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Those iconic words were uttered by then-presidential candidate George H. W. Bush at the 1988 Republican National Convention.

This week on #30Issues, we're asking: who should pay how much in taxes?

But before we get into what your taxes might look like under a Trump presidency, it helps to understand where the federal income tax came from. Listen to the first 9 minutes of the segment below to hear a whirlwind tour of American politicians and the promises they've made (and broken) in the name of taxes.

And while you're at it, go ahead and listen to the rest of that segment too. Joseph Thorndike, director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts, breaks down the history of taxes in a pretty palatable way.

Here are the two main myths, as Joseph Thorndike sees them:

Thorndike says: "The truth lies somewhere in the middle...At the end of the day, tax rates do matter to growth, but lots of other things matter more, so we shouldn't fetishize them."

@BrianLehrer Nice radio montage! FDR after Pearl Harbor: "sacrifice." W after 9/11: "Go shopping. Treat yourself."

@BrianLehrer I thought this was going to be the most boring segment ever, but it's very interesting!

@brianlehrer House elections are largely auctions for access to change the tax code. How do we change that?

Great @jthorndike interview by @BrianLehrer: taxes increase when they must, not when they should (mostly).

@BrianLehrer There should be a marginal tax for the top 1% around 70%-80% because everyone knows loopholes reduce it by half or more.

Take the most extreme tax proposals by the presidential candidates. Donald Trump wants to slash taxes by about $11 trillion. Bernie Sanders could increase taxes by $14 trilli...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio talks about the new housing plan for East New York and other city news.

When asked about the investigations into the Board of Elections and the recent suspension of a chief clerk, the Mayor expressed his frustration and said an immediate reversal of the purge has to happen.

"I commend Brigid Bergin for focusing on this issue. This is an example of an area that needs tremendous reform."

He said he's going to exert a lot of leverage to make things right before the elections in June.

"I could not be more frustrated" by ppl getting turned away at polls, says @BilldeBlasio. NYS is far behind rest of U.S. b/c of arcane laws.

Roxanne in the Bronx asks about plastic bag fee.@BilldeBlasio: close to agreement with @NYCCouncil. "We all agree plastic bags have to go."

Caller to @BrianLehrer says he appreciates East New York rezoning but "over 25% of the ppl in ENY will not be able to live in ENY anymore."

BdB tells @BrianLehrer caller from East NY that he'll be heading there soon to talk with residents about the rezoning plan that just passed

.@nahmias Mayor @BilldeBlasio's response: I have to be straight-up with you…I haven’t experienced the new lights. I’m going to look into it.

The Mayor also addressed the recent investigations into his own fund-raising, saying he has complied with rules at every step.

"I think money should be out of politics entirely...Anything that we do that encourages more and more wealthy people to be in leadership positions because they're self-funding and somehow we think that's going to liberate us from a set of problems - it's the other way around. It only digs into a set of problems when people with privilege and power then also have political power."

It's Earth Day! We're checking in on New York City's climate resiliency plans.

Eddie Bautista, executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance and former director of the Mayor’s Office of City Legislative Affairs, said Mayor de Blasio's ONENYC Plan to build a more equitable and climate-resilient city still leaves the waterfront largely exposed to storm surges.

Bautista also pointed out that heat waves are killing more people than storm-related incidents in New York City, which he called "troubling." Part of the problem is energy supply challenges for a dozen or so Brooklyn neighborhoods, where about 7,000 people live. Bautista is urging the de Blasio administration to take the need for extreme heat initiatives more seriously.

But it's not all bad news. Bautista said the plan is strong in some areas, notably the green infrastructure program that has strengthened under de Blasio.

.@eddiebautista08 of @NYCEJAlliance says the mayor's climate resiliency plan still leaves waterfront exposed: https://t.co/OOhgAbOHnn

How would your taxes change under a Trump presidency?

Tony Nitti, partner at WithumSmith and Brown and a contributor to Forbes.com, focusing on tax policy, court decisions and planning opportunities, walks us through the tax plans of each of the presidential candidates.

Sharon Olds, award-winning poet who teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and author of Stag's Leap: Poems (Knopf, 2012), offers an assignment and insight into writing poetry.

Advice for young poets: Take your vitamins. Exercise. Talk kindly to yourself. -@Old_Sharon pic.twitter.com/p8fam1aF1R

.@Old_Sharon loves surprises in poetry.

"It gives you that fresh feeling that you’re being given, by the writer, a new view on something."

→ Did you miss the assignment? See the details here and submit your own poem!

Harriet Tubman will be honored on the front of the $20 bill, as announced by the Treasury Department.

Cokie Roberts, political commentator for NPR and for ABC News and author of Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868 (Harper Perennial, 2016), discussed Washington, D.C. and the experiences, influence, and contributions of its women during one of the most dramatic periods in America’s history. Roberts has been advocating for a woman on the bill, most recently for Alexander Hamilton's wife Elizabeth.

Cokie Roberts: still a chance Tubman won't make it to the $20. "For women in American history, it's been one broken promise after another."

