"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."
No need to have a decades long debate, the text of the 16th is quite clear that it grants power to collect an income tax. If this power existed previously, then why the 16th?
Also, from Article I of the Constitution:
"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
There really is no debate. Prior to the 16th, any taxes had to be apportioned to the states relative to their populations. Congress could tax a state but not an individual.
You'll note that the 16th passed almost concurrently with the 17th requiring direct election of senators. This two amendments removed the most powerful blocks on the accumulation of federal power.
Since Congress could only tax the states, one of the most important functions of a senator was to ensure that a congressional apportionment did not arrive at the door of his state legislature. It was quite common for the state legislatures to appoint the state's senators. If such an apportionment were to arrive, then that state legislature would be responsible for raising the necessary revenue to pay the apportionment with rather easily imagined consequences. Now the state could have an income tax or any form of taxation it desired but any federal tax apportionment was guaranteed to inflame the citizenry. Hence, one of the jobs of a senator was to make sure such a tax bill never made it out of congress and to keep a cap on spending.
BTW, plot federal spending both before and after the passage of the 16 and 17th amendments.
Because of the way they want it collected.
This is secondary though. The amendment in question does indeed repeal the 16th - and it goes further to make unconstitutional the taxation of any type of income.
I would also like to repeal 17th.
No need to have a decades long debate, the text of the 16th is quite clear that it grants power to collect an income tax.
It grants nothing that didn't exist previously since we had a fully constitutional income taxes on wages, salaries, and business income many times prior to the 16th.
The 16th's only effective function was to overcome the impediments put on taxing rents of real property, and returns from investment property by the decisions in of the USSC in Pollock.
If this power existed previously, then why the 16th?
It started out as a Republican political ploy to impede passage of an income tax by Congress that backfired:
| The Bailey Bill In April 1909, Senator Joseph W. Bailey, a conservative Democrat from Texas who was also opposed to income taxes, decided to further embarrass the Republicans by forcing them to openly oppose an income tax bill similar to those which had been introduced in the past. He introduced his bill expecting it to get the usual opposition. However, to his amazement, Teddy Roosevelt and a growing element of liberals in the Republican party came out in favor of the bill and it looked as though it was going to pass. Not only was Bailey surprised, but Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, the Republican floor leader, frantically met with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachussetts and President Taft to work out a strategy to demolish the Bailey tax bill. Their own party was split too widely to permit a direct confrontation, so the strategy was to pull a political end run. They announced that they favored an income tax but only if it were an amendment to the Constitution. Within their own circle, they discussed how it might get approval of the House and the Senate, but they were quite certain that it could be defeated in the more conservative states-three-fourths of which were required in order to ratify the amendment. Thus, the Democrats were off guard when President Taft unexpectedly sent a message to Congress on June 16th, 1909, recommending the passage of a consitutional amendment to legalize federal income tax legislation. The strategy threw the liberals into an uproar. At the very moment when their Bailey bill was about to pass, the Republicans were coming out for an amendment to the Constitution which would probably be defeated by the states. Reaction to the Amendment Congressman Cordell Hull (D-Tenn., and later Secretary of State under FDR) saw exactly what was happening. He took the floor to excoriate the Republican leaders. Said he: "No person at all familiar with the present trend of national legislation will seriously insist that these same Republican leaders are over-anxious to see the country adopt an income tax...What powerful influence, what new light and deepseated motive suddenly moves these political veterans to 'about face' and pretend to warmly embrace this doctrine which they have heretofore uniformly denounced?" {1} He went on to expose what he considered to be a political trick. He needn't have been so concerned. The slogan of "soak the rich" automatically aroused Pavlovian salivation among politicians both in Washington and the states. The Senate approved the Sixteenth Amendment with an astonishing unanimity of 77-0! The House approved it by a vote of 318-14. When Republican Congressman Sereno E. Payne of New York, who had introduced the amendment in the House, saw that this end run was turning into a winning touchdown for the opposition, he was horrified. He went to the floor and openly denounced the bill he had sponsored. Said he: "As to the general policy of an income tax, I am utterly opposed to it. I believe with Gladstone that it tends to make a nation of liars. I believe it is the most easily concealed of any tax that can be laid, the most difficult of enforcement, and the hardest to collect; that it is, in a word, a tax upon the income of honest men and an exemption, to a greater or lesser extent, of the income of rascals; and so I am opposed to any income tax in time of peace...I hope that if the Constitution is amended in this way the time will not come when the American people will ever want to enact an income tax except in time of war." {2} The end run of the Republican leadership did indeed backfire. State after state ratified this "soak the rich" amendment until it went into full force and effect on February 12, 1913 |
Another article on the same vein:
Another take on the income tax and a bit of history on the Pollock decision and the 1894 tax on rent & investment income it struck down plus some more on the subsequent 16th amendment proposals for specific wording of the amendment. The article includes some of the specific points in debate as regards taxing of income vs consumption taxes that were prevalent up to that time:
Some source material in a PDF containing Taft's address in proposing the 16th to Congress, as well as the Congressional Record of the debates. It is a rather large PDF (several megabytes), and takes awhile to download over phone connections:
Googling on the 16th amendment leads to alot of different opinions on what it was all about, much of it highly agenda driven. But one can find source here and there and put things in context once you take the time to actually read what Pollock said and did as opposed to decades of rhetoric about it and the subsequent manuvering to re-establish income taxes after the Pollock court had struck down the 1894 version in the way it did.