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The Articles of Confederation gave Congress responsibilities such as paying national debts, but the central government could not tax individuals directly. Instead, it had to request money from the states.
Was this mainly a deliberate safeguard against recreating the kind of powerful government the colonies had opposed, or did the states’ political interests make a stronger revenue system impossible to agree on? I’m trying to understand both the principle behind the arrangement and how it affected the new country in practice.
