With all the brouhaha regarding the stimulus, Times Traveler reminds us it could be worse:

Taft Considers Proposing an Income Tax
Thursday, March 25, 1909

The problem of how to increase federal government revenues has reached a point where President William Howard Taft is seriously considering an income tax proposal.

‘Too much of the revenue, some of the revisionists are saying, is to be derived from the tariff on necessities of household use. If the Republican Party was beaten in 1892 because the McKinley bill made the women pay a few cents more for their tin dippers, what will happen, they ask, to a party that puts up the cost of cheap stockings and women’s and children’s gloves, that taxes the supper table $8,000,000 on tea, the breakfast table $10,000,000 on coffee, and the dinner table $2,000,000 on spices, in addition to the $52,000,000 tax on raw sugar, which is finally included in the price of the refined article?

What Obama really needs is to distract people by discovering a new continent.

Shackleton’s Feat Is Highly Praised; It Is Taken as Proving the Existence of an Antarctic Continent