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Senators Miller & Chambliss,
Congressman Linder,
Other Members of the Georgia Congressional Delegation,
Other Members of Congress,
Governor Perdue,
Georgia Representatives Bannister, Heard, & Dix,
Georgia Senator Henson,
Georgia Leaders,
Those of you at the state level don’t realize how much power you have. During the early 1970s, 32 states called for a Constitutional Convention. The goal was a balanced federal budget. It was a small window of opportunity for the return to real freedom and limited government. We missed that opportunity and government expansion has continued unabated.
Federal income taxes have become oppressive, vague, and subject to bureaucratic interpretation. When thugs take my property for their own consumption, re-sale, or charity; it is called theft. When you do it, it is called voluntary taxation. You are mistaken if you believe unrestrained political power will always work for good. Evil cannot create goodness. Unrestrained power must be stopped.
You can choose to continue delegating your responsibility to bureaucrats and executive fiat. You can choose to ignore the common sense, facts, and moral reasoning that our nation was founded on; or you can use Article V of the U. S. Constitution to hit the government “reset” button. Repeal the 16th Amendment. In 1776 citizens from several states revolted to overturn lesser injustice.
Please take the time to read the information, comments, and opinions below.
Respectfully,
Wes Alexander
F. A Hayek - "To be controlled in our economic pursuits, means to be....controlled in everything."
Paul Craig Roberts - "Some of the taxes we must pay are not really taxes. Capital gains and estate taxes are confiscations. A capital gains tax is a tax on the rise in the price of an asset. A home or land rises in value because of inflation and supply and demand. A person who sells his home or land has no real gain, because he cannot repurchase the home or land at a lower price. A capital gain tax simply confiscates a percentage of the asset."
Ludwig von Mises - "It is the market, and not the revenue department, which decides upon whom the burden of the tax falls and how it affects production and consumption. The market and its inescapable law are supreme."
Paul Craig Roberts - "Income taxes are not the only taxes. There are property taxes, wealth taxes, excise taxes, and sales taxes. If you add together all the taxes you paid, you might find that you own no more of your own income than a 19th century slave. A slave owed his master about half his work product, the rest being necessary for his own maintenance."
Paul Craig Roberts - "Democracy produces the opposite results of feudalism. Instead of an upper class living off the sweat of a lower class, the lower class lives off the sweat of an upper class."
The email below was in response to my question to the National Taxpayers Union about mounting a campaign at the state level to repeal the 16th amendment - WBA
Monday, February 03, 2003 PM
Subject: Repeal the 16th?
Thank you very much for your inquiry.
As you have correctly surmised, the Constitution does provide a little-discussed method of proposing a Constitutional amendment -- a limited convention called by 2/3 of the states, whose amendment would then be subject to the 3/4 ratification requirement among the various Legislatures.
Back in the early 1970s, National Taxpayers Union met with state lawmakers to explore the feasibility of proposing a Balanced Budget Amendment through a single-subject convention. NTU and its allies at the grassroots level persuaded 32 of the required 34 Legislatures to pass BBA convention calls, only to see the momentum for this drive slow by the mid-1980s and actually reverse itself in the late 1980s (there are now 28 BBA convention calls in force). The convention calls have been undone primarily through a disinformation campaign sponsored by a strange alliance of labor unions (who oppose balanced budgets and limited spending) and far-right groups (who believe the Article V Convention is a plot to repeal the entire Constitution).
Although NTU supports the Article V convention method for proposing amendments, a major new campaign for a separate convention to propose repeal of Amendment 16 is not all that feasible within our current budget. Although both a Balanced Budget Amendment and repeal of Amendment 16 are very popular, each require a separate lobbying effort (reflecting our belief that conventions should only be called to draft single amendments). On the other hand, the same unholy alliance that opposes a BBA convention would do the same for repeal of Amendment 16 (the unions aggressively support punitive income taxes, and the far-right groups believe Amendment 16 wasn't properly ratified anyway).
Naturally, NTU will pursue every opportunity to repeal Amendment 16, including a limited convention to propose such a change. It is likely that the increased complexity of the tax system (such as the AMT) will so confuse Americans and hamper tax collections that Congress will be forced, out of self-interest, to consider tax reform in the next five years. Article V convention calls (from, say, 20-25 states) could add useful pressure on Washington and hasten the day of debate. In this context, the Article V method will play an important (though frankly not central) role in our current effort for tax reform.
