Editor I believe in good conscience you must attach a name to these quotes. Many folks reading this will think that this is law. Justices can say many things and if they say them in a minority opinion that is all that it is a minority opinion. Since we still have an income tax this quote if it is from a Justice must be a minority opionion. By stating the quote is by United States Supreme Court what exactly do you mean. Even a lawyer can appear before the court and make statements that will appear in the record. I think you should clarify this. Many will be misled.

Huh? The Supreme Court cannot make statements or be quoted. It is like quoting the President of the United States without saying which President. Do we have a Justice to attach to this quote. And if we do I would assume that he had a minority view on what ever case was being considered. My copy of the Constitution says this: 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 wihtout regard to any census or enumeration." It is interesting to me to get the Canadian input on our Constitution or forgive y'all may be Americans living abroad. Otherwise I assume that your own constitution, history and public issues are just to boring to be involved with. Someone once told me that living in Canada is liking living trapped in an attic of a large house where there is always a party going on down stairs and you are never allowed to attend. Zoltan I don't believe that an Amendment can violate a prior amendment. Otherwise all amendments after the X which gave the Feds more power or in which the "nation" regulated the "states" as in slavery, voting rights, etcetera would be invalid. Your interpretation of the X would stop the Amendment process in its tracts and therefore the X would in effect be invalid or against the Constituion which specifically calls for an amendment process.

Warren you should heed your own advice and be virtuous: ignorance is not a virtue! Unfortunately I have had to do your research for you. I failed to find the pie chart which is usually in each copy of Publication 17 (ever heard of it) but have pulled the following figures from a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) web site. These figures cover a long period from 1966 to 2005 so they are averages. Your 20% statement widely misses the mark. Here are the stats: Personal Income Tax 50%, Social Security Receipts 33%, Corporate Income Tax 20%, Estate and Gift, Excise, and Customs finishing out the bottom rungs. This same source states that as a percentage of GDP income taxes were about 10% under Clinton after having retreated under Reagan and Bushes to around 7% and expected to go back up towards the year 2017. As I have stated previously Reagan increased Social Security Taxes when he cut Income Taxes and robbed the SS fund for his star wars etcetera. Logic dictates that income taxes must go up to pay back social security the trillion or so it is owed. Check it our for yourself because IGNORANCE IS NOT ONLY NOT A VIRTURE IT IS VERY UNBECOMING. For you Mikey I have the following information: the IRS Budget is 11 billion dollars, the agency brings in close to 3 trillion dollars a year. A real good return on investment I would say. As far as what it takes in Mike do you just mean by audit. You must in fairness include all the money people pay in because of their fear of audit. Just like plumbers get paid an exorbitant wage (highest of the trades I am told) they keep the water flowing in our homes all year long. The presence of IRS law enforcement keeps the federal income taps flowing also. People invariably will not be honest if audits are not performed. Thus every day we count our change at stores etcetera, employees in banks, and businesses are constanly checked and systems are installed to guarantee correctness in financail transactions. Do you honestly believe that any government can operate differently than what we consider the Best Business Practices?

Carlton can you tell me of a time when "innocence was a defense". The quintessential question asker was Colombo. I really like the Lieutenants style. The only way to stop him in his tracks was to tell him the truth and with a straight face. If you got either one of those wrong (the truth or the face) he would come back at you. Bulldog tenacity thats what I like in a law enforcer or investigater.

This is the most misunderstood exression. Warren is correct. A cop asks you "will you come along voluntarily or do I have to use the cuffs". The tax return is required by law just like stopping at a stop sign. The tax return is based on what the individual or business knows about their income and expenses. Many make the mistake that the tax return is based on what the government knows. Government knows very little compared to what the covert conspiracy theorists and the "they" crowd on this site think they know. Government and the IRS is mostly benign and only get into the act after you fail to voluntarily stop at the stop sign or to file your tax return. The IRS is like the State Trooper parked behind a tree. Just keeping an eye on things.

