Bryan Fischer at the American Family Association wrote a column explaining how 16th Amendment does not mean what it says.
It starts out with:
The current tax code is 3.6 million words long, four times longer than the collected works of Shakespeare. It requires 25 volumes to contain it, and takes up nine feet of shelf space.
This monstrosity is based entirely on the 16th Amendment, which authorizes Congress “to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.”
Now the 16th Amendment had to be ratified by the American people. How in the world did the framers of this misbegotten gargantua convince the American people to do this to themselves?
Easy. They lied to us.
And goes down hill from there. Yes, the usual 'law dictionaries trump anything actually written in law', the founding fathers never meant for us to have an income tax, and income doesn't mean what you think it means are all thrown together. Phil Hart is even cited as a source.
25 volumes and 9 feet of shelf space? Gee... I've been retired for over 5 years, but as I recall, the code itself was one volume, and the Regulations were in four. Didn't realize that much additional tax law has been passed and signed since 2006.
Little boys who tell lies grow up to be weathermen.
Anybody got a link to that NY Times cartoon from then showing the worker and entrpenuer that clearly demonstrates the fallacy in the claim that "The term “income” did not apply to wages and salaries. That was considered “earned income,” income received from labor, and not “unearned income,” the money fat cats made from investments and their corporations. What we call “unearned income” was the target of the 16th Amendment."?
“Where there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.” — Plato
Poor confused Mr. Fischer cites out-of-context quotes with as much chutzpah as people who misquote the bible. Unfortunately, the idiots who follow him can't be bothered to do what I just did: spend 90 seconds on a google search finding source documents.
Bryan Fischer wrote:Roger Foster wrote “A Treatise on the Federal Income Tax Under the Act of 1913” in 1914. In it he writes, “t is evidently the intention, as a general rule, to tax only the profit of the taxpayer, not his whole revenue.”So wages and salaries were exempt from taxation under the 16tth Amendment; investment and dividend income and profits from business were not.
Roger Foster wrote:§ 43. The Act provides as to individuals :
"That, subject only to such exemptions and deductions as are hereinafter allowed, the net income of a taxable person shall include gains, profits, and income derived from salaries, wages, or compensation for personal service of whatever kind and in whatever form paid, or from professions, vocations, businesses, trade, commerce, or sales, or dealings in property, whether real or personal, growing out of the ownership or use of or interest in real or personal property, also from interest, rent, dividends, securities, or the transaction of any lawful business carried an for gain or profit, or gains or profits and income derived from any source whatever, including the income from but not the value of property acquired by gift, bequest, devise, or descent
and this:
Roger Foster wrote:§ 46. Judicial definitions of income. It was said by Lord Chancellor Halsbtjby of England : "I think it cannot be doubted, upon the language and the whole purport and meaning of the income tax acts, that it never was intended to tax capital * * * as income at all events." Lord Macnaghten : "In every case the tax is a tax on income, whatever may be the standard by which the income is measured. It is a tax on 'profits or gains' in the case of duties chargeable under Sched.. (A.), and the expression 'profits or gains' is constantly applied without distinction to the subject of charge under all the Schedules." ...
"Strictly speaking, 'income' means that which comes in or is received from any business or investment of capital without reference to the outgoing expenditures." ...
By the rule of construction, noscitur a sociis, however, the words in this statute must be
construed in connection with those to which it is joined, namely, gains and profits; and it is evidently the intention, as a general rule, to tax only the profits of the taxpayer, not his whole revenue.Accordingly, money received as the result of the change of an investment, or as the proceeds of a sale without profit, is not income. Thus, when a vendor received the purchase-money in annual installments, it was held in England that such installments were principal and not taxable as "annual payments" or income. So, too, an increase of capital when realized cannot justly be called profit or income. Examples are the increase in the value of real estate, or personal property, such as stocks, unless expressly provided in the statute.
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig." - Robert Heinlein
Doofus wrote:The current tax code is 3.6 million words long, four times longer than the collected works of Shakespeare. It requires 25 volumes to contain it, and takes up nine feet of shelf space.
Thomson Reuters (the WestLaw/FindLaw folks) publishes the entire IRC, plus
Amending Acts Table listing all public laws amending the code since 1954
A comprehensive Topic Index and a Table of Code sections to help you speed research
Precise deep cities in the running head make it easier to find the relevant subdivision of the Code section
Updated to the time of publication to provide you with the most up-to-date information available anywhere
in a single volume. It's $130 per copy, dropping to $36 if you want more than 3000.