Sincerely,
Pete Sepp,
V-P Communications
National Taxpayers Union
Gary North's REALITY CHECK
Issue 231 - April 15, 2003 - BEWARE THE IDES OF APRIL
Today is tax day. All across America, people will be frantically filling out their 1040 forms, mailing them in by midnight. Others will be sending in their extension forms. The annual day of reckoning reminds us that there are no free lunches.
Before income tax withholding was dreamed up by Beardsley Ruml in 1942, and sold to Congress as a wartime measure in 1943, Americans did not pre-pay through the
year. They paid on tax day. Most of them didn't pay in 1942. Ruml was at the time chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the most powerful regional FED bank. He had been on one or another the Rockefeller Foundations' payrolls since 1921. He was Treasurer of Macy's, the giant department store. He had noticed there that customers paid their bills more readily when required to spend a little each month. He applied the same principle to taxes, with payment in advance. It worked. Income tax withholding raised revenues from this source from $686 million in 1943 to $7.8 billion in 1944.
What very few Americans know is that the income tax amendment was never actually passed by the voters. There were major irregularities in the amendment's voting procedure. The government wanted that tax in 1913, so the irregularities were overlooked. The Attorney General announced that it had been passed by the voters. Not for another seven decades did anyone go to the original sources, state by state, to see if the amendment had been legally ratified. Bill Benson, a former tax collector for the state of Illinois, did the spade work, collected 17,000 documents, and co-authored a book that showed that the 16th
Amendment had not been legally ratified.
The book, THE LAW THAT NEVER WAS, came out in 1985. It immediately was dropped down the memory hole. Professional historians, who should have done the work two generations earlier, ignored the book.
This historical fact does not mean that the tax laws are not going to be enforced, as always. It surely doesn't mean that a jury will uphold you if you stop paying taxes. No jury will believe Benson's story. No jury is going to let you off the hook when they know they are forced to pay. It's a matter of envy.
Any attempt to use legal technicalities to overcome the lifeblood of the modern welfare State will fail. The courts are not going to overturn the entire modern economic system, with its faith in salvation by legislation and taxation. Our taxes are the judges' bread and butter.
Bill Benson doesn't pay income taxes. But he spent time in prison, where he almost died, as part of his one-man protest. He also has what you and I don't have: officially certified records of each state's voting in 1912. Still, I would love to have a CD-ROM with the images
of all of those documents. They could be scanned in. I'd pay Bill $50 for such a CD. I have recommended to him that he do this, but so far he hasn't.
THE CON JOB IN 1913
You may have seen a copy of the original 1040 form.
It was four pages long. Taxpayers paid 1% on everything above $3,000. The top rate was 7% (6% plus 1%). That rate kicked in at $500,000.
You can compare the purchasing power of the dollar in 1913 vs. 2003 by going to the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Use the Inflation Calculator under "Inflation & Consumer Spending. Use $100 for the 1913 figure. You will find that today, you would need $1,849 to match the purchasing power of $100 in 1913.
So, anyone who did not earn $3,000 -- the equivalent of $54,000 -- paid no income tax in 1913. Anyone who earned more than the equivalent of $360,000 paid an additional 1% surcharge on income over this. The top surcharge of 6% kicked in at $500,000, the equivalent of $9,245,000. That's annual income, not net wealth.
Within five years, the top rate was 77% on income of more than $1 million. At the bottom bracket, the tax was raised by a factor of 6, i.e., 6% on income over $4,000.
Most people escaped most of the income tax burden. They escaped until 1942. But, generation by generation, the bottom bracket has dropped, price inflation has risen
(pushing everyone into a higher bracket), and tax compliance has increased. So has the authority of the tax collectors at all levels to undermine our privacy.
The opponents of income taxation in 1912 said that we would see the day when taxes would extract 25% of people's income. Such Cassandras were ridiculed. Today, the Federal government collects about 22% of national income. State and local governments extract an additional 18%. Yet the United States is taxed at lower rates than most Western
industrial nations.
Note: the level of taxation imposed by the British after the French-Indian (Seven Years) War
ended in 1763 was in the range of 1% of national income outside of the South, and possibly as high as 2.5% in the South. To escape from that oppressive tax burden, the colonists revolted in 1776.
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