Until the tax protesters are able and willing to explain their interpretations and applications in a way that can be utilized by common folks, being paid a wage or salary by an employer, I will continue to understand the amendment and various income tax laws in ways that will keep me and others out of prison.
I have repeatedly asked tax protesters to clearly and publicly explain their rationale and procedures for legally not paying federal income tax. None have been willing to personally do so, which leads me to conclude that their methods will not withstand scrutiny. Whether is because the methods are flawed, or because government will engage in "might makes right" makes no material difference.
If it works for you, great. But if you can't show me how to have it work for me, do not presume to correct me or complain about my verbiage in the absence of your willingness or ability to show others how to make it work for them.
You and I agree on much. But I have long since grown weary of those insist federal income taxes are something vastly different than commonly understood, yet refrain from offering actionable information to back up such claims.
If my information is bad, do not merely call it bad. Rather, provide good information to counter it. Good information must be more than a few excerpts from old court cases that may have since been overturned in part or in whole.
From your cite:
During the interim between the Pollock decision in 1895 and the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, the Court gave evidence of a greater awareness of the dangerous consequences to national solvency which that holding threatened, and partially circumvented the threat, either by taking refuge in redefinitions of "direct tax" or, and more especially, by emphasizing, virtually to the exclusion of the former, the history of excise taxation.
...
The Court conceded that taxes on incomes from "professions, trades, employments, or vocations" levied by this act were excise taxes and therefore valid. The entire statute, however, was voided on the ground that Congress never intended to permit the entire "burden of the tax to be borne by professions, trades, employments, or vocations" after real estate and personal property had been exempted, 158 U.S. at 635.
...
Under this approach the Court thus found it possible to sustain a corporate income tax as an excise "measured by income" on the privilege of doing business in corporate form.10 The adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment, however, put an end to speculation whether the Court, unaided by constitutional amendment, would persist along these lines of construction until it had reversed its holding in the Pollock case.
In other words, income was going to be taxed with or without the 16th amendment, but the amendment removed all doubt about what the SCOTUS was going to do.
Or put in yet other words, while the 16th amendment may not have conferred any new powers on congress, it limited the power of SCOTUS to remove taxing powers from congress.
Simply put, I believe the nation would be far better off if Congress did not have the power to tax incomes (or gasoline, or much anything else except imposing import duties) but instead had to apportion their budgetary needs among the States based on population, with the States then raising the monies in whatever way they saw fit. One might tax mineral extraction, another might tax income, yet another gambling.
Whether achieving this could be done simply by repealing the 16th, or whether additional limit would need to be imposed on Congressional delegated power is mostly a moot question as any properly worded amendment to repeal the 16th would do both.
Charles
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