The Secret History of the Income Tax and its unconstitutionality

Our government’s desire for confiscating our money is limitless. As long as the people are willing to tolerate it, and according to whatever limits the people’s tolerance will extend to, the government will confiscate and squander as much as it can. These limitations and the people’s tolerance is determined by their level of ignorance or lack of knowledge concerning the tax code. The amount of the citizenry’s earnings being left untouched by the government is the amount it cannot seize without stirring civil unrest.  

Few taxes were levied during America’s beginning years. A handful was only manageable for our charming federal overseers; that being taxes on alcohol, carriages,  sugar, tobacco, and a few other taxes on basic items for consumers. During the War with Great Britain of 1812, sales taxes were levied on various items of luxury as a means for paying the costs of war. In 1817, with Great Britain’s vanquishment, Congress eliminated all internal taxes and financially supported the federal government with tariffs or imports. Taxes may not have been too problematic for the people during the war with Great Britain, or at least as problematic as they were during the wars after the War of 1812, but war-time since then has always been the best time for raising taxes and having the people be acquiescent to these increases, because they have been programmed to think of them as being indispensable for paying the costs of war. The unwarranted and extravagant money squanderers of our political class would use this to their avail in later years after the War of 1812-1817 and all throughout American history thereafter.  

It was during the Civil War when the first attempt at instituting an income tax came about. Congress passed a bill in 1861 demanding a 3 percent income tax on everyone earning a $600 to $10,000 annual salary. Becoming disgruntled with the income tax,  the populace forced an abrogation thereof and returned to taxing tobacco and alcohol, but government’s desire for instituting a permanent income tax did not die. Instead, it merely went into a state of dormancy. Throughout the next twenty years members of Congress fought tooth and nail to enact another income tax with the introduction of no less than sixty-eight bills.

The Panic of 1893 was a time of economic downturn when the Reading Railroad went into receivership and the businesses and banks investing in it followed suit. The Panic of 1893 was ideally excusable for the government to introduce a new income tax in 1894. As politicians were then as they are now; so obscure with their manifest intentions and doings, the trailblazers of the income tax assigned a benevolent and appealing phrase to the new tax bill: “An act to reduce taxation, provide revenue for the government, and for other purposes.”

The 1894 taxation act foisted upon every American making more than $4,000 annually a 2 percent tax while exempting all federal, state and local government officials from paying the new tax. Where had the principles of “equal treatment under the law” escaped to? A series of events followed after the 2 percent tax on $4,000 annual salaries, in which, at its zenith, resulted in a constitutional amendment, but was soon found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. In 1895 it was declared to be in violation of Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution. Albeit, it did not end there, but would still evolve into the labyrinthine income tax system we are encumbered with today. The decade following after, the Supreme Court became more morally retrogressive along with public sentiment and awareness being diluted, because of the eventual ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment.

In the Senate, the Republican Party destroyed every bill the Democrats introduced to increase taxes on higher incomes. The Democrats used this as leverage to traduce the Republicans as being bastions for the rich and hoarders of wealth while campaigning to have Republican power nullified. This forced William Howard Taft, while most knew him as being strongly opposed to the tax, to include in his political speeches support for income taxes being good “in principle.”

It was Joseph Bailey, a paradoxically anti-income tax Conservative Democrat from Texas, who in April of 1909 tried to humiliate Republicans by deceiving them into opposing another income tax bill similar to those antecedently introduced. While anticipating the Republican Party’s opposition to the introduction of his team’s bill, Bailey was stunned to see Teddy Roosevelt and many other Liberally-minded Republicans vote in favor of the bill thereby making it seem as though it would surely pass.

 Bailey was not the only one left stunned. In a panic-stricken response, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, the Republican floor leader, conferred with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and President Taft to strategize about how to ward off Bailey’s tax bill. They decided to make an attempt to outflank their opponents since their own party was too divided to be victorious in a direct confrontation. They gave their support for an income tax under the stipulation of it being enacted via a constitutional amendment. They dissertated amongst themselves about the likelihood not being great of it winning approval from the House and Senate. They talked about about it certainly being rebuffed in the more Conservative states and not receiving the three fourths legislature votes of which were requisite for ratification in it becoming an amendment. The Senate voted 77 to 0 in approval, and the House 318 to 14.

