Free Republic

After several courtroom battles, Marrita Murphy lost. Her case attracted widespread interest because it involved an important question -- and also because she initially won a major round in court. The issue: Should Ms. Murphy have to pay federal income tax on a $70,000 award she received from a former employer for emotional distress and loss of reputation? She argued the award wasn't taxable. She paid the tax -- more than $20,000 -- and later sought a refund. In 2006, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in her favor. The...

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.

Tonight, Republican Minority Whip Eric Cantor announced an update to the House Schedule for this week. H.R. 1388, The Give Act, is scheduled for Wednesday. Note: The title is “Anticipated Floor Schedule.” The Whipping Post states, “On Wednesday, the House will meet at 10:00 a.m. for legislative business. H.R. 1388 - Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act (Subject to a Rule) (Sponsored by Rep. McCarthy (NY) / Education and Labor Committee)

Casselberry, FL The Winter Springs Civic Center 400 N. Edgemon Ave Winter Springs, FL. 32708 We will meet this month at The Winter Springs Civic Center. There will be a presentation of the FairTax followed by a Q&A and a discussion of recent volunteer activities. For more information, please contact Larry Walters at 407-949-2959. Date: Thursday, August 14, 2008 Time: 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM This event does not require an RSVP. Registered users can request event reminders. Register

Regular Guy Paul linked to an Ann Coulter column suggesting that if we took the vote away from women, we'd never have another Democratic president.  I'm almost tempted to sidetrack this post because I caught a hilarious comment in the comments section that rebutted the notion that fascism is a leftist ideology - it most definitely is - but that's for another day. I'm not even interested in Coulter's comments per se, considering they were mostly tongue-in-cheek, but something that Paul said caught my attention. Generally speaking, I would support repealing all the Constitutional amendments of the 20th century. So...

Napoleon resident John F. “Jack” Green is 78 years old and runs about three miles every morning. He also is running for Congress in the 5th District special election as a write-in candidate. “I’m running because I can’t lose. I can only win,” Green said. “How can you lose something you never had?” While Green’s name will not be on the ballot, the names of State Rep. Bob Latta, R-Bowling Green, and Democrat Robin Weirauch of Napoleon will be. Green said he ran for the same congressional seat six or eight years ago, when no Democrat candidate was running. Green,...

In Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority,1 the Supreme Court held that state interests are more properly protected from federal encroachment by the procedural safeguards found in the federal political process rather than by judicially defined limitations.2 Justice Powell, in a strong dissent, asserted that the majority's decision reduced the tenth amendment to "meaningless rhetoric."3 In explaining its decision, the majority observed that State governments, through equal representation in the Senate, retain sufficient influence over the federal political process to insure their autonomy and sovereign interests.4 The Court, however, recognized that the seventeenth amendment, which provides for the popular...

It's a hardy perennial in the more philosophically-oriented conservative circles, despite its manifest political infeasibility: the argument that the Seventeenth Amendment should be repealed or should never have been passed. While this argument does have its virtues, I disagree. Regardless of whether it was a good idea at the time, repealing the 17th Amendment today would only weaken the mechanisms that are essential to conservative policies and conservative philosophy. Specifically, restoring to state legislatures the power over the election of Senators would make the Senate less directly accountable to the people and insulate the federal courts even further from public...

[I wrote to Boortz today about this, but he didn't respond. I didn't expect him to. Maybe he will discuss it if enough people here make noise.] The Fair Tax - Why we are all being fooled... ... and why it is just lip service. Since the start, way back in the days of CATS (Citizens for an Alternative Tax System), I have been an advocate of the Fair Tax. Back then I was naive. I was doing the cool thing. I have learned a lot about what this "Alternative Tax System" has evolved to... The Fair Tax.

States and the IRS are mining personal and business data to sniff out scofflaws The Texas comptroller's Office suspected for years that well-heeled Lone Star citizens were buying big-ticket private planes out of state to dodge sales taxes. But the tax collector couldn't prove it. Then the agency installed new computer technology that matched federal airplane registrations with state tax records. In just the past six months, Texas has collected $5 million in unpaid taxes from 43 scofflaws. As tax season nears its Apr. 15 peak, revenue agencies are reaching for a software tool kit that has long been popular...

http://www.givemeliberty.org/RTPLawsuit/Update2005-09-30.htm Twenty-five years ago Bill Benson, a former Illinois Department of Revenue investigator, began a cross-country trip across the forty-eight states that comprised the Union in 1913 seeking documentary evidence regarding the ratification of the 16th Amendment. This was a most important undertaking, because the government uses the 16th Amendment as its sole authority to tax an individual’s wages and salaries. During his two-year trip, Benson collected thousands of certified legal documents from both state and federal archives documenting exactly how the 16th Amendment was acted on by each state legislature and handled by the office of the Secretary of...

A former IRS agent who believes citizens are not required to pay federal income taxes was acquitted today on charges he attempted to defraud the government. Joseph Banister, a Certified Public Accountant in San Jose, Calif., had been telling his clients they don't need to file federal income tax returns because the 16th Amendment, which gives Congress "power to lay and collect taxes on incomes," was never properly ratified.

CONGRESSMAN STEVE KING INTRODUCES RESOLUTION TO ELIMINATE IRS WASHINGTON - As W-2s arrive in mailboxes this week, U.S. Congressman Steve King has introduced a resolution to repeal the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to collect income taxes. H.J. Res. 16 would eliminate the IRS and the means for the government to collect income taxes. "The IRS is an out-of-date, trillion-dollar-a-year drag on our economy," said King. "Instead of continuing to band-aid our complicated, leaking tax system year after year, we can choose a permanent solution and finally rid Americans of the fat leech they feed...