Truth be told, at least a little bit of the motivation to reinstate income tax was related to Prohibition. One of the hurdles of outlawing demon rum was that said spirits were at the time paying a pretty good chunk of total Federal Revenue. The 19th Amendment was also tied into the whole movement, as the ultimate goal by some arguments.
The period from 1910 to 1920 was dominated by these three issues and it's very interesting to me at least that the only way the "save us all" crowd could impose their will upon the rest of America was to amend the Constitution, the hardest procedure to change basic laws. The amendments that resulted are the first ones that allow the government to impose itself upon citizens. (with the exception of course of the 19th, the suffrage amendment)
All in all it was a tough time to be a rich white male exploiting the poor masses. We had to succumb to income tax, give up booze and let the ladies vote all in the space of 7 years.
Supreme Commander of The Imperial Illuminati Air Force
Your concern is duly noted, filed, folded, stamped, sealed with wax and affixed with a thumbprint in red ink, forgotten, recalled, considered, reconsidered, appealed, denied and quietly ignored.
Doofus wrote:The current tax code is 3.6 million words long, four times longer than the collected works of Shakespeare. It requires 25 volumes to contain it, and takes up nine feet of shelf space.
Thomson Reuters (the WestLaw/FindLaw folks) publishes the entire IRC, plus
Amending Acts Table listing all public laws amending the code since 1954
A comprehensive Topic Index and a Table of Code sections to help you speed research
Precise deep cities in the running head make it easier to find the relevant subdivision of the Code section
Updated to the time of publication to provide you with the most up-to-date information available anywhere
CCH publishes the income tax regulations as a six volume set.
The GPO publishes the entire Title 26 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which includes non-income tax regulations such as gift and estate tax regulations, as a 20 volume set.
fortinbras wrote:I think the 25 volumes is the CCH Federal Tax Guide, an enormous (and extremely useful) looseleaf reference.
That's possible. And the CCH Federal Tax Guide is more than the Internal Revenue Code and regulations because it includes commentaries and explanations, as well as annotations to revenue rulings, revenue procedures, court decisions, and other materials.
So Fischer clearly doesn't know what he's talking about (and probably doesn't care that he doesn't know).
Dan Evans
Foreman of the Unified Citizens' Grand Jury for Pennsylvania
(And author of the Tax Protester FAQ: evans-legal.com/dan/tpfaq.html)
"Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Bryan Fischer wrote:This [tax code] monstrosity is based entirely on the 16th Amendment,
That's wrong also.
As we've discussed many times, the power to tax incomes is actually found in Article I, Section 8, clause 1. All that the 16th Amendment did was clarify that taxes on incomes from property (i.e., rent, dividends, and interest) was not required to be apportioned. But a tax on wages, salaries, and other earned incomes had been held to be constitutional without apportionment even before the 16th Amendment, in both Springer and Pollock.
Dan Evans
Foreman of the Unified Citizens' Grand Jury for Pennsylvania
(And author of the Tax Protester FAQ: evans-legal.com/dan/tpfaq.html)
"Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Earlier today, American Family Association policy chief Bryan Fischer pretty much shredded whatever pretense he has of being mainstream--or at least what passes for mainstream on the religious right.
Dan Evans
Foreman of the Unified Citizens' Grand Jury for Pennsylvania
(And author of the Tax Protester FAQ: evans-legal.com/dan/tpfaq.html)
"Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Dan Evans
Foreman of the Unified Citizens' Grand Jury for Pennsylvania
(And author of the Tax Protester FAQ: evans-legal.com/dan/tpfaq.html)
"Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Dan Evans
Foreman of the Unified Citizens' Grand Jury for Pennsylvania
(And author of the Tax Protester FAQ: evans-legal.com/dan/tpfaq.html)
"Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
This monstrosity [the tax code] is based entirely on the 16th Amendment, which authorizes Congress "to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived."
Now the 16th Amendment had to be ratified by the American people. How in the world did the framers of this misbegotten gargantua convince the American people to do this to themselves?
Easy. They lied to us.
OK maybe he's not the expert, but he knows where to find one...
As Phil Hart says in his book "Constitutional Income: Do You Have Any?":
"It is the annuity check you get in the mail from your investments, it's your passive income. It is not the money you worked for. It is the net income, the profit left over from your 'income property' after you have paid all your expenses and taxes on the property. It is the interest income that accrues to your savings account even while you sleep" (p. 236).