You guys can have a field day whipping and beating up on the IRS. They cannot whip or beat back, they can only keep doing their jobs. Audited citizens can bad mouth the IRS and its lowly Agents all they want, but the IRS by law cannot say anything about the citizen except "see ya in court". Unfortunately the ones who screw up their taxes and wind up getting seized upon usually after ten or fifteen years of stonewalling in the payment of their true taxes are the ones who naively listen to unknowlegeable diatribes like y'all are posting. Dear friends pay your correct taxes and don't let this happen to you.

The IRS is the only Fed Agency that does not cost it pays. For each dollar allocated to the IRS Budget it brings in $10. All we need to do is hire more folks to increase the tax revenue ten fold. It is common knowledge or facts tell us .....to those who care to check, that amount of under paid tax each year is approximately $200 billion dollars. This represents about 5 to 10 percent of the 2.5 trillion paid in accurately by the best taxpayers in the world - the American Public. To get the additional $200 billion simple math dictates we need only increase the IRS payroll by about $20 billion. In additon to the amount brought in by audits the general effect of audits is an increase in compliance by all sectors of the public.

Mike you probably have no better faith in Funk and Wagnalls (in fact I don't believe you have faith in anything) but here goes: "Income 1. Money or other benefit, received, the amount so received." "Outgo 1. That which goes out; cost or outlay; opposed to income."

Commissioners are political appointees, not IRS "professionals". Paul the word "income" means come in, outgo means go out. What is difficult about that? Be careful Paul of those carefully crafted and crafty guys, just use your common sense? Now of course some income is specifically exclude from taxation like municipal bond income but for general discussion my definition stands. The Code clearly states, "income from whatever source derived unless specifically excluded by this code". What Mike perchance is the "Original" meaning of income in your dictionary.

You are right Warren, the IRS "Experts" are not "gods" they only offer advice. If you can show or prove that you relied on advice from them and they were wrong the only thing you have to do is pay the tax. No penalty or interest will be charged in such a case. The issue is and always has been correctness (100% absolute correctness) nothing more and nothing less. If it was not done correctly the first time even with IRS help it can be corrected later without penalty and interest. What is wrong with that may I ask? Do you want your return done correctly or not whether it is sooner or later! I mean y'all got three years to file amendments and such and get it all right and squared away proper like.

Yepper Mikey! Tax Act of 1862 established the Bureau of Internal Revenue and levied a tax of 3% on incomes between $800 and $10,000 and 5% avove that. Rates of course were entirely to high. Try Wikky sometime you may learn something rather than some secretive right wing propagandist rag.

I did not Wik that but I will now? My understanding is that there was no Internal Revenue until the Civil War. All revenue was exteranl. I don't believe the Civil War Internal Revenue was on labor but on wealth. And yes they hated Treasury Rats even back then. But like it or not the Treasury Rats were the real heroes of the Civil War and every other war and project this government has prosecuted.

Archer what issuing power. We discussed the other day that just issuing money to pay debts is inflationary. One must earn money the old fashinoned way - WORK FOR IT. The way govenrments earn money is by the old fashinoned way of taxation, which is the transfering of real wealth (work credits denominated in dollars) to the governments whether it be in the form of sales taxes, property taxes, or income taxes. Having issuing power as you say is nonsense. When will you ever get on track.

What he says all seems to be true but is it GOOD. The IRS was created to finance the Civil War or War Between The States. Without it the US would be truncated and apparently the Confederate States would extend to the tip of South America with slavery all the way down. Without war Germany would rule most of the world and we would at a minimum be some type of vassal state. Forget about borders and going to the moon etcetea if citizens did not have to report their taxes under penalties of perjury. PS: Would it not also be great if we could go to the Supermarket, fill are carts and bags with groceries and compute the amount we owe ourselves and just drop it into a box on the way out. Why don't they let us do that? Unfortunatly the Supermarket feels a need to do a tally themselves and collect it themselves or not let us out the door. Funny isn't it that the idea of tallies and perjury and fair business dealings are part of all business transactions. Why should our dealings with the government be any different?

