What Keeps Me up at Night Once upon an early morning dreary, while I pondered weak and weary…What's in a name? At about 2:45 this morning, while I was writing a post on gross income (soon, my friends), the thought crossed my mind, what makes the Internal Revenue Service and the Internal Revenue Code internal? Why not simply the Revenue Service and the Revenue Code? So, I thought to myself, what’s in a name: the “Internal” Revenue Service? Back in the Day Running a nation is expensive. Interstate highways do not build themselves, B-52 bombers do not grow on trees, and the Internal Revenue Code did not write itself. In 1791, George Washington and his new Congress realized, as angry as they were about the “Intolerable” Acts,” such as the stamp tax and the tax on tea (see, e.g., the Boston Tea Party), that taxes were a necessary evil. Not…