The Democrats reacted uproariously when President Taft unpredictably relayed a letter of recommendation on June 16th 1909 for the passage of a constitutional amendment for enacting a federal income tax. Both Democrats and Republicans filled the ears of the constituents with much claptrap about the income tax and the lie that only the wealthiest people, those who would feel no more than a pinch, would be affected by this and not anyone from the middle or lower classes. The Sixteenth Amendment was instituted on December 7^th 1913.

When the income tax was first instituted only half of 1 percent of the country’s income earners paid any income taxes. A few years later it had become the federal government’s chief source of income. Currently, nearly half of all federal revenue is supported through the income tax. 26 years after the ratification of the income tax, only 5 percent of the population of taxpayers and their dependents had to file tax returns. Today, 80 percent of the population is robbed from the income tax. The “withholding from wages and salaries” facet of the income tax that was employed in 1943 by Franklin D. Roosevelt facilitated the process of tax collection for the government only, having the tax be collected at the payroll window before the taxpayer was even scheduled to pay. This, more than any other facet of the income tax, transmuted the whole blueprint of it being a tax merely on the wealthy into a tax on all of the masses with the middle class taking the brunt of the blow. In the upper brackets, rates have increased as high as 94 percent during times of war and currently it would be 50 percent if we were in a time of peace. People with median income in the middle class pay between 12 and 35 percent.

At last, to put the icing on the cake, the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution fulfills one of the Communist Manifesto’s 10 main objectives: “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” This is one of very many other features of America that is essentially Communistic. 

Sources: http://www.salestax.org/library/skousen_16history.html

http://www.amazon.com/Fair-Tax-Book-Saying-Goodbye/dp/0060875496

Part 2 of Republicans and Democrats Are On Board For Shipping Jobs Overseas

This essay is in continuation of the last essay that was written on the effects of NAFTA and globalization. 

United States exports may have grown by 16.6 percent during Obama’s tenure, but imports have swelled by 19.7 percent, leaving the United States’ trade deficit in 2010 to be mounted by 33 percent from $375 billion to $498 billion, a big deficit boost America has never before  seen in a decade’s time. From December 2000 to December 2010, America incurred a total trade deficit of $6.1 trillion which surpassed our entire economic growth. Resultantly, America had to borrow $1.553 billion every day to indemnify for this decade of trade deficits. When it comes to “advanced technology products”, at the start of George W. Bush’s second year in office, America ran a deficit with the world surging from $16 billion in 2002 to $82 billion in 2010. For the past decade, in 22 states the loss of manufacturing jobs increased by one-third: Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio had a 38 percent decline, North Carolina a 42 percent decline, Michigan a 48 percent decline, Rhode Island a 44 percent decline, and New Jersey a 39 percent decline. In 2010, America had totaled a $110 billion trade deficit with Japan, Germany, Mexico, and South Korea in automobiles and parts.  With an economy one-fifteenth lesser the size of ours, South Korea exports 12 times the dollar volume of automobiles and parts we sell to them. Foreigners’ share of the United States market exceeds America’s share of the world market by $500 billion. 

The United States has a trade imbalance that is more than 7 times bigger than any other country on the planet. 

According to Americaneconomicalert.org our trade deficits for each month in 2011 ranged anywhere from $43 billion to $51 billion giving us a total trade deficit of almost $560 billion for the entire year. And the total trade deficit for this year so far, from January to August, is at a total of $374,347,000. By and large, since 1975, America has run a trade deficit of $8 trillion with the rest of the globe. Think about how much of the national debt would be nonexistent conjointly with how well our federal, state, and local taxes and our American workers’ wages would have been paid and how many businesses of all sorts would have been able to flourish in being supported with $8 trillion. 

America had a $1.3 billion trade surplus with Mexico anterior to the enactment of NAFTA in 1993. In 2011, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of $64.9 billion. Our current trade deficit with Mexico is at $43.3 billion.  According to the Economic Policy Institute, America had a “job-supporting trade surplus with Mexico” before NAFTA, and by 2010 America had a jobs trade deficit with Mexico amounting to a total of 682,900 jobs being displaced in America.  

