It's Friday, April 15, 2022, the day of the week when I pass along a quotation intended to be uplifting or enlightening. Today's lines concern the inevitability of taxes, a touchy topic that often arises on this date. That's because, despite the three-day grace period granted by the Internal Revenue Service again this year, the Ides of April has long been Tax Day in this country.
Although paying taxes can sting, a tax burden is the kind of shared sacrifice that lends itself to witticisms with universal appeal. As Scarlet O'Hara, in Margaret Mitchell's 1936 classic "Gone with the Wind" declares in a fit of pique, "Death, taxes, and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them."
Childbirth, of course, is the new variable there, the adage about death and taxes being quite old. You ask: How old exactly?
The old saw about the inevitability of "death and taxes" is often attributed to Benjamin Franklin. And Franklin did use it, in a 1789 letter to a friend that was carried across the Atlantic Ocean. The National Constitutional Center described it, persuasively, as Franklin's "last great quote." He was not the first to use it, however, and it originally comes from Great Britain, not the United States.
Twenty years earlier, in "Tom Jones: A Comic Opera," author Joseph Reed uses the line and attributes it in a way that signals to the audience that it is a familiar sentiment. ("I may be mistaken, it's true; because, as the man says, we can be sure of nothing in this world but death and taxes…")
As early as 1726, in an essay titled, "The Political History of the Devil," Daniel Defoe wrote, "Things as certain as Death and Taxes, can be more firmly believ'd." But even that isn't the earliest reference unearthed by "The Quote Investigator." That distinction, as far as is known, belongs to Christopher Bullock in 1716.
But it was good old Ben Franklin who put it in an American context. Writing (in French) to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, an old pal from his days in France, Franklin asked about Le Roy's health and the general state of affairs in Paris. Franklin also apprised his pen pal about the adoption and ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
"Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes," Franklin wrote in November 1789. Two months away from his 84th birthday, Franklin's own mortality was on his mind: "My health continues much as it has been for some time, except that I grow thinner and weaker so that I cannot expect to hold out much longer."
Benjamin Franklin died the following spring, on April 17, 1790. But the founding document he wrote about with such hope is with us still. Despite its flaws and challenges -- and its many amendments -- the Constitution has proved "durable," and that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
