ABSTRACT

The distinction between constitutions and laws became critical to the political prospects of one of Texas’s leading public officials, Bob Bullock, when he got crosswise of the income tax issue in the 1980s and 1990s. Texas, then as now, was one of only seven states that do not levy an income tax and most Texans like it that way. But for more than one hundred years, often when recessions hit and state revenues decline, Texas politicians have flirted with the idea of an income tax. As early as 1907, Texas Governor Thomas M. Campbell proposed both an income tax and an inheritance tax, losing the income tax but winning a modest inheritance tax. As Texas and the nation struggled under the Great Depression of the 1930s, Governor Ross Sterling in 1931 and Miriam “Ma” Ferguson in 1933 proposed income tax legislation-both failed.