America in2011 ran a trade deficit of $295 billion with China, up from $6 million in 1985, and is the biggest trade deficit a country has ever had with another country in the history of the world. Due to China’s currency manipulation, America has lost 2.8 million jobs since 2001 to China, 1.9 million of those jobs being in manufacturing. Many economists estimate that China’s currency manipulation yields to them an unfair subsidy on their exports of up to 40 percent while having the biggest protectionist policies of all the major countries in the world since World War 2. With China’s high tariffs, the Chinese can sell a Jeep Grand Cherokee in China for $85,000 more than a Jeep Grand Cherokee that is being sold in America for $27,490. 

Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost per month. Also, China and America were once equalized in their production of 100 million tons of crude steel, but after China joined the World Trade Organization, America saw a major downturn in output while China saw a major upturn. Last year, China dismayingly surpassed the United States in steel production by 880 million tons to 81 million tons. China’s industry preponderates over every other force in the global steel market and the market inputs manufacturing iron ore and metallurgical coal.

General Motors has been diminishing its operations of manufacture in this country while amply investing and broadening its business base in China.  Dan Akerson, the CEO of General Motors, while addressing journalists in Shanghai, China said 70% of all General Motors vehicles are being made outside of the United States. General Motors has “11 joint ventures in China with SAIC and FAW. We’re involved in vehicle manufacturing, sales, distribution, engineering design, downstream businesses such as telematics, financing and used cars. We operate 11 assembly plants in China, four power train plants in 8 cities across the country. We have more than 2,700 dealerships and sales outlets nationwide. We regard our 11 joint ventures as 11 keys to success. Not just in China, but globally. Our commitment to working in China, with China, and for China remains strong and focused on the future. We’re now building out the advanced technology center which will bring our research and development that is centered largely in the United States. We’re gonna diversify that more into China because we think this market is so critically important to the success of our company.” 

SAIC is the Communist government-run automotive corporation which monopolizes most industrial activity including the automobile industry. FAW is the second government-owned manufacturing company. Corporatists of General Motors have been bowing down to the authoritarian Communist masters for years. Since the 1990s Communist China has knavishly maneuvered American corporations. China wrests United States technology and industrial capabilities under the guise and promise of profiteering for America with China’s mammoth population of workers. According to a Commerce Report: “GM beat our other prospective foreign partners with a more than $1 billion bid to produce a variation of Buick Sedans with the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp (SAIC). One of the major factors, if not the main impetus for the subsequent contract award, was GM’s willingness to transfer a good deal of state-of-the-art technology. The fact that technology transfer was, indeed, the price extracted from GM for the China joint venture contract is confirmed by internal GM documents.” 

With General Motors’ assistance, Communist state-sponsored corporations are investing in America and buying energy resources and principal industrial plants. The Nexteer plant, formerly owned by General Motors in Saginaw, Michigan, was first bought by an obscure company known as Pacific Motors and the industrial authority of Beijing, who then 6 months later transmitted ownership to AVIC, a corporation run by the Communist Chinese government. 

All of this has been made possible with the Obama administration’s taxpayer bailout and claimed ownership of General Motors.

Laughably enough, though Romney ascribed this entire event to being a scam of “crony capitalism”, he ought to be very prudent about what waters he treads on considering that two of his biggest campaign contributors, Wall Street plutocrats John Paulson and Paul Singer, profited $1 billion each, a 3000% gain, in playing with the game of the General Motors bailout and spinoffs and returns on the stock market.

Republicans and Democrats Are On Board For Shipping Jobs Overseas, NAFTA and TPP Free Trade Agreements

During the presidential debates of 1992, Ross Perot warned America about NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreements), a function at the epicenter of the emerging one world government/economic apparatus in which the Mexican, Canadian, and American globalists have chiefly used to de-industrialize America’s economy and send American jobs overseas, never to be repatriated. Perot symbolically characterized the entire program of shipping jobs overseas as being a great sucking sound.

Ross Perot ran against George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992's presidential race. George Herbert Walker Bush was the man who met with Canadian Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, and Mexican President Carlos Salinas in San Antonio, Texas on December 17, 1992 to ceremonially sign their names to NAFTA papers, spearheading and promoting the agreement before their legislative and parliamentary branches.  George Bush’s presidential tenure ended before he was able to finalize the process of the agreement being enacted into law, so the agreement was passed onto Bill Clinton for the finalization of the enactment process.  

