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Is Citizen volunteerism necessary to pull the US out of it's financial hole?
We are in a rut in the USA. Everybody can see this clearly. The discussions concerning the distribution of money to maintain our services have revealed we may not have enough to do the job without further going into debt. Obviously just paying our taxes is not enough to solve our national problems.
Could citizen voluntarism be the kicker that gets the ball over the goal post? Is it possible to make Citizen voluntarism mandatory, say 100 hours per year or military service, to get the right to vote in elections?
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Peter Law 30+
As I understand it; your founding fathers realised this & made it illegal to charge income tax. Naturally the politicians have been trying to change this, but without success. If I am wrong please correct me, I am from the UK & may have it wrong.
""The federal government rests its authority to collect income tax on the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—the federal income tax amendment—which was allegedly ratified in 1913............. ......... After an extensive year-long nationwide research project, William J. Benson discovered that the 16th Amendment was not ratified by the requisite three-fourths of the states and that nevertheless Secretary of State Philander Knox had fraudulently declared ratification.""
http://www.thelawthatneverwas.com/
Anyhow, if we let them spend our money, & print as much extra as they like, then we will end up as their slaves.
:-)
John Moonstroller 20+
" The 16th Amendment, the income tax, has been the subject of many Supreme Court decisions. The IRS always cites to the Brushaber v. Union Pacific R.R. Co., 240 U.S. 1 (1916), to inform the public that the income tax was held to be constitutional by the Supreme Court. What the IRS doesn’t inform the public about Mr. Frank Brushaber, the central character in the Supreme Court case, is that he was a withholding agent for several foreign investors in the Union Pacific Railroad, acting as their fiduciary.
The Supreme Court, obviously being aware of all of the pertinent details, ruled in the Brushaber case that the federal government always had the power to tax income as an excise tax and, therefore, the 16th Amendment is constitutional.
The Supreme Court then ruled in the very next case it decided, Stanton v. Baltic Mining, 240 US 103 (1916), the following: “… that by the previous ruling it was settled that the provisions of the Sixteenth Amendment conferred no new power of taxation, but simply prohibited the previous complete and plenary power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged and being placed in the category of direct taxation subject to apportionment by a consideration of the sources from which the income was derived…”. The ”previous ruling” cited in the Stanton decision was referring to the Brushaber decision.
A few years later the Supreme Court again ruled upon the 16th Amendment’s effect on the federal government’s power of taxation. In Peck & Co. v. Lowe, 247 US 165 (1918), the Supreme Court stated, in part: “The Sixteenth Amendment … does not extend the taxing power to new or excepted subjects …”.
You can read more here: http://llstuler.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/the-constitutionthe-supreme-court-the-16th-amendment/