Hart adds, "[T]he target of the income tax amendment was income from unincorporated businesses and from investments" (p. 243). He concludes, "The people of America simply did not think the 16th Amendment was ever going to tax the wages or salary of a working man" (p. 313).
That enormous number of volumes is, I think, for the much-annotated editions such as the CCH Federal Tax Guide, which is a real monument of tax lore with thousands of case cites and explanatory blandishments, or the US Code Annotated set. The tax code itself can be printed in one (big) volume, admittedly with small type (about 8 pt), no annotations or other helps. Eliminating the history notes of when each section was amended would shrink it to about half its size.
Frankly much of the bulk of the tax code is for loopholes worked up at the bidding of big corporations and billionaires.
Here's a recent article on the length of the Code. I use the Thomson Reuters paperback version referred to in the article, and I never noticed that the edition starts at page 100 and then skips 474 pages in its numbering.
This is an odd coincidence, because just a few days ago I was looking at my new desk copy of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, from CCH, which is a bound version of the loose-leaf copy in the CCH Standard Federal Tax Reporter, mentioned in one of the linked articles.
This version, dated as of January 10, 2014, is in two volumes. This version (after adjusting for page numbers in the sequence that are not used) comes to almost exactly 5,000 pages of text: specifically, by my count, 4,999 pages.
However, this CCH hard copy version includes annotations showing virtually all the changes in the Code since the enactment of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 on August 16, 1954 -- more or less in reverse chronological order, after each subsection.
This version includes the entire texts of Code sections that were in the Code at any time since 1954, but which have been repealed.
It also includes excerpts from the texts of non-codified portions of various Acts of Congress that show things like effective dates, and so on.
In the area for Code section 103 (dealing with tax exempt interest income) you will find very small type reproductions of non-codified portions of many, many Acts of Congress that specify that the interest income from such and such bonds issued by such and such a municipal authority will qualify for the section 103 tax-exempt treatment.
The entire two-volume set is printed with small fonts, and the annotations after each subsection that I just described are shown in even smaller font.
Off the top of my head, the only Code section that I know of in the CCH version is not printed with all the changes in the text since August 16, 1954 is Code section 1 (the imposition of the tax on individuals, basically). Some of the earlier versions of the tax rate schedules in section 1 are not reproduced by CCH in this volume. (Being the tax geek that I am, I have copies of blank 1040 forms and related instructions for every year going back to 1913, so I do have the tax rate schedules for individuals for every tax year in a separate place. I think the IRS might have most or all of that available on its web site now, as well.)
This CCH version of the Code does not include the committee reports.
I don't want to sound like an advertisement for CCH, but this printed version of the Code is valuable and convenient for a serious U.S. federal tax practitioner, particularly because it shows almost all the changes in the text (and the effective date of the changes) since 1954. Because this law changes so frequently, it's pretty important to have more than just the "latest" version of the text at your fingertips.
Contrasting the approximately five thousand page CCH version of the Internal Revenue Code with the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, my copy of the Bankruptcy Code, in larger font type and WITH the committee reports (but without the texts of all changes since enactment in 1978) runs only about 400 pages.
EDIT: Footnote: The CCH desk copy I described, which is printed on thin, onion-skin type paper, in two volumes is over five inches thick.
"My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line." -- David Mamet
Oh, another useful feature of the CCH version of the Internal Revenue Code (in the loose-leaf Standard Federal Tax Reporter and in the deskbook copy) is a list, at the end, of every Act of Congress that has amended the Code since August 16, 1954, with the public law number, the popular name (if any) of the Act, and the date of enactment (generally, the date the Act was signed into law by the President).
Curiously, the list actually includes one public law enacted 25 days BEFORE the August 16, 1954 date of enactment of the 1954 Code. That's the Revised Organic Act of the Virgin Islands, on July 22, 1954. (And, don't even ask... whatever your question is, I have no idea.....
)
According to CCH, the first amendment to the 1954 Code came on August 30, 1954, only 14 days after the Code was enacted.
For non-tax geeks who may be wondering: why all the references to the 1954 Code? The answer is that the current Code -- the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, is really just the 1954 Code, as amended, with a name change that came in 1986. The "1986 code" was not really a re-codification.
"My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line." -- David Mamet
