CtC's Weston White: Fake quotes & other problems

[Famspear]

Regardless its absolutely clear, except to those indulging heavily in the kool-aid, they were not talking about taxing working folk.

No, it's not.

You might be right -- or you might be wrong -- about what the Court was thinking about here. (I.e., was the Court referring to the income of, say, a corporate business in a "service" industry where the bulk of the income of the corporation is realized from the workings of the human brain, or was the Court talking about the income of ordinary working folk?) Although your spin on the context in this particular case is an arguable one and (in my opinion, a respectable one, whether I personally buy it or not), you are (as usual) straining. It's not "absolutely clear" that you have correctly deduced what the Court was referring to, and your personal interpretation of what the Court was thinking is not the only reasonable one.

And I don't drink kool-aid.

[Demosthenes]

SteveSy wrote:

Regardless its absolutely clear, except to those indulging heavily in the kool-aid, they were not talking about taxing working folk.

And yet, the political cartoons and newspaper articles of the time assumed that tax could indeed apply to working folk, as has been pointed out to you repeatedly,

[SteveSy]

SteveSy wrote:

Regardless its absolutely clear, except to those indulging heavily in the kool-aid, they were not talking about taxing working folk.

And yet, the political cartoons and newspaper articles of the time assumed that tax could indeed apply to working folk, as has been pointed out to you repeatedly,

True and there's cartoon's of Obama wearing a turbin, Bush wearing a swastika, congress under the sickle and hammer....your point?

No working man paid income tax anytime until around the 40's. Only the richest of the rich even had to worry about even coming close to owing the income tax in 1898, 1864 -1866 and 1913.

There was no legislation whatsoever that dealt with the income of the human brain and hand in 1909 and that's the period the court was referring to. Legislation just passed in 1913 would have nothing to do with the case at hand. It certainly wasn't common legislation, to say otherwise would be ridiculous.

[Demosthenes]

True and there's cartoon's of Obama wearing a turbin, Bush wearing a swastika, congress under the sickle and hammer....your point?

Sad. You going to trot out that same truncated quote again from the NY Times that ended up proving my point and not yours?

[SteveSy]

True and there's cartoon's of Obama wearing a turbin, Bush wearing a swastika, congress under the sickle and hammer....your point?

Sad. You going to trot out that same truncated quote again from the NY Times that ended up proving my point and not yours?

Proving what point Demo.....that facts are the facts. Look it up, no working person had to pay the tax, actually 99% of the income earning class of the U.S. didn't even make enough to owe.

What's sad is you rely on cartoons instead of reality.

[Demosthenes]

You once again confuse not taxing low income people with being prohibited from ever taxing low income people. Congress left the issue open. The 16th Amendment means exactly what it says; there is no hidden meaning, no unspoken restriction on what the words say.

Reading the newspapers of the day and looking through the political cartoons of the period is an excellent source for seeing how the 16th amendment was pitched to the people. It was a wildly popular amendment because the people were sick and tired of the oppressive tariff system which taxed poor but not rich, and welcomed the income tax as a more fair solution.

I've shown you articles and newspaper articles from 1909 and 1913 proving my point. Why don't you post articles and newspaper cartoons that show that an average joe's wages were constitutionally safe from ever being taxed? (Hint, there are many many more cartoons today showing Obama *not* wearing a turban or Bush *not* wearing a swastika...)

[Cpt Banjo]

The point, which is too obvious for Stevie to grasp, is that the wages of everyone (not just the top 1% of all earners) were considered as income. Whether they ended up being taxed because of the exemption amount is beside the point. Reread the quote from the Howbert case -- the Court was discussing what was treated as income, not what was being taxed. As usual, Stevie has created a red herring by raising the issue of ultimate taxability rather than focusing on what the Court was discussing: is it income?

[Imalawman]

True and there's cartoon's of Obama wearing a turbin, Bush wearing a swastika, congress under the sickle and hammer....your point?

Sad. You going to trot out that same truncated quote again from the NY Times that ended up proving my point and not yours?

Proving what point Demo.....that facts are the facts. Look it up, no working person had to pay the tax, actually 99% of the income earning class of the U.S. didn't even make enough to owe.

What's sad is you rely on cartoons instead of reality.

