THE BIG UMBER BIRD

I want to introduce you to the central character of our story.  He is a man of mystery, and his name is  Charles Pollock.  When our story begins he lived in Boston, a dull town in a dull time - Mark Twain's "Gilded Age".  And Charles worked in a bank; dull, dull, dull.

But at least he was narcissistic. That made him a little interesting, if only to himself. 

Then, in 1894, Charles took a lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court. This makes Charles a sort of  hero to the anti-tax movement. And here let me suggest you imagine a really big explosion,  with piles of innocent people dead and dismembered,  laying all over the place...

...because, really, the anti-tax movement is just a loony tunes version of a suicide bombing- you blow up yourself and everybody around you. 

Those who oppose the power of the state to tax its citizens resemble, to borrow a description from Tom Wolf, “…the logician,  who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.” (“From Bauhaus to Our House”) To whit:

See, the U.S. government has been taxing income since 1861, as permitted in the Constitution under Article 1, Section 2 ("Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several states…") and Article 1, Section 8 ("The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes,…"). 

But in 1862 Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney (above), author of the Dredd Scott decision which had helped to bring on the Civil War, became incensed that money was actually being taken out of his paycheck to help pay for a war against slavery.  Taney was a very strong believer in slavery and in being treated as somebody special.

And Taney’s objections to paying taxes also struck a cord with those who agreed they personally did  not deserve to be paying taxes. However, the majority of the court disagreed with the Chief Justice, and the taxes were collected, the war was fought and won and slavery was ended.

Of course we're talking about rich people here, very rich people, who had no compunction using insane logic to justify holding onto their money and buying politicians to safe guard their money.  Buying politicians is what is currently known as free speech, if your logic can somehow equate "buying" with "free" without your head disappearing up your own fundamental aperture.

Anyway, in 1872 the rich people had the income tax laws repealed. Unfortunately for Taney he was already dead and he wasn't getting his money back. Or his slaves. For that he would have to wait until the "Inheritance Tax" could be redefined as the "Death Tax". But I'm getting ahead of myself.

For the next twenty years the Federal government struggled along supported by import duties alone, which amounted to less than 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product.  And yes, that is how we funded government before 1861. But before 1861 we were an agricultural economy, where farm workers do not require much education, where populations were scattered and where all health problems were local, because transportation was by foot and horse. Our diseases move no faster nor farther than we do. 

After 1861 we were a growing industrial economy, where transportation was mostly by railroads. Factory workers required at least a high school education. They were concentrated in industrial centers, and railroads were making  public health a regional problem. In other words, economic conditions had changed. 

Now, besides being unable to support an effective government, import duties (aka tariff's),   raised the price of all goods, imported and domestic. In fact, during the 1880's import duties added as much as 48% to the final price consumers paid, for milk, for steel, and for everything in between.

 This protected domestic companies and allowed them to keep their prices high enough to ensure high profits, no matter how crappy their products and services were.  That's what happens when a few powerful people control access to a product or service. It's why monopolies are bad.. 

Congressman William Jennings Bryant of Nebraska labeled high tariffs “socialism for the rich”. “They weep more because fifteen millions are to be collected from the rich than they do at the collection of three hundred millions upon the goods which the poor consume.” And that was true, And it was unfair, But it ain't like they kept it a secret.

Between 1871 and 1891 sixty separate bills were introduced in the House of Representatives - where all funding bills must originate - to reestablish an income tax. That's right, people were actually voting and fighting for the right to pay taxes. Both Republicans and Democrats who were in the pay of the wealthy,  beat all of those efforts back. And then in 1893 a new tariff reform bill was introduced by Democratic Representative  William Lyne Wilson (above) of West Virginia. He was Chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee.  Wilson's bill was a modest attempt to lower the import duties on foreign iron ore, coal, lumber, wool and sugar.  

But the bill also included a minor amendment, introduced at the last minute by ten term congressman Benton McMillan (above) from Tennessee's 4th district. His minor amendment read,  “That from and after the 1st day of January, 1895, there shall be levied, collected, and paid annually upon the gains, profits, and income of every person residing in the United States, derived from any kind of property, rents, interest, dividends, or salaries…a tax of 2 per cent on the amount so derived over and above $4,000” during any five year period.  

Thanks to inflation, today, that amount, would be equal to almost $90,000, over any five year period -  a modest amount by any measure, except of course to those being asked to cough it up.  And, maybe it will seem odd to you, but those most able to pay this tax, screamed the loudest. Like stuck pigs.

The pigs paid little attention to Mr. McMillan’s amendment because so many income tax measures had been introduced so many times before, and none of them ever came to anything. This was because the rich and powerful had a secret weapon in Congress.

He was the white supremist and Democratic Senator Majority Leader, Senator Arthur Pue Gorman of Maryland (above). Gorman was the tool the rich and  powerful used to ensure the Senate was the place all income tax bills went to die.

Gorman (above, right) helped the opponents of the Wilson bill attach more than 600 amendments  which reinstated almost all of the import duties the bill had attempted to lower. It was a legislative St. Valentine's Day Massacre on the floor of United States Capital, right in front of God and everybody.

