"It's so simple, it's ridiculous": taxing times for 16th amendment rebels

In U.S. Code Tide 26, Subtitle A, Chapter 1, Subchapter A, Part I, Section 1, it says, "There is hereby imposed on the taxable income of ...," followed by subcategories that seem to include most Americans, complete with tables showing the percentage owed for each income range. (Subchapter A even comes close to that magic word liable that many in the movement insist is nowhere applied to personal income taxes--it's called "Determination of Tax Liability.") But "taxable income" is the rub. Tax honesty types claim the "constitutional" definition of income, as set forth in such Supreme Court cases as Doyle v. Mitchell Brothers (1918), is corporate profits, not individuals' wages. (Courts have knocked down this claim regularly during the last 30 years.)

The movement has an argument against the income tax for every level of abstraction, from the highest (taxing the fruits of our labor is against our natural rights as sovereign individuals) to the lowest (the IRS can't manage to get everyone, so it is reasonably safe just not to file). One California paralegal who speaks at the We The People conference relies on everything from the Magna Carta to the Treaty of Paris of 1765 to the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights to defend her contention that she doesn't owe any income tax. Massed together, the chorus of tax honesty voices can't help but remind you of the lawyer in the old joke who argued that his client was not even in town when the victim was killed; and if he was in town, he didn't kill him; and if he did kill him, he was insane when he did it.

At the conference you learn that taxing violates our natural rights; and anyway, the Constitution does not permit an unapportioned direct tax like an income tax; and if you think the 16th Amendment took care of that, well, it wasn't properly ratified; and even if it was, it didn't give any new taxing powers to Congress; and even if it did, the statutes and codes of the IRS as written aren't officially U.S. law; and even if they were, they don't define liability and income such that any normal working American owes taxes; and anyway, if you just don't file they might never catch you. And there are plenty of complications on every step of this tangled path. (The claim that the 16th Amendment wasn't properly ratified actually holds up pretty well. To judge from the pathbreaking research of Bill Benson--a marvelous example of legal Protestantism--there were enough procedural irregularities in its passage that it technically should not have been declared ratified in 1913. Still, it was thus certified, and the courts tend to respond to Bensonite arguments by saying it's too late to do anything about it now, and it isn't the court's problem.)

This doesn't mean anything goes in stabbing at the income tax. There are fringe beliefs even on this fringe. Larry Becraft is a lawyer who has actually won a handful of acquittals--including one for Vernice Kuglin--in defending people on trial for tax evasion. He gives a talk that is basically a warning to the movement to get its act straight and stop being absurd. Among the beliefs even others in the movement condemn as silly are the notions that by using a ZIP code or allowing a government document to spell your name in all capital letters, you surrender your sovereignty and make yourself a serf of the federal government, and that the income tax applies only to people who live in a federal territory or district, not to residents of the states.