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Originally Posted by ChTatum
Not following this story, but I am opposed to the current income tax structure.
I do believe it is still listed as voluntary, but apparently that is just in theory.
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Very true, if you ask the IRS or the Government to give proof were it say one must render to this so-called income tax there is none, nothing on the books or in our constitution to uphold it! Do I pay?? Yes and why ? Because Government does not obey the Laws and can do whatever they want with you, so no we are not free people, we are salves to a lie, people don't want lose the things they've worked so hard for, so they play their game~
Americans send their money to the Internal Revenue Service or, more properly, allows the IRS to take it from them.
Why?
For years, the IRS has proclaimed that the great virtue of America's tax system is that it's voluntary. How does the IRS define "voluntary"? It says that the tax is voluntary because everyone computes his own income tax liability and sends the amount owed to the government. In other words, if the government calculated the tax liability for the citizenry, the tax would be involuntary. But since the people themselves are permitted to compute the liability, the tax is voluntary.
One can only wonder, of course, how many public-school-trained Americans believe this nonsense. The truth is that the income tax is no more voluntary than the military draft. If you fail or refuse to pay, they will seize you, fine you, jail you, or in the worst case, kill you, just as they do if you refuse to comply with a military draft.
And this is the true reason that people troop down to the post office and dutifully deposit those returns and checks.
Of course, an IRS official would respond, "You have a choice, and that's what makes the tax voluntary. You can choose to pay the tax or you can choose to go to jail. No one forces you to choose to pay the tax, and so it's voluntary."
But the choice between two evils does not convert the choice of one of them into a voluntary act. It is instead a choice between two coerced options.
For example, suppose a thief grabs you in a dark alley, points a gun in your face, and says, "Your money or your life." You choose to give him your money rather than surrender your life.
Could the thief later appear in court and say to the judge, "Your honor, I'm not guilty of theft because my victim gave me his money voluntarily"?
The process is no different with the IRS. Despite all the deceptive hoopla about the IRS's being a nice, pleasant, friendly, benign agency (check out its website at www.irs.gov), the truth is that this agency is no different, in principle, from the Nazi Gestapo or the Communist KGB.
State-sponsored terrorism
The IRS is a state-sponsored terrorist organization. Its very existence depends on the terror that it is able to strike in the hearts and minds of the American people. And it knows that the reason that American citizens scurry down to that post office to mail their tax returns is that they live in deadly fear of retaliation by this agency, just as people in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia lived in mortal fear of the Gestapo and the KGB.
Every April, the IRS engages in a very subtle and sophisticated advertising campaign to reinforce the fear that it has instilled in the American people. For example, there was the time they hauled away the multimillionaire Leona Helmsley to jail for taking a few improper income-tax deductions. The not-so-subtle message to the rest of us? "If the wealthy and powerful cannot stand against us, what chance do you have? Pay your taxes on time or else!"
This year, the publicity campaign centered around the Indianapolis Baptist Church in Indiana. The church owes $6 million in unpaid payroll taxes. The church's position is that they never paid "salaries" to their employees but instead made a series of "love gifts."
Unfortunately, however, IRS people don't believe in love, because one of their spokesmen (who asked not to be identified) dismissed the church's argument, declaring, "In the United States, if you employ people, whether you are tax-exempt or not, you've got to withhold taxes for workers."
Got to? But I thought it was all voluntary!
The IRS threatened to begin foreclosing its tax lien on the property, and guess what date it selected to begin the process: April 10. What a remarkable coincidence! "If a 50-year old church with 1,000 members cannot stand against us, what chance do you have? Pay your taxes on time or else!"
The viciousness of the IRS
What happens if you refuse to file your tax returns and refuse to pay your income taxes? Well, tax resisters say that nothing will happen to you because, echoing the IRS commissioner, they say that the income tax is voluntary. Their arguments are multifaceted, ranging from their claim that the U.S. criminal statutes and IRS code do not require people to pay their taxes to their claim that the 16th Amendment was never properly ratified. On the basis of these claims, thousands of American tax resisters don't file and don't pay taxes and tell other people that they can live tax-free lives as well.
All too often, however, what the tax resisters don't tell others is that they live lives of misery and impoverishment. Most of them don't have bank accounts, preferring to deal with bank money orders purchased at convenience stores, because the IRS will simply place a levy on their bank accounts. They also customarily don't own real estate, including a home, because the IRS clouds their title with tax liens. They don't hold salaried positions because the IRS garnishes their wages. Thus, to truly avoid the IRS's collection of the taxes owed, tax resisters are often relegated to finding a series of "independent contracts," entailing no withholding tax, which provides them with a subsistence standard of living.
Are they principled? You bet. Are they courageous? You bet. But they cannot deny that when people free themselves from the "voluntary" income tax, the result is a lifestyle different from that of everyone else.
Tax resisters often point to the fact that they are not in jail as proof that the income tax is voluntary. But the truth is that many of them have gone to jail. And while the IRS doesn't go after all of them, especially those who keep a low profile, it is simply owing to staff shortages and not because the IRS has folded or surrendered.
Let me provide you with an example of the viciousness of these IRS people. When I was a young attorney, I represented a woman who owed the IRS, as I recall, somewhere around $20,000. Her husband had abandoned her and her child and was living somewhere in Mexico. The bank was foreclosing on her home, which had an equity of about $40,000 in it.
Owing to indifference or incompetence, the IRS had forgotten to file a tax lien against the property. We advertised the foreclosure sale in the local newspaper, and on the appointed day, lots of people showed up and bid on the property. The result was an enormous foreclosure check for the equity, which was made jointly payable to my client and her husband (who, unfortunately, was not around to endorse and cash the check).
We immediately filed suit for divorce in state court, deposited the check into the registry of the court, and asked the judge to use the money for child support for my client's teenage boy until he reached 18 years of age. By placing the money under the control of a state court, we had immunized it from IRS liens.
A local IRS agent got wind of what we had done, walked into my law office, and pleasantly demanded his share of the money. I pleasantly responded that there was nothing I could do because the money was under the control of the state judge, who himself was concerned about the welfare of the child.
The IRS agent smiled and left my office. He then embarked on a course of harassment that included regular telephone calls and visits both to my client's home and to her place of work. He also made regular visits to her son's high school, where he seized the boy's truck.
After several weeks of this abuse, my client walked into my office and said, "Pay them the money. I cannot live like this." The IRS's nasty, vicious, little devils who constantly remind us of the "voluntary" nature of the income tax and how they're here just to "serve" had won.
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