With the “Tariff reduction” bill thus bullet ridden and bleeding on the floor, no one believed that President Grover Cleveland, who had campaigned on a lower tariff platform, would ever tolerate such a misbegotten bill. Of course he had also reassured the money-class that he would never do anything which might hurt "business". So surely he would veto this worthless tariff bill. 

But Cleveland signed the bill. It didn't cost him anything. At least the tariffs had been marginally lowered. At least he could claim that he had done everything he could to lower prices for working class Americans, while, at the same time, not actually doing anything to openly offend his rich campaign donors.

But imagine the mobster's shock the next morning to discover that Al Capone had beat the rap for the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre,  but was going to jail anyway for income tax evasion. That was the shock felt among the rich and powerful. America had returned to a national income tax. And the response was just what you would expect it would be from the rich and powerful. They sued.

The fine print of the accidental income tax required that all stock companies pay the income tax for individuals before distributing any dividends to them. Dividends were now income. And when he received his notice from the Farmers' Loan and Trust Company (because he owned all of ten shares of stock in Farmers’ Loan and Trust) Mister Charles Pollock was very angry. 

He was angry enough to hire the high priced Boston top gun lawyer, Joseph Hodges Choate (above). Yes, he was one of those New England Choates.  Anyway, Choate quickly filed a lawsuit claiming a Federal income tax on stock dividends was unconstitutional.

The Massachusetts courts disagreed, as did the lower Federal courts. They both upheld the law. But somehow Charles Pollock found the money to appeal his lawsuit all the way to the United States Supreme Court (above), which, to everyone’s surprise, agreed to hear the case immediately.

On 8 April, 1895, in a narrow 5-4 ruling, the court ruled in favor of Mr. Pollock. The opinion, written by Chief Justice Melvin Weston Fuller (above) said that while salary could be taxed, income derived from property, be it rent, interest on savings or dividends on stock investments, could not, because they were not “apportioned” by population. It was like splitting hairs on a bald man.    

The decision was very unpopular, and the dissenting opinions were intellectually devastating. Justice Henry Brown (above) wrote that “This decision involves nothing less than the surrender of the taxing power to the moneyed class…Even the specter of socialism is conjured up to frighten Congress from laying taxes upon the people in proportion to their ability to pay them.”

And Justice John Marshal Harlan argued that the court's majority opinion, “…declares that our government has been so framed that,...those who have incomes derived from...bonds, stocks and investments...have privileges that cannot be accorded to those having incomes derived from the labor of their hands, or the exercise of their skill, or the use of their brains.” 

These were both powerful arguments. But then the greedy have always been willing to lose the intellectual and moral arguments, as long as they get to keep the money.

Middle class Americans, stuck paying income taxes while the rich spent their untaxed fortunes buying up the art treasures of Europe and Asia, were outraged. They were infuriated. They were fighting mad. And it would still take 11 years before the will of the people could overcome the power of the “moneyed classes”.

In 1909 President William Howard Taft proposed a Constitutional Amendment (in part because he thought it would never pass) to allow a Federal Income Tax. 

On 12 July, 1909 the 16th amendment (above) passed the Congress and was submitted to the states, in part because the congress never thought the states would pass it. The amendment was brutally blunt and short. It reads in total, “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” Period. End of Amendment. There weren't no loop hole this time.

Alabama took less than a month to vote for the 16th amendment. Kentucky, South Carolina, Illinois, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Maryland, Georgia and Texas all passed it in 1910. Twenty-three more states followed in 1911, three more in 1912, and six more in 1913.

It was with the vote of the New Mexico legislature, on 3 February, 1913, that made the 16th amendment the law of the land. Six states either rejected the amendment or never took it up, but that did not matter. The Constitution only requires that two-thirds of the states approve of an amendment to make it the law. And in the end 42 out of 48 states approved it.

And so, when some lunatic or confidence man or woman tries to seduce you with a magical scheme to avoid paying taxes, you can now show them the 16th Amendment. Or just explain to them that, by placing the source of support for the government in the people’s hands, income taxes places the power there as well.

The relevancy of this tale of narcissism to your life may become clearer when you realize that on 1 June, 1929 the Farmers Loan and Trust Company, owners of a lower Manhattan sky scrapper and defendant in the lawsuit which inspired the 16th amendment,  changed their name to City Bank Farmers Trust.

 And then in 1976 they changed their name again. This time they shortened it to Citibank.  This is the same Citibank that in 2009 swallowed some $320 billion of taxpayer (meaning your) bailout dollars. 

Oh, and as of 1894, Charles Pollock was an employee of Farmers Loan and Trust in their Boston branch. And it seems likely to me that he sued his own employer with their connivance. And that the Supreme Court was willing to overlook that fraud, all in the name of protecting rich people's money.

It seems to me that the limits to which the rich will go to avoid paying their fair share of government remains endless, spinning arguments to confuse, obfuscate and always to deny, so that their wealth, safe and untouchable, emerges from the process like a big umber bird.  These people just think they are top of the world, ma!

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