After many symposiums, NAFTA passed the House of Representatives on November 17, 1993 with 132 Republicans and 102 Democrats approving. It afterwards passed the Senate with 34 Republicans and 27 Democrats approving.

The impasse American citizens entrapped themselves in when having to choose between which of the two men would be the nation’s next presidential figurehead and mouthpiece for the globalists to use in hornswoggling the American people into accepting the next step in forging the New World Order in 1992 is the same impasse Americans have entrapped themselves in with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Americans still have not learned from their history. They still have not seen through the smoke mirrors of the perpetual tussle between the Republicans and Democrats notoriously in the media’s spotlight. 

American businesses are transporting themselves overseas to places where overtaxing environmental regulations and bureaucratic restrictions exist much less. These are places where labor standards are virtually nonexistent as well, and workers can be legally paid slave labor wages and have health benefits be unprovided to them. In other nations where our parsimonious American corporations are amalgamated with foreign corporations, how are American workers expected to compete with the foreign workers therein who are willing to toil for, say, 6 cents an hour and seven days a week in jobs we Americans toil in here and expect to be paid 8 to 12 dollars an hour for ? Corporations and businesses of all types will take the workers who are much more inexpensive, leaving Americans to slide further into the pit of joblessness and being subjected to more government assistance programs and foreign goods and services. 

Let us take a look at what has economically resulted from the enforcement of NAFTA. America has lost 5.7 million manufacturing jobs between the years 2000 and 2010, calculated at a total 33 percent loss exceeding the calculated losses during the 1930s Great Depression. In that period, manufacturing accounted for 34 percent of all jobs, but now manufacturing only accounts for 11 percent of all jobs. America has lost 42,400 factories since the year 2001, 36 percent of which employed more than 1,000 workers and 38 percent of which employed 500 to 999 workers. Total manufacturing Gross Domestic Product in 2008 (at $1.64 trillion) represented 11.5 percent of the United States economic output, a decrease from 17 percent in 1999, and 28 percent in 1959.  

An article from Yahoo Finance cited data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research saying “the United States economy has lost about one-third of its capacity to generate good jobs.” And that is with 34% of all American workers in 2010 having a four-year college degree, an increase from 19% of all American workers in 1979.

During the scanty employment growth of the past 4 years, 58 percent of the jobs created were low-wage jobs, as indicated by the National Employment Law Project. 22 percent accounted for jobs with mid-wage incomes and 20 percent accounted for jobs with higher-wage incomes. The low-wage jobs pay $13.83 an hour or less. During our economic slump some 60 percent of the lost jobs paid mid-wage incomes while 21 percent paid low-wage incomes and 19 percent paid higher-wage incomes. When looking into 366 different vocations between 2008 and 2012, the National Employment Law Project recorded the median hourly wages for low-wage jobs were $7.69 to $13.83, mid-wage jobs were between $13.84 and $21.13, and high-wage jobs were between $21.14 and $54.44. Only 46 percent of the re-employed full-time workers were earning as much as they did at their former jobs. About one-third reported receiving a cut in their pay of 20 percent or more. 

 The RT reported this past October that only 4 of every 10 adults in the United States are employed. The unemployment reports released earlier in October saying unemployment decreased to 7.8 percent are only in view of those who are not only jobless but have withdrawn from seeking for any work. If you are seeking for a paycheck, have submitted in job applications within the past 4 weeks, and are working part-time, you are still considered as being a part of the labor force.  When looking at the employment to population ratio, 58.7 percent of Americans are working, leaving in total 82 million or 41 percent of people unemployed.

All of the those referenced numbers above signifying a moribund economy are what Obama’s supporters will say has been “inherited” from the spoils Bush caused, much of those spoils linking to NAFTA, and that it takes more than one presidential term to stabilize an economy. Accordingly, in the eyes of his supporters, Obama is assoiled for any noteworthy progress not being made that he promised to have be made during his tenure. Contrarily, if Obama truly has been heroically and untiringly working to salvage this economy from the pernicious policies of Bush, any reasonable human being would rationalize that Obama’s administration would listen to the admonishments being given by their Democratic associates in this video and the many other American citizens and political leaders who have censured NAFTA over the years.