Steve I have an article that you would enjoy, I'll see if I can track it down for you. But it discussed how the tax went from around the top 8% to virtually all residents/citizens over the years of WWII. The propaganda from that time period is very interesting to study. But basically, the ticket to taxing most people was instituting a withholding schema. Prior to that point it was very hard to tax the average american once a year for 10-15% of their income. But when it got extracted a little bit at a time there was less public outcry. Besides, during the war it was cast as one's civic duty. Of course once instituted it was not going away.

But nowhere in the legislative history of the expansion of the income is a discussion of whether it was constitutional to tax lower income. That was always assumed. It also doesn't matter if the 16th wasn't meant to apply to everyone's income - the wording of the amendment certainly doesn't say that at all. Thus, a court could never get past the clear wording of the amendment. There would be no need to look at legislative history.

[Joey Smith]

Weston White is among the dumbest of the dumb among the many dummies at LH.

Stevie: Please do not hijack this thread; if you want to make your "income tax was never authorized as it has developed to" argument again, please start your own thread.

[Judge Roy Bean]

With nothing of interest on the HD idtiot box I have been listening to music and reading (yes, in combination it works, at least for me).

I seem to have just stumbled upon something Ben Franklin wrote that brought me back to the keyboard here and might make someone a worthwhile signature:

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

Enjoy your weekend!

[SteveSy]

I seem to have just stumbled upon something Ben Franklin wrote that brought me back to the keyboard here and might make someone a worthwhile signature:

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

Enjoy your weekend!

Kind of ironic really....That quote came from a paper printed in London just prior to all out war against Britain, November 1767. It was concerning smuggling goods into this country while avoiding the taxes we were so pissed about paying. Using that quote in support of a government would be kinda like saying we should still be under British rule. He also says the following quotes in the same article.
"Our proverb too says truly, that the receiver is as bad as the thief" and see a "mote in their brother’s eye, while they do not discern a beam in their own" in reference to those who are objecting to the people avoiding taxation.

[Imalawman]

I seem to have just stumbled upon something Ben Franklin wrote that brought me back to the keyboard here and might make someone a worthwhile signature:

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

Enjoy your weekend!

Kind of ironic really....That quote came from a paper printed in London just prior to all out war against Britain, November 1767. It was concerning smuggling goods into this country while avoiding the taxes we were so pissed about paying. Using that quote in support of a government would be kinda like saying we should still be under British rule. He also says the following quotes in the same article.
"Our proverb too says truly, that the receiver is as bad as the thief" and see a "mote in their brother’s eye, while they do not discern a beam in their own" in reference to those who are objecting to the people avoiding taxation.

Steve, do you think its morally acceptable to defraud the US government? I think you do. You seemingly defend every single tax cheat out there and you always try rationalize every quote about being dishonest with the government that we've ever posted on here.

[rant]The older I get, the more I do not accept as sacred everything that our founding fathers did and said. Just because we agree with the majority of their actions doesn't make them morally infallible and speaking ex cathedra. For instance, I don't believe that anyone is born with inalienable rights. Yet, clearly the founding fathers did. I don't have a problem disagreeing with them. It seems like too often tax cheats and gov't fraudsters view the founding fathers as almost godlike - if they said something it must be true and morally correct. [/rant]

[LPC]

You [Sybil] might be right -- or you might be wrong -- about what the Court was thinking about here [in Stratton's Independence]. (I.e., was the Court referring to the income of, say, a corporate business in a "service" industry where the bulk of the income of the corporation is realized from the workings of the human brain, or was the Court talking about the income of ordinary working folk?)

I don't read what Sybil writes any more, and I don't respond to him, but I want to repeat my understanding of Stratton's Independence for your benefit and the benefit of others who might be reading this for the first time.

What the Supreme Court wrote was:

“As to the alleged inequality of operation between mining corporations and others, it is of course true that the revenues derived from the working of mines result to some extent in the exhaustion of the capital. But the same is true of the earnings of the human brain and hand when unaided by capital, yet such earnings are commonly dealt with in legislation as income.”

Stratton’s Independence, Ltd. v. Howbert, 231 U.S. 399, 415 (1913).

The issue that the Supreme Court was addressing in those two sentences was whether a mine owner should be allowed to deduct as a form of depreciation the cost (or basis) of the ore that is in the ground before it is extracted. The ore that is in the ground is a form of capital and, once it is extracted from the ground and sold, it is gone forever, so the profit from the sale of the ore is not "income" because it is the sale of an asset, and the return of the investment in the assets is not "income" because, once an asset is sold, it is gone forever.

