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To: RayChuang88

Actually, you wouldn’t. In particular, repeal of the 16th Amendment wouldn’t accomplish anything other than, quite possibly, simply exempting property-owners from income tax on their capital gains when realized.

Folks who focus on repeal of the 16th Amendment need to read the Income Tax Cases - Pollock v. Farmer’s Loan & Trust Co. - a little more carefully. Those Supreme Court cases, from 1895, did hold an earlier income tax to be unconstitutional - but only as it applied to the capital gains of property-owners when they sold their property.

In particular, the Supreme Court expressly considered the application of that earlier income tax to wages and other compensation for services, decided that such a tax would be nothing more than a valid excise tax, and therefore constitutional. In the Income Tax cases themselves, this part of the tax didn’t survive because the Supreme Court decided that severing only the unconstitutional parts - i.e., the tax as it applied to capital gains - would have left a law that perverted the intent of Congress when it enacted the law in the first place, so it simply voided the entire law.

The 16th Amendment was expressly drafted and designed to overrule the Supreme Court’s decision in the Income Tax Cases. Thus, repealing it would simply put us back to the situation that existed immediately after those cases were decided, namely: repeal of only the capital gains tax portion of the income tax - an income tax on payments for services rendered - wages - would still be perfectly constitutional and I, for one, would bet my bottom dollar that Congress would not have such a delicate concern for the citizens of this country that it would repeal the rest of the income tax because it was unfair. Instead, there would be more shrieking from the harpies on the left than we’ve ever heard - to the point that a lot of bankers and other people who “look rich” to the idiot left would probably be assaulted and murdered, and we would end up with some draconian federal tax on property, e.g., a transactions tax on every transfer of property, along with rules that impose a constructive transfer at the end of each year (which would effectively mimic the mark-to-market rules that apply to certain financial businesses right now).

No, as tempting as it may sound (and I do not disagree with the spirit of the idea - that the only way to truly rein in the federal government is to restrict its access to our money), repeal of the 16th Amendment will not do much, if anything, to staunch the flow of dollars into the Congressional feeding trough.


13 posted on 01/13/2010 6:42:12 AM PST by Oceander
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To: Oceander

“The 16th Amendment was expressly drafted and designed to overrule the Supreme Court’s decision in the Income Tax Cases. Thus, repealing it would simply put us back to the situation that existed immediately after those cases were decided, namely: repeal of only the capital gains tax portion of the income tax - an income tax on payments for services rendered - wages - would still be perfectly constitutional....”

That is why an “aggressive repeal” is needed - not just one that turns the clock back to 1913, but one that renders ALL income taxes unconstitutional.


20 posted on 01/21/2010 11:59:30 AM PST by phil_will1 (My posts are in no way limited or restricted by previously expressed SQL opinions)
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