TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — In his new book, “The New Income Tax Scandal: How Congress Hijacked the Sixteenth Amendment” (ISBN 1413495443, Xlibris) John C. Garrison, who has served honorably on the legal staff of a major State of Florida law enforcement agency, and who has been active for over two decades in tax history research and tax reform activism, has delved into the history of those questionable events in Congress that led to the establishment of our modern income tax, fearlessly revealing in his book the legislative corruption that went into the system at its inception.
Like a reflex reaction, it seems natural for people quickly to associate our dreaded annual income tax with the I.R.S. But a new book seeks to turn this focus instead on Congress. It is Congress, after all, who is responsible for whatever may be wrong or dreadful with the income tax since it was Congress who created the tax as it is, with Democrats – the strongest supporters of the system-leading the charge.
If you think our elitist Congress today does what it wants without regard to citizens’ well-being, wait until you learn from Garrison what an elitist Congress did when it began our modern income tax in 1913 under the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson. For the first time, the fundamental corruption in our income tax-the real reason why this tax is so universally hated-is here clearly, methodically, and with professional competence and expertise revealed by Garrison.
Included in the shocking detail are the following events which Garrison documents:
* In 1913, under the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson, and with a trusting public caught up in the exciting news of a newly-ratified 16th (or Income Tax) Amendment of that year, Congress in new legislation supposedly based on the new Amendment, managed quietly and inappropriately amid the national excitement to convert the income tax from the excise tax it had been until then to the direct tax it is now through an erroneous assumption of its taxing power under the new Amendment. The Amendment had passed with wide popular support that arose from a promise made by Congress that the income tax would be and remain strictly a tax on the “idle rich” who lived off the gain from their investments. The working class, seen as already too encumbered with consumption taxes, was to be spared from this burden.
* While the 1913 error of Congress was indirectly confirmed as such three years after the fact in the 1916 rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court in Brushaber v. Union Pacific and Stanton v. Baltic Mining, Congress was not compelled in these cases to correct itself since the High Court here did not directly consider, or specifically discuss, or bring to public attention an issue of whether Congress had committed an error in its act of 1913. Instead, the Court just disposed of these cases merely and only by correcting litigant misconceptions over the true intent of the 16th Amendment. With Congress not pressured by these rulings, and with no widespread public suspicion or displeasure with the system existing at the time due to the tax being then applied only to a minority rich class (for whom alone Congress had promised and said it was intended), it became convenient for the Congress elites-following the old but flawed adage that what people don’t know won’t hurt them-to leave quietly in the system the inherent corruption as it was and as it is to this day. This also left an unsuspecting public largely unaware of the huge financial loss the Congressional error of 1913 would cause U.S. workers in later decades. This happened when, in a delayed “bait and switch” trick, the tax was turned by the Congress elites from its original promised intent as a tax solely for the rich to a tax applied on American workers en masse under the Democratic administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is here where the “hidden” problem of the income tax kicked in for the first time with a working public deeply unaware this had happened, as it is true also to this day.
* Although the U.S. Supreme Court had already affirmed the property nature of labor in its 1884 decision in Butchers’ Union v. Crescent City (more recently of the mere “right to work” itself in Greene v. McElroy – 1959), Congress in effect, through its error of 1913, stripped American workers of their constitutional right to claim either their labor or their right to work as their “income-producing property” so as to deprive the workers of their legal right to deduct the costs of their personal labor (the skilled and intelligent human energy and time they sell to employers). These deductible costs included expenditures for such living necessities as food, shelter and proper health maintenance.
* To keep the system from suddenly collapsing in 1978, the U.S. Tax Court in the case of Reading vs. Commissioner was forced to cover up the misdeed of Congress and income tax corruption by denying that human labor is property, defining such labor as mere “behavior performed by human beings in exchange for compensation” but failing to cite relevant authority to justify this bizarre and arbitrary definition of labor or to explain the existence of those long-established authorities that contradict this view.
* When Garrison made this discovery and filed without attorney several cases in federal court (beginning in 1990) challenging this corruption in the system-a corruption so profound and incredible that it places the total life-sustenance of every working taxpayer at the mercy and grace of Congress-he was shocked to find that the evidence he put forth in the form of legal precedents affirming a worker’s labor to be income-producing property was being systematically suppressed by federal judges who then used stonewalling tactics to suppress Garrison’s strenuous objections. Garrison’s question was, “If the tax system is legitimate, why is it that courts feel they have to step in with lawless tactics to help the U.S. Justice Department defend it against my arguments and evidence, which neither the courts nor the I.R.S. could refute-only evade or suppress?” Repeated and identical experiences of this nature in three separate federal jurisdictions led Garrison to conclude that there was something terribly wrong being covered up by the system and that the federal courts were in on it.
* In the Garrison cases, federal judges were forced to obstruct justice not only through the suppression of evidence and the deprivation of Garrison’s right to due process-with two federal judges in one Tallahassee, Florida case, Senior Judge William Stafford and Magistrate Judge William Sherrill, Jr., acting in concert to do this-but through a practice of “judicial activism” that included casuistry, overt lies and deception as the only way these judges had to keep the system from suddenly collapsing and publicly exposing the insidious act of Congress.
* This, unfortunately, is not a fanciful “conspiracy theory.” These are real life events for which there is already plenty of hard evidence readily available in the public domain.
* In his remarkably revealing and explosive book, Garrison proposes a hybrid tax system as the most equitable, viable and constructive solution to the problem he addresses.
About John Garrison
John C. Garrison has served as a specialist staff legal assistant in a civil service career in the area rulemaking and administrative law. In a private and separate effort, he has been engaged in the study of federal tax history and law and in tax reform activism for over two decades.
To contact the author or for more detail on his book, visit
NEWS SOURCE: John C. Garrison
[tags]John Garrison, tax reform, The New Income Tax Scandal, Sixteenth Amendment, Xlibris[/tags]