The Supreme Court responded by stating that "the same is true of the earnings of the human brain and hand when unaided by capital...." But how are they "the same"?

They are the same only in the sense that human beings have only so many hours in the day and so many years to work, and once those hours and years are gone, they are gone forever and can never be replaced.

And yet the compensation paid to humans for their irreplaceable time is "commonly dealt with in legislation as income."

In the past, Sybil has argued that the court was talking about the profits of corporations that sell the services of the employees of the corporation, but that makes no sense whatsoever. In the first sentence of the quotation above, the court said that "the working of mines result to some extent in the exhaustion of the capital." But the working of corporate employees does not result in any exhaustion of capital. The compensation of employees is an expense of a corporation and not a capital investment and, if an employee dies or retires or quits, the corporation/employer simply hires another with no loss of capital. The context of the quote makes no sense in the context of income received by the corporation for the work of its employees (as explained above), and only makes sense in the context of income realized by the employees from the corporation for the sale of their own time and labor.

I freely admit that the words of the court about the "earnings of the human brain and hand" were obiter dicta. But that increases their power. The Supreme Court was saying that "of course everyone knows that wages and salaries are income also" and didn't feel it was necessary to explain why or provide any citation of authority. That speaks to the proper treatment of wages and the meaning of "income" more powerfully that reasoned arguments.

Sybil's position has been that the court didn't mean what it said, and if it meant what it said it was wrong, or if it meant what it said and it wasn't wrong the what it said was still irrelevant to the case and should be ignored.

What a law school professor of mine said in response to the argument that what the court said was "just dicta" was "but they said it, didn't they?"

Sybil's great challenge in life is explaining why all of the courts that have said things that he doesn't like didn't really mean what they said.

[LPC]

[rant]The older I get, the more I do not accept as sacred everything that our founding fathers did and said. Just because we agree with the majority of their actions doesn't make them morally infallible and speaking ex cathedra. For instance, I don't believe that anyone is born with inalienable rights. Yet, clearly the founding fathers did. I don't have a problem disagreeing with them. It seems like too often tax cheats and gov't fraudsters view the founding fathers as almost godlike - if they said something it must be true and morally correct. [/rant]

Amen.

The Declaration of Independence was a press release written to justify taking up arms against a king.

The Constitution was a mass of political compromises, the most significant of which were about slaves and the treatment of predominantly slave-owning states.

The rule of law means that we must deal with the words and meanings of the Constitution, but it's doesn't mean we must deify the authors who were, as far as I can tell, just trying to deal with the situations that then existed.

[LPC]

Another point that sails right over the heads of tax protesters is that Lucas v. Earl IS A LEADING CASE. EVERY LAW STUDENT WHO TAKES FEDERAL INCOME TAX STUDIES THIS CASE. When a tax protester cites this case for a proposition which is the VERY OPPOSITE of the Court's ruling, it's all the more hilarious.

Yes, Lucas v. Earl is a leading case in the area of U.S. income taxation, and stands for the ''Anticipatory Assignment of Income Doctrine''. In the case, Mr. Earl was arguing that because he and his wife, in the year 1901, had made a legally valid assignment agreement (for state law purposes) to have his then-current ''and after-acquired income'' (which was earned solely by him) be treated as the income of both him and his wife as joint tenants with right of survivorship, the legally valid assignment agreement should also determine the federal income tax effect of the income he earned (i.e., only half the income should be taxed to him).

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected that argument, essentially ruling that under federal income tax law all the future income earned by Mr. Earl was taxable to him at the time he earned the income, even though he had already assigned part of the income to his wife, and regardless of the validity of the assignment agreement under state law. And obviously, the Cracking the Code issue -- of whether the private-sector compensation received by an individual for personal services in an activity unconnected with a federal privilege is non-taxable -- was neither presented to nor decided by the Court.

Law students taking "Federal Income Tax 101" are initially presented with two issues: What is income? And: Whose income is it?

For "What is income?", they read cases like Eisner v. Macomber and Glenshaw Glass, but for "Whose income is it"? they read Lucas v. Earl and other cases.

I mention this to point out that whether compensation for labor is "income" and whether compensation for labor can be taxed in the "private sector" is NEVER DISCUSSED IN LAW SCHOOL.

