The Fascinating Truth About The 16th Amendment The income tax is just an excise; capitations still require apportionment; and you’ve been taken to the cleaners. Introduction
AS THE FIRST AMERICAN IN HISTORY to secure a complete refund of all federal income taxes withheld-- including Social Security and Medicare taxes-- and the author of several books that have led to many tens of thousands of other American men and women getting all THEIR money back year after year since 2003, I imagine I'm the last person from whom you'd expect to hear praises of the income tax. But that's what you're hearing.
The fact is, the income tax is not only a Constitutional tax, it is also a very desirable tax. Applied in strict adherence to its statutory design, the income tax is benignly-limited in scope. It is also a fit mechanism by which those who make money from the exploitation of public resources return to the common purse a portion of their private profits.
In this short paper, I am going to show you what the income tax really is and on what it really falls. I'm also going to show you how the tax has come to be widely misunderstood and how, since FDR's third term as president, that misunderstanding has been systematically cultivated and exploited by an insatiable state which is increasingly impatient with any level of restraint.
TO PUT IN A NUTSHELL what you are about to learn, the "income" tax is and always has been an excise on gains from certain federally-connected activities in which most Americans do not engage in meaningful (taxable) amounts, if at all. The law says this plainly, if only in places not commonly seen by most people.
Unfortunately, most Americans have been successfully conditioned over the last 75 years to believe the tax applies to all economic activity. Concurrently, most Americans have been induced to report payments of all kinds to government tax agencies using forms such as W-2s and 1099s which are actually prescribed-- again, in places most people don't know to look-- exclusively for the reporting of federally-connected tax-relevant payments.
These reporting-form allegations are taken as true if unrebutted, and it is on that basis that the income tax is ultimately applied, both to those who have engaged in taxable activities and those who have not, but aren't aware of the need to rebut the erroneous reporting-form allegations to the contrary. Because of the way this has all been designed, put in place and maintained, for most folks the "income tax" could be better called the "ignorance tax".
I realize that what I've just described sounds as unlikely as the proposition that everyone's emails and phone calls were being systematically vacuumed-up by the government without warrants would have sounded a few years ago. Please suppress your skepticism for the moment and indulge your curiosity (and don't forget that thousand-plus-high stack of complete refunds, Social security taxes and all, that you looked at a few moments ago, which you also would have found very unlikely indeed).
Just read what follows. You'll end up recognizing the truth.
PLEASE READ CAREFULLY AND THOROUGHLY! In particular, click on links in the text such as those for "apportionment", "excise" and "capitation". Even if you are a legal specialist, I assure you that the legal meanings of these Constitutional terms are not what you think, just as the Constitutional term "income" doesn't mean what you think it does. You'll find something very worthwhile, and often very important, at every other link within the text, as well.
Read the "NOTES" at the end of the paper, also. Like the linked materials, the notes contain important documentation of everything you'll have read in the main paper, and will be very intriguing and entertaining to any legal scholar and historian, as well.
Enjoy.
The Fascinating Truth Versus The Comforting Myth
"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie-- deliberate, contrived and dishonest-- but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." -John F. Kennedy "All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed." -I. F. Stone
MY FRIEND, ALL YOUR LIFE YOU’VE BEEN TOLD THAT THE 16TH AMENDMENT was a transformational event in the history of the United States Constitution by which an unapportioned direct federal tax on "all that comes in" was authorized. You’ve been told that the amendment reversed the preceding 137-year-old Constitutional tax structure prohibiting such taxes-- under which the American people had grown to be the freest, most prosperous, and most optimistic people in the history of the world-- in favor of a radically-different structure under which the scandal-ridden and deeply-distrusted denizens of Washington, DC were granted carte blanche to reach directly into every wallet, be it that of a Wall Street tycoon or that of the average working stiff.
Explanations as to why the rich and happy Americans of the early 20th Century would do such a thing to themselves have always been vague-- they typically amount to something about a populist or progressive impulse that swept the country in favor of sticking it to the “Robber Barons”. Missing is any reason why such an impulse would embrace a universal tax reaching not just the robber barons, but their alleged victims in the working class, as well (along with every little shopkeeper, every mid-level success-story working out the American dream, and everyone else, too).
Also missing from these stories is any explanation of why the several states would ratify such a tax, under which they would inevitably lose power and significance in favor of their federal competitor. Further, these stories leave out the fact that there already WAS an income tax on the books and still in force at the time of the 16th Amendment, which had been successfully deployed over the preceding 52 years without Constitutional problem, save for a single instance in which the US Supreme Court had taken issue with its application to merely two single varieties of realized income.
These stories don’t mention that, in fact, huge portions of our modern body of income tax law pre-date the 16th Amendment, even though this is plainly stated in the preamble to the 1939 Internal Revenue Code, and even though Congress publishes a comprehensive derivation table explicitly identifying the pre-16th-origins of these still-current statutes. (See a little video presentation on this subject here.)
The fact is, an awful lot is left out of these stories purporting to explain the seemingly inexplicable decision of the prosperous American people of the early 20th Century to chuck a system that had served them so well for so long-- because they’re just stories. They’re fiction, so they don’t have to make sense. Those telling these stories want you to believe otherwise for reasons of their own, but the truth is, the 16th Amendment did nothing these story-tellers want you to imagine it did. Instead, the amendment merely overruled a Supreme Court decision that had briefly interrupted the application of the already-long-standing tax (the twice-heard case of Pollock v. Farmer’s Loan & Trust, 157 U.S. 429, and 158 U.S. 601, (both 1895)), while making no changes to its pre-amendment nature.
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Poster Comment:
Lots of links in text at source.
Tax time is here and gone. But I have not paid the Federal or State income taxes since I drove the truck for IWX about 12 years ago.
The IRS only has a 10 year window to collect the tax. After that they are statutorily prohibited from collecting.