User talk:Ymom2

Tax protester
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! Your edits to the above referenced article have been reverted. You may want to review certain Wikipedia policies and guidelines, including:

Verifiability

Neutral Point of View

No Original Research.

Also, the arguments you raised are already covered in depth in such articles as:

Tax protester constitutional arguments

and

Tax protester statutory arguments.

Please review those articles in detail. Yours, Famspear 15:00, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Just a follow up. Regarding this verbiage:


 * There have been supreme court rulings that state that the Income Tax is unconstitutional however the IRS has claimed that the supreme court's rulings are "inaplicable". THAT is ilogical [sic].

As I mentioned on the talk page for the article, in the past there have indeed been a few Supreme Court cases where the Court ruled certain very old versions of Federal income tax statutes to be unconstitutional -- for example, the 1895 Pollock case, as covered in various Wikipedia articles, interpreting an 1894 statute. The verbiage above, however, is misleading, and the IRS is actually correct. Except for the Murphy decision from the year 2006 (a decision, by the way, that was later vacated), which was not a Supreme Court case, there has been no Federal court decision ruling that the income tax imposed under the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, the current tax code, is unconstitutional. Even in the Murphy case, the court did not rule the income tax itself unconstitutional.

Further, the cases that tax protesters tend to cite for the argument that the Federal income tax is unconstitutional are usually cases where the Court actually upheld the statute. In particular, read the article on Tax protester constitutional arguments.

The argument that there is no law requiring you to file a Form 1040 is blatantly false. And the argument that the IRS refuses to show people the law is also blatantly false. Indeed, the IRS instructions for Form 1040 include citations to specific code sections. On its web site, the IRS even includes a link to the entire Internal Revenue Code.

Further, there isn't even a legal requirement that the IRS "show the law" -- just as there is no legal requirement, for example, that the police "show the law" that makes murder a crime.

The "show me the law" rhetoric is an ineffective tax protester device. What they really mean is not that "there is no law." The law is clearly there, including: ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;. What tax protesters are really arguing is not that the statutes do not exist, but instead that the statutes somehow do not mean what the courts have consistently ruled.

The most recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on tax protester arguments under the 1954/1986 Code is the famous case of Cheek v. United States -- also covered here in Wikipedia. In Cheek, the Supreme Court stated:


 * Claims that some of the provisions of the tax code are unconstitutional are submissions of a different order. They do not arise from innocent mistakes caused by the complexity of the Internal Revenue Code. Rather, they reveal full knowledge of the provisions at issue and a studied conclusion, however wrong, that those provisions are invalid and unenforceable. Thus, in this case, Cheek paid his taxes for years, but after attending various seminars and based on his own study, he concluded that the income tax laws could not constitutionally require him to pay a tax.

The Supreme Court in Cheek continued:


 * We do not believe that Congress contemplated that such a taxpayer, without risking criminal prosecution, could ignore the duties imposed upon him by the Internal Revenue Code and refuse to utilize the mechanisms provided by Congress to present his claims of invalidity to the courts and to abide by their decisions. There is no doubt that Cheek, from year to year, was free to pay the tax that the law purported to require, file for a refund and, if denied, present his claims of invalidity, constitutional or otherwise, to the courts. See 26 U.S.C. 7422. Also, without paying the tax, he could have challenged claims of tax deficiencies in the Tax Court, 6213, with the right to appeal to a higher court if unsuccessful. 7482(a)(1). Cheek took neither course in some years, and, when he did, was unwilling to accept the outcome. As we see it, he is in no position to claim that his good-faith belief about the validity of the Internal Revenue Code negates willfulness or provides a defense to criminal prosecution under 7201 and 7203. Of course, Cheek was free in this very case to present his claims of invalidity and have them adjudicated, but, like defendants in criminal cases in other contexts who "willfully" refuse to comply with the duties placed upon them by the law, he must take the risk of being wrong.

Cheek, 498 U.S. at 205-206 (footnote omitted; emphasis added). The tax protester, Mr. Cheek, was ultimately convicted and went to prison.

The Supreme Court rulings from the late 1800s and from the period prior to World War II -- that various income tax statutes in the past were unconstitutional -- are indeed legally inapplicable to the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. Generally, those rulings have been overturned by Constitutional amendment or have been overruled by the Supreme Court itself. Yours, Famspear 15:14, 28 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Dear user Ymom2: At the expense of appearing to beat a dead horse, I should also point out that the Cheek decision presents an almost insurmountable obstacle for tax protesters charged with tax evasion (a crime). If a tax protester argues in a tax evasion trial that the Federal income tax is "unconstitutional" -- or if the prosecution can show evidence that the tax protester had used that argument any time prior to the trial -- that fact can be used against the taxpayer (as it was against Mr. John Cheek) to show willfulness. In the context of the tax evasion statute,, willfulness basically means actual awareness of the existence of the law. If you argue that the law is invalid, the jury may conclude that you were aware of the law -- and that you disagreed with the law or disagreed that the law was valid. Disagreement with the law, or disagreement that the law is the law, does not negate awareness of the existence of the law, and indeed claiming the law does not exist may actually help persuade the jury that you were aware that the law exists. As the Supreme Court stated, if you argue that the tax laws are invalid, you must take the risk of being wrong. Mr. Cheek took that risk and ended up in prison.


 * Think of it this way. You are standing on a railroad track. Someone off to the side yells, "hey, look out, the train is coming." You look down the track and say, "No, that's not a train, it's just a mirage." The fact that you really believed the train was not a train is not going to help you at all when that train hits you. Further, by saying "it's just a mirage" you have provided the evidence that you were aware of the train's existence -- you just believed that it was not a "valid train." Belief that the "train is invalid" does not negate the fact that you were aware of its existence. Yours, Famspear 15:36, 28 March 2007 (UTC)