And Patricia Turner, folklorist, executive director of The Reinvention Center, and the Dean and Vice Provost at UCLA, explained why she suggests using the image on the left below rather than the image on the right.

Here's how Dr. Turner explains it:

“This ‘matches’ the image of men on money who all have on formal dress and are depicted in their prime. Many of the others run of her evoking claims of looking like a mammy or ‘Aunt Jemima.’ I personally think a head wrap is a perfectly dignified, functional garment and that there should be no shame about the fact that black women wore them. However, in the late 19th and much of the 20th century, the head wrap became a marker of caricature of a black woman.”

1865

“Oh you Rascal, I am overjoyed to see you,” Varina Davis greeted Francis Preston Blair when he arrived in Richmond in early January. For his part, Blair reported that the First Lady of the Confederacy “Never looked as well in her life, stout but fairer well dressed & even a better talker than ever.” Elizabeth Blair Lee had received periodic reports of her friend over the years, but here was a first-hand account from her father, back from a secret mission for the Union. For some time the newspaper publisher Horace Greeley had been encouraging the senior Blair to use his connections with both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis to try to initiate peace talks. The carnage on the battlefields had reached such horrendous numbers that even dedicated Unionists were looking for some way to end the war. So Blair devised the excuse of going to Richmond to see if he could locate some important papers missing from his house at Silver Spring after the Confederates had partied there.

Lincoln, who trusted the old newspaperman and thought there would be no harm in him sounding out Jefferson Davis, issued Blair passes to go through Union lines to Richmond and return, though the family was nervous about the seventy-three year setting out in such cold weather. “He feels that tis a call of duty & that no one must now shrink from that in these days of trial & trouble,” Lizzie fretted, “& will not return until he sees my Oakland patient for her good & ours I hope.” She knew that her husband could decipher her code--he would remember how Lizzie had nursed the terribly sick Varina Davis when they all spent a summer together in Oakland a few long years ago. Despite the efforts at secrecy, word of Blair’s trip got out and Lizzie found herself quizzed at parties but “luckily most people begin with the story about his papers,” s...

Peter Willcox, environmental activist and Greenpeace captain and author of Greenpeace Captain: My Adventures in Protecting the Future of Our Planet (Thomas Dunne Books, 2016), talks about his work with Greenpeace, including attacks by the French military and arrests by the Russian military.

Brigid Bergin, the City Hall and politics reporter for WNYC, follows up on her reporting of the big drop in registered Democratic voters in Brooklyn and whether there's more to the story than the Board of Election's claim of "routine maintenance."

→ Catch up on Brigid's reporting so far. First, she pointed out the discrepancy between the number of registered Democrats in Brooklyn this year compared to past year's. The mayor's office then confirmed that the number was much larger than that - closer to 126,000.

Follow Brigid on Twitter as she continues to report on this story:

Follow @brigidbergin

"Read my lips: no new taxes."

Those words were spoken by then presidential candidate George H. W. Bush at the 1988 Republican National Convention.

Our #30Issues in 30 Weeks election series continues. This week we ask: who should pay how much in taxes? And where did the federal income tax come from?

Listen to the first few minutes of the segment above to hear a quick, archival tour of American politicians and the promises they've made (and broken) in the name of taxes.

Then, Joseph Thorndike, director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts and an Adjunct Professor at the Northwestern University School of Law, discusses the history of taxes in America and the changes to income and corporate taxes throughout the different presidencies.

So here are the two main myths, as Thorndike sees them:

Thorndike says: "The truth lies somewhere in the middle...At the end of the day, tax rates do matter to growth, but lots of other things matter more, so we shouldn't fetishize them."

A judge has downgraded former NYPD officer Peter Liang's conviction from second-degree manslaughter to criminally negligent homicide, meaning he'll serve no time in jail for the shooting death of Akai Gurley.

Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, who secured the manslaughter conviction but recommended that Liang face no jail time, objected to Judge Danny Chun's determination to diminish the crime and said he planned to appeal the decision. 

Delores Jones-Brown, John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor, former New Jersey prosecutor, and co-editor of African Americans and Criminal Justice: An Encyclopedia (Greenwood, 2014), talks about the resolution of this rare case where a police officer faced criminal charges over the death of an unarmed African American man.

Although Liang avoided jail time, it's rare for a police officer to even be indicted. But despite this case and others that signify an increased scrutiny of police officers involved in shootings, Jones-Brown said Liang's indictment doesn't showcase a new normal. She pointed out that when white officers are involved, as was the case with the choking death of Eric Garner at the hands of former NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, indictments are still a rarity.

"I think the tragedy of Liang's case is that he is a minority officer. The notion that we can watch a white officer intentionally kill a human being and we have a minority officer...accidentally kill a human being and be successfully indicted and convicted, but we can't get an indictment in the first case [Pantaleo]. So there's a level of racial politics and scapegoating that is going on that's not a new normal. And it does not mean that white police officers are going to be held accountable more frequently in the future."