Why?

BECAUSE IT'S SILLY. WHETHER COMPENSATION FOR LABOR IS "INCOME" IS NOT DISCUSSED IN LAW SCHOOL FOR THE SAME REASON THAT WHETHER THE SUN REVOLVES AROUND THE EARTH IS NOT DISCUSSED IN ASTRONOMY COURSES. IT'S SILLY.

[Edited to fix the Sun-Earth metaphor, which I originally got "backwards" in the sense that I stated it correctly.]

[notorial dissent]

Or, to put a finer point on it, he may well have and could have assigned half or all of the income, but he had to have gotten it fully into his possession first for the assignment to have any effect, it was the instant of having full possession of the income that allowed for the assignment to come in to play, and that was when the income tax liability came in to existence. Otherwise, by the reverse of that logic, you could earn whatever you wanted, then at a later time assign a portion of that income to someone else and then claim that you are actually only responsible for the half you kept. Doesn’t work that way other than that in certain circumstances you would then claim a deduction against income for say a charitable donation.

[SteveSy]

For instance, I don't believe that anyone is born with inalienable rights. Yet, clearly the founding fathers did.

WOW! No wonder it's impossible to convince some of you that our government is has gone completely off the deep end....It wouldn't matter if it did, you're fine with it.

[SteveSy]

The Declaration of Independence was a press release written to justify taking up arms against a king.

So do the right thing and move to England, they are after all our true rulers. Why partake in the illegal acts of our forefathers?

The Constitution was a mass of political compromises, the most significant of which were about slaves and the treatment of predominantly slave-owning states.

Huh? Funny, I've read all of the anti-federalist and federalist papers and a significant portion of the Elliot debates. Slavery was mentioned rarely in all of them as compared to all of the other arguments. The truth is people didn't want to trade one tyrant, the king whom they just got rid of, for a few hundred tyrants. That's what the constitution was about....but hey if saying it was all about slavery, which is now gone, helps you feel better about ignoring everything we founded this country upon so you can justify shaping the constitution anyway your little heart desires by interpretation alone then so be it.

[Famspear]

For instance, I don't believe that anyone is born with inalienable rights. Yet, clearly the founding fathers did.

WOW! No wonder it's impossible to convince some of you that our government is has gone completely off the deep end....It wouldn't matter if it did, you're fine with it.

As you are wont to do, Steve, you are again overstating your case. And you are illustrating one of the flaws in your approach: You are trying to convince others that the government has gone off the deep end. What you write about federal income taxation is colored by that underlying motive. Your motive is questionable, and your method is suspect. The conclusions you reach are therefore, understandably, flawed.

Further, it is easy to convince at least some of us here in Quatloos that the government has gone completely off the deep end. Why? Because we don't need "convincing." Maybe not all of us. Opinions vary.

And what government certainly does matter. What the Quatloos regulars do not generally do, however, is to transmute opposition to government tax policy, or other policy, or spending, or regulation, etc., into delusional beliefs about the legal nature of the federal income tax system, or delusional beliefs about the history of that system.

I can't speak for Imalawman, but my view is that in the sense in which tax protesters use the term "inalienable rights", there are no "inalienable rights." Why? When tax protesters say "inalienable rights," what they really mean is "you can't tax me." That's just a tax protester fantasy.

In the sense in which the Founding Fathers used the term "inalienable right," there is no general inalienable right not to be taxed.

[SteveSy]

Steve, do you think its morally acceptable to defraud the US government?

If I were to ask you do you think its morally acceptable to defraud a thief what would your answer be? It depends on what you qualify as "defrauding". If a thief were to say give me all your money and you only gave him half would you be defrauding the thief. If you did give him all your money, because you were afraid he would severely punish you if you didn't, but you knew the guy next to you only gave half of his, would he be morally wrong for doing so?

You seemingly defend every single tax cheat out there and you always try rationalize every quote about being dishonest with the government that we've ever posted on here.

I don't defend every single tax cheat. I simply want to make sure they have a fair trial, just like everyone else should.

I also don't rationalize every quote about being dishonest with the government. I simply posted the facts behind the quote. I have never agreed or disagreed with it. Seems you just don't like hearing the truth.

Just remember, you wouldn't be here right not under a U.S. flag defending payment of taxes to the U.S. government if it were not for a bunch of "tax cheats" and people who refused to accept the rule of law.