Many politicians have no intentions for terminating our participation in these unfair trade agreements with every manufacturing market of the world so we can consume every good we can manufacture domestically, have our Gross Domestic Product grow exponentially and create millions of jobs here in America. Obama is trotting on the way of the globalists despite the fact he proclaimed many times that “I don't think NAFTA has been good for America and I never have” as well as saying that he “opposed NAFTA and voted against CAFTA”. 

Much like how Mitt Romney has "flip-flopped" and repeatedly changed his stances on many issues, Obama has done so with this issue. Before being instated in the Oval Office, he promised multitudinously to “renegotiate” our terms and standings with NAFTA and said we “should use the hammer as a potential opt out and as leverage to ensure that we actually get labor and environmental standards that are enforced.” 

In this video the CTV network queried as to whether or not Obama lied to Ohio about NAFTA and reported that Obama had confessed about his false promises of renegotiation on NAFTA saying “Don’t worry. It’s campaign rhetoric. Don’t take it seriously.” 

Remember when he told us during the Democratic presidential race in 2008 that “globalization right now is creating winners and losers, but the problem is, it's the same winners and losers every time?” 

Remember when we were promised not free trade, but “fair trade?" 

Where is Obama now on these terms and agreements concerning NAFTA?

Obama’s administration has been focusing on implementing new measures in the free trade zone with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Totalitarian redefinitions of intellectual property will be foisted onto the public with this agreement. In rewriting copyright laws, internet user’s freedoms of expression along with their rights and claims to internet privacy and acquisition of crucial information via the internet will be eviscerated. In conjunction with stripping innovators of their rights and claims to copyrights, trademarks, patents, and perhaps geographical indications, this is designed to have innovators of varying types be accused of copyright infringement in situations where copyright infringement was not committed. The internet’s global infrastructure will be transformed with this. 

The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement--- “NAFTA on steroids”--- is merging Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam with the United States in negotiating a treaty and restructuring social contracts and the standards of worldwide trade, wage, and regulatory policies without the mainstream press giving any detailed coverage on it, all at the behest of the aristocrats systematizing the New World Order. As the United States hectors economically fraught countries into joining under the auspices of an unusual provision in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Canada and Mexico have joined the Trans-Pacific Partnership this October in the meantime having Japan and China scheduling to join later. While NAFTA has provided ways for transnational corporations to base themselves on conditions and territories where they can pay their worker’s slave labor wages and avoid paying for their healthcare and pensions, The Trans-Pacific Partnership takes everything a few steps further in giving transnational corporations the legality to lower their worker’s wages even more, evade or self-exempt from paying penalties for environmental damage, be non-compliant with laws intended to protect the environment, consumers, and workers, and can sue governments to receive compensatory funds for any laws that have impinged the transnational corporations. Precedents being established by the Trans-Pacific Partnership will endow transnational corporations with the prerogative of litigating against countries’ laws, regulations, and court decisions in international tribunal courts whose pronouncements in all ways trump that of any countries’ domestic judicial courts.  Conflicts of interest have no hindering legal impact on the consciences or aggrandizements and careers of those who masterminded and support the Trans-Pacific Partnership. 

The Trans-Pacific Partnership aims to terminate Buy American laws. Only 69 members of the House of Representatives seem to be aggressively opposing this, and it can be read in a letter they wrote in “strong support of Buy American procurement policies” articulating their concerns about how everything being proffered will “adversely impact American jobs, workers, and manufacturers.” Furthermore, they said, “This could result in large sums of U.S. tax dollars being invested to strengthen other countries’ manufacturing sectors, rather than our own. At a time when U.S. manufacturing only employs 11.71 million people, a 40% decline from its peak in 1979 and the lowest since 1941, we simply cannot allow this to happen.” 

Unfortunately, while members of both the Democrat and Republican parties signed their names to this letter, the many Democrats and Republicans in support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement outnumber them. This comes as a new staggering eye-opener showing how majorly dubious most politicians are, regardless of how much one politician exclusively and ornately declares himself/herself as having genuine intentions of good will (in reality no good will) for the American people.