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If we don’t FIRST eliminate the 16th Amendment, we WILL end up with both a Sales Tax and an Income Tax. Count on it.

If we don’t FIRST eliminate the 16th Amendment, we WILL end up with both a Sales Tax and an Income Tax. Count on it.

There's been nothing to stop Congress in the past from passing a national sales tax while maintaining an income tax except for one little detail called constituents. Congress critters know they would experience outrage on the same level as when they tried to grant amnesty to illegal aliens if they tried to have both taxes.

If we don’t FIRST eliminate the 16th Amendment, we WILL end up with both a Sales Tax and an Income Tax. Count on it.

Firs, let me say that I know of not a single FairTax supporter who does not also support repeal of the 16th amendment but, as a practical matter, there is simply NO way it can happen as you suggest. Congress is NOT going to move to repeal the 16th amendment without first having a viable replacement tax in place.

Secondly, if what you say were true, why do we not have them both today as there is currently NOTHING preventing it?

True, but what you are missing is that the FairTax leadership in Congress is very aware of just that point and they are not going to allow the 16th to survive.

Here’s what they are planning right now:

1. Pass the FairTax but do not enact it until the 16th is repealed. This puts pressure on Congress and States to repeal the 16th.

2. FairTax leaders are now meeting regularly with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a bipartison organization of state legislators, to ‘memorialize’ Congress for drafting a Constitutional Convention for the sole and exclusive purpose of repealing the 16th. Only 34 states are needed to memorialize Congress and then Congress has to do it. The last I heard they have a high number of states willing.

The danger with enacting the FairTax without repealing the 16th is that people will get complacent and think that the unapportioned Income tax is gone and there’s no pressure to repeal the 16th amendment that no one is using anyways.

But in the future all it takes is one class warfare argument to soak the rich and Congress will resuscitate the unapportioned Income tax and then 15-20 years later the cancer will have spread again. That’s the way it happened in 1913 and since that year the Income Tax Code has had five major reforms, each time trying to drive this cancer into remission. It is the 16th that is the root of the cancer. It will always come back to make society sick until another reform provides relief.

The reason the FairTax was not implemented in 1913 is because it was technologically unfeasible but that is not the case now.

So yes you are right the 16th must absolutely be wiped out without a hope of ever returning. The good news is that the FairTax leadership is working that issue daily.

Article V of the U.S. Constitution specifies the ratification process, and requires 3/4 of the States to ratify any amendment proposed by Congress. There were 48 States in the American Union in 1913, meaning that affirmative action of 36 states was required for ratification. In February, 1913, Secretary of State Philander Knox issued a proclamation claiming that 38 states had ratified the amendment.

In 1984, William J. Benson began a research project, never before performed, to investigate the process of ratification of the 16th Amendment. After traveling to the capitols of the New England states, and reviewing the journals of the state legislative bodies, he saw that many states had not ratified the Amendment. Continuing his research at the National Archives in Washington, DC, Bill Benson discovered his Golden Key. This damning piece of evidence is a 16 page memorandum from the Solicitor of the Department of State, whose duty is the provision of legal opinions for the use of the Secretary of State. In this memorandum sent to the Secretary of State, the Solicitor of the Department of State lists the many errors he found in the ratification process!

The 4 states listed below are among the 38 states that Philander Knox claimed ratification from.

The Kentucky Senate voted upon the resolution, but rejected it by a vote of 9 in favor and 22 opposed.
The Oklahoma Senate amended the language of the 16th Amendment to have a precisely opposite meaning.
The California legislative assembly never recorded any vote upon any proposal to adopt the amendment proposed by Congress.
The State of Minnesota sent nothing to the Secretary of State in Washington.
When his year long project was finished at the end of 1984, Bill had visited every state capitol and knew that not a single state had actually and legally ratified the proposal to amend the Constitution. 33 states engaged in the unauthorized activity of amending the language of the amendment proposed by congress, a power the states do not possess. Since 36 states were needed for ratification, the failure of 13 to ratify would be fatal to the amendment, and this occurs within the major (first three) defects tabulated in Defects in Ratification of the 16th Amendment. Even if we were to ignore defects of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, we would still have only 2 states which successfully ratified.