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Sen. Warren will introduce legislation implementing a wealth tax on fortunes over $50 million.
Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1 (MSNBC)
Sen. Warren announces that she's joining the Senate Finance Committee and will be introducing "legislation implementing a wealth tax on fortunes over $50 million."
3:31 PM · Feb 2, 2021
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oooooEEEEEoooo
the final nail in its coffin. The vast bulk of post-Pollock jurisprudence also considers Pollock to have been erroneously decided as well. I find the article's legal reasoning sound and persuasive.
I fully support a wealth tax and do not consider it a 'waste of time' at all.
from the article
Pollock is an ignorant misreading of history and the meaning of the apportionment clause, as discussed in the prior sections to this article. The Founders’ purpose for the apportionment clause was not to protect wealth from the force of mere numbers but rather to apportion a requisition to reach the wealth of the states. Population was considered an appropriate index of wealth. Apportionment was not an individual taxpayer right vis a vis the government, but a means of allocating taxes in a way that could reach that wealth. The rules regarding direct taxation were never intended as an impediment on the taxing power of the United States.
Pollock is also a condemnation of close reading of text as a sufficient ground for constitutional adjudication, without an understanding of the history of that text. If you know nothing about the history or original function of the direct tax, then it is easy to misinterpret the language “apportionment by population” as if it were forcing the same amount of tax per person and protecting wealth from mere numbers. That turns the original constitutional meaning upside down.
In any case, Pollock was bad history when it was decided, and it quickly became a pariah and shrank in importance. Justice Harlan described Pollock at the time as the “decision [that] will become as hateful with the American people as the Dred Scott case.”61 Looking back, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. judged that Pollock was an inappropriate overreaction to the populist William Jennings Bryan, a vague terror that was translated into “doctrine that had no place in the Constitution.”62 Almost immediately the Supreme Court began retreating from what it later called its “mistaken theory” in Pollock,63 by expanding the definition of “excise tax” elastically to include taxes that were obvious assaults on wealth, including the estate tax,64 a corporate gross receipts tax,65 the corporate income tax,66 and a tax on Chicago Board of Trade commodity transactions.67 The elastic expansion of “excise” to avoid apportionment of the tax was solely a tool to confine Pollock to its facts because the original 1787 meaning of “excise” meant only a tax on whiskey68 and other sins.69 The Sixteenth Amendment, passed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and ratified by three-quarters of the states, allowed a tax on income without apportionment, putting the last nail in Pollock’s coffin.
The Founders believed in the wealth tax. Apportionment was designed to reach wealth by taxing states according to a proxy for relative wealth, using the best measurement of wealth that was then available. To turn a requirement designed to make it easier to tax wealth into a rule exempting wealth from taxation is to turn the Founders’ meaning upside down. The progressive idea of a wealth tax, like the estate tax, is clearly constitutional. ■
Pollock is also a condemnation of close reading of text as a sufficient ground for constitutional adjudication, without an understanding of the history of that text. If you know nothing about the history or original function of the direct tax, then it is easy to misinterpret the language “apportionment by population” as if it were forcing the same amount of tax per person and protecting wealth from mere numbers. That turns the original constitutional meaning upside down.
In any case, Pollock was bad history when it was decided, and it quickly became a pariah and shrank in importance. Justice Harlan described Pollock at the time as the “decision [that] will become as hateful with the American people as the Dred Scott case.”61 Looking back, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. judged that Pollock was an inappropriate overreaction to the populist William Jennings Bryan, a vague terror that was translated into “doctrine that had no place in the Constitution.”62 Almost immediately the Supreme Court began retreating from what it later called its “mistaken theory” in Pollock,63 by expanding the definition of “excise tax” elastically to include taxes that were obvious assaults on wealth, including the estate tax,64 a corporate gross receipts tax,65 the corporate income tax,66 and a tax on Chicago Board of Trade commodity transactions.67 The elastic expansion of “excise” to avoid apportionment of the tax was solely a tool to confine Pollock to its facts because the original 1787 meaning of “excise” meant only a tax on whiskey68 and other sins.69 The Sixteenth Amendment, passed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and ratified by three-quarters of the states, allowed a tax on income without apportionment, putting the last nail in Pollock’s coffin.
The Founders believed in the wealth tax. Apportionment was designed to reach wealth by taxing states according to a proxy for relative wealth, using the best measurement of wealth that was then available. To turn a requirement designed to make it easier to tax wealth into a rule exempting wealth from taxation is to turn the Founders’ meaning upside down. The progressive idea of a wealth tax, like the estate tax, is clearly constitutional. ■
go after them Senator Warren.
