The Supreme Court case seeking to shut down wealth taxes before they even exist

spaceghoti@lemmy.one to politics @lemmy.world – 381 points – The Supreme Court case seeking to shut down wealth taxes before they even exist
vox.com

The plaintiffs’ arguments in Moore v. United States have little basis in law — unless you think that a list of long-ago-discarded laissez-faire decisions from the early 20th century remain good law. And a decision favoring these plaintiffs could blow a huge hole in the federal budget. While no Warren-style wealth tax is on the books, the Moore plaintiffs do challenge an existing tax that is expected to raise $340 billion over the course of a decade.

But Republicans also hold six seats on the nation’s highest Court, so there is some risk that a majority of the justices will accept the plaintiffs’ dubious legal arguments. And if they do so, they could do considerable damage to the government’s ability to fund itself.

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Given that the 16th Amendment exists expressly in order to establish a federal income tax, it's probably safe to say that this has not been understood as an unlimited power of taxation.

Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Company is the relevant SCOTUS case, if you're curious. The tl;dr is that Article I, Section 9:

No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

states that revenues raised by a "direct tax", which includes income taxes, from a given state must be proportional to that state's population relative to the rest of the country. Income isn't evenly distributed among the states, so income taxes violate this provision. That's why the 16th amendment specifically exempts income taxes from that requirement:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on income, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

The basic idea was that, if Congress needed to raise a bunch of money for some large project, they can't go targeting specific states for it.

The Supreme Court in Stanton v. Baltic Mining Co. added that 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." 240 U.S. 112 (1916).[30]

That effect was reaffirmed in Bowers v. Kerbaugh-Empire Co., 271 U.S. 170 (1926), in which the Supreme Court reviewed Pollock, the Corporation Excise Tax Act of 1909, and the Sixteenth Amendment. The Court concluded, "It was not the purpose or effect of that amendment to bring any new subject within the taxing power. Congress already had power to tax all incomes."

The Sixteenth Amendment exists not because of the limitations imposed by Pollock v. Farmers, but because Congress was concerned that the Supreme Court might strike down further income tax laws even though they were within the powers conferred by Article 1. Congress thought the Supreme Court had gone too far (and they likely did) and wasn't sure how far they would go so they took it out of the Supreme Court's hands.

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