Your off base Logan. If no return is filed the IRS will file one for you. Yes you are better off to file yourself. Capone never filed and the IRS could not find his income. They did however determine that he built a million dollar home and had many other trappings of wealth. If you have wealth and it shows then you must have had income. This is the manner in which IRS catches drug dealers all of the time. The secret to beating the IRS is put your money in the ground and never spend it. Laws are not trumped up by the IRS, they are written by Congress and the President. It is a basic tenet of law and logic Logan than you as a lover of logic and philosopy should know and it is this: "Ignorance of the law is no excuse". If one can claim ignorance of the law no one would ever be convicted of any crime or of even not stopping for a red light. All law proscribing behaviour or requiring compliance operates under this principal. LETS ALL GROW UP HEY! You guys that all bemoan the lack of liberty blame your lack on "THEY". And "they" keep us in debt etcetera. Who is this "they". I get offers for credit cards and loans every day. I am totally free to partake or not of these offers. I suggest that those who long for greater liberty and a restoration of some mythical and mystical republic (that never has existed as they perceive it) have some psychological disorder based on their false perception of this elusive THEY.

Anothr silly commissioner. Income is what you put into your pocket, outgo is what you take out of your pocket. Code Section 1 IRC "There shall be a tax on income from whatever source received", obviously Ms. Peterson is taken out of context. The difference between what you put in and the deductible part of what you take out is taxable income. At tax time many people try to go gooffy for their own selfish purposes - to rob their government and fellow citizen.

Reagan is no different than all men down through history that have hated taxes. Have you ever found someone who loves them. When politicians say they are going to cut taxes but they keep spending what they are doing is SELLIMG BONDS. That is what Reagan and Bush did as well as raise SOCIAL SECURITY contributions. This is how they financed the goverment, debt and robbing the "poors" social security fund.

Taxation must be transparent. Government expenditures must be transparent. The citizen should know the reason and logic of the tax system and the expenditures. And in this country we do if anyone is interested. Go to IRS.gov. etcetera. All of the info is available. Many on this site thing these things are all secret and covert operations. Nothing can be further from the truth.

And look what Reaganism/Bushism has done to us 25 years later. A 10 trillion dollar national debt.

I think Bastiat's remarks are trash. What the world needs now is pragmatism which is the American miracle not idealistic garbage. In his exanded essay he says "Life, faculties, production - in other words, individuality, liberty, property - this is man." What trash in logic and in literary construction this is. Individuality, liberty, and property just like government, state, and bureaucracy that does not sevrve the needs of others in some pragmatic way will seize to exist. Businesses know this and so do business men. The capitalist fallacy can be discerned from this vignette: a shirt maker and a shoe maker met at the club bar and were complaining about their ware houses full of merchandise that they could not sell but in which they had a lot of built in profit due to the low wages they paid their workers. They were very proud of their "life, faculties, production, and their individuality (at being so smart), their liberty, and their property" but were crying over the fact they could move the stuff. A child over heard them and suggested that if they paid their workers a better wage that maybe the shoe workers could by shirts and the shirt workers could by shoes. Everyone lived happily ever after. "From the mouths of babes."

Mike the quote was referreing to taxes period!. Not good or bad taxes, taxes!. And that was what I was commenting on. Now if you want to get into the details of good and bad then lets get holt of the devil and have a decent discussion. You know that is where the devil is in the details. This site is not about details but about platitudes.

Read my comment above. It is children who believe a society can live without taxation. Read some history y'all. If taxes are so bad why have they existed for ever and ever with no end in sight either. "Taxes are the basis of civilization" go live in a jungle, no taxation there.

Only if you think folks are as stupid as you are. If you think folks are smart like you then you feel that a democratic government can be run with intelligence and that democratic and financial institutions can be operated to benefit all. Otherwise are only hope is a Marxist or Radical Right elitism to save us all from ourselves.

The problem with many today is that they do not want taxation with representation either. Bottom line they do not want taxation at all. Children such as they are!

Archer you make one fatal flaw in your other wise worthless diatribe. You keep telling us to look things up and you don't have the least understanding of these things? There is not trillions of trillions of dollars of currency in circulation. There is only approximately 500 billion. (LOOK IT UP!) Go on to IRS.com and find out where the money comes from and where it goes. Is renting property or tools to people usury also?