taxed income upon which it directly operated, but by taking into view the burden which resulted on the property from which the income was derived, since in express terms the Amendment provides that income taxes, from whatever source the income may be derived, shall not be subject to the regulation of apportionment…
Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad, 240 U.S. 1 (1916)"

Also, taxation for revenue purposes is obsolete.