Posted on 06/22/2021 2:54:07 PM PDT by MosesKnows
This question occurred to me the other day in a discussion about the 16th amendment; how would taxation be today if we had not passed the 16th Amendment. Prior to the 16th Amendment, Article I, Section 9, Clause 4 No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, Unless In Proportion To The Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken. Amendment XVI 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. Prior to the 16th Amendment when Congress proposed spending $100,000,000 and the population of the country was 100,000,000 a bill goes out to each state requiring $1 for each person counted in the census. Our latest census indicated a population of 331,449,281 as of April 1, 2020, an increase of 7.4%. The US Debt Clock indicates that the US National Debt is $28,437,000,000,000 as of June 22, 2021. That debt is an accumulation of yearly deficit spending. Today we hear projections of a $1 Trillion deficits and higher. The last one I heard proposed exceeded $8 Trillion. Collecting $8 Trillion in taxes prior to the 16th Amendment would result in each state receiving a tax bill of $24,136.42 for each of its citizens. The reason this became a topic is that we can imagine the communications regarding the proposed legislation that caused deficit spending. The point being that if New York with a population of 20 million or California with a population of 40 million received a tax bill of that size they most certainly would want to know what the money was for and was it constitutional.
I was around when we spoke of a billion dollars then hundreds of billions of dollars and on occasion the word trillion popped up. Later in life the word trillion came up more often and at an increasing rate. I now lived long enough to see the word trillion come into vogue. In each case the word regarded the Public Debt or National Debt.
If that fails, how long until the word quadrillion gets bantered around?
Since the dollar is now only worth 5 cents, a trillion nickels isn’t all that much money.
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