Nat'l Journal: Republicans Close to Violating the Constitution

[jmowreader]

43. Have you heard the best tax protester argument?

Apparently the people who wrote the Sixteenth Amendment didn't intend that "wages and salaries" be considered as income.

See http://www.simpleliberty.org/tait/the_camels_nose_grows.htm, if you can get through it all. Take this enlightening paragraph:

The 1913 law was intended to tax wealthy business professionals, proprietors, corporations, and certain passive unearned investments. The amount of tax owed was to be measured by net income.[1] This is obvious by examining an income tax return from 1913. The tax return of 1913 functioned similarly to the modern Schedule C. Although including a graduated “progressive” surtax, the minimum tax rate was a whopping 1 percent of individual and corporate net income in excess of the exemption amount.

Okay, let's do that: Let's examine an income tax return from 1913. Happily, the Internal Revenue Service has posted the form on their website:

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/1913.pdf

Flip to page 2 and we'll find that under "Description of Income," the first line is "total amount derived from salaries, wages, or compensation for personal service of whatever kind and in whatever form paid." And the very first Internal Revenue Code specifies that wages are income.

The most irritating part of the tax protester is their reliance on the works of the Founding Fathers and their demand that the US be operated exactly as the Founders wrote, or exactly as how they think the Founders wrote. Yes, the Founders were smart men. Yes, they gave us a good system of government. But the Founding Fathers weren't oracles. They built a government for a largely agrarian, non-technological society spread across thirteen states clustered on the Atlantic coast. They didn't foresee airplanes, automobiles, electronic communications, complex financial transactions, $9 billion warships, thirteen metropolitan areas with population higher than the entire population of the United States at the moment General Cornwallis surrendered, wheat farms the size of Delaware, a sea on our western frontier, or a state in the middle of the ocean. How, then, do we keep the spirit and intent of the Founders while facing the reality that a perfect government for three and a half million people collapses when it's asked to govern a hundred times that?