ABSTRACT
The development of income taxes may be viewed as a response to increasingly insistent and articulate demand for a more equitable apportionment of tax burdens. These taxes are the outstanding contribution of popular government and liberal political philosophy to modern fiscal practice. The concept of production, moreover, has itself a strong ethical or welfare flavor. The social income might be conceived in terms either of the value of goods and services produced or of the value of the productive services utilized during the period (after deduction for depreciation and depletion). The relation of the income concept to the specified time interval is fundamental—and neglect of this crucial relation has been responsible for much confusion in the relevant literature. The very notion of double-counting implies, indeed, the familiar, and disastrous, misconception that personal income is merely a share in some undistributed, separately measurable whole.