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to introduce the Liberty Amendment, which repeals the 16th Amendment, thus paving the way for real change in the way government collects and spends the people’s hard-earned money. The Liberty Amendment also explicitly forbids the federal government from performing any action not explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution. The 16th Amendment gives the federal government a direct claim on the lives of American citizens by enabling Congress to levy a direct income tax on individuals. Until the passage of the 16th amendment, the Supreme Court had consistently held that Congress had no power to...

"The freedoms won by Americans in 1776 were lost in the revolution of 1913," wrote Frank Chodorov. Indeed, a man's home used to be his castle. The income tax, however, gave the government the keys to every door and the sole right to change the locks.Today the American people are no longer the master and the government has ceased to be the servant. How could this be? The Revolution fought in the name of the inherent natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness promised to enthrone the gains of individualism. Instead, federal taxation bribes the States and individuals to...

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.

Constitutional Challenge:Repealing the 16th Amendment wouldn't kill the income tax. By David B. Levenstam Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer (R-Texas), and the Cato Institute's director of fiscal policy studies, Stephen Moore, all want to replace the federal income tax with a national sales tax. They say that repealing the 16th Amendment will eliminate the income tax. They're wrong. Income taxes existed--and were considered constitutional--before the 16th Amendment. Ratified in 1913, the 16th Amendment states: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among...

Wesley Clark, genius -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: September 26, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com I keep hearing how smart Gen. Wesley Clark is. I hear he's a Rhodes scholar. I hear he can read a novel in 20 minutes. I hear he graduated first in his class at West Point. I hear he's a genius. But I keep hearing him say the dumbest things. Here's one example. On June 15, he was interviewed by Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press." Asked about President Bush's tax cuts, here's what he said: Well, first of all, they were not efficient in...

A To-Do List By Robert Wolf There is much consternation to the effect that politics has become a full body contact sport. Many are dismayed because all that is important is winning. Pubs and Dems will say anything and do anything to win, but the end of world is not at hand, not if we are up to the challenge. Libertarians think Republicans are Clinton Lite. Conservatives are depressed because congressional spending continues unabated. Conservatives and Libertarians are, both, ready ‘to give up the ghost’, ‘shed that mortal coil’ and ‘head for the hills’, perhaps for good reason; watching the...

We, the people of these United States, rightfully petition our President, House of Representatives and Senate on behalf of substantive tax reform legislation, including legislation to repeal the 16th Amendment to our Constitution and replace the current invasive income tax with a national sales tax or flat tax. We encourage presidential and congressional support for House Joint Resolution 15 "abolishing personal income, estate, and gift taxes" and other tax reform measures seeking to restrict central government spending to its constitutional parameters. Likewise, we insist that reductions in taxation be accompanied by comparable reductions in extra-constitutional and economically untenable government spending....

THE HISTORY OF THE SIXTEENTH AMENDMENT by W. Cleon Skousen Strange as it may seem, the Sixteenth Amendment (which gave the American people the affliction of confiscatory income taxes) was never supposed to have passed. It was introduced by the Republicans as part of a political scheme to trick the Democrats, but it backfired. Here's the story. The Founding Fathers had rejected income taxes (or any other direct taxes) unless they were apportioned to each state according to population. Nevertheless, an income tax was levied during the Civil War and upheld by the Supreme Court on the somewhat tenuous reasoning....

<p>If you are in favor of repealing the income tax, you can express your views on the subject online by going to http://www.thelibertycommittee.org/repeal16petition.htm .</p> <p>But don't be surprised if a lot of your friends, neighbors and even family think you are nuts.</p> <p>There are a lot of people who are strongly opposed to any restrictions on the power of Congress to tax as they deem necessary. These are the folks who believe that the government should micro-manage the affairs of its citizens in every conceivable way. Nearly every federal politician benefits from the income tax because it provides the money with which to fund an assortment of programs that appeal to the voters. It also provides an incentive for substantial political contributions from supporters who want legislation to reduce their taxes or to subsidize some activity that the supporters favor. You can expect them to be vocal and strident in their opposition to the repeal of the 16th Amendment to the constitution. You can also expect them to spend huge amounts of money to sustain the status quo.</p>

"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."–The 16th Amendment What are we to make of the idea Washington is floating of replacing tax on income with a national sales tax? The Cato Institute has described it as "simpler, more efficient, pro-growth and fairer to taxpayers." And I must be missing something because I thought we already paid taxes on products and services. In addition to states where a sales tax already exists, sizeable portions of the prices...

I've looked over some of the literature that tax protesters have put out, giving reasons why the 16th amendment was never properly ratified. Much of it seems interesting, but it leaves out what I consider to be a very important matter, which I hope somebody out there can clear up: If it can be determined with certainty that a particular law we've been observing for decades, was, in fact, not enacted in the proper legal way, what would be the proper means of handling the matter, and can you cite precedent for it?

My bunghole is still hurting from filing my tax forms on Monday. How about you? For the last couple of weeks working up to Monday I've been coming to a slow boil. How dare they steal from me! How dare they take the money I work so many hours for and give it to people so they can sit on their ass and watch Oprah in a house I'm helping to pay for. How dare they confiscate the fruits of my labor so some left wing bozo at the University of Babaloo can do a study to find out if...