A Constitutional Replacement for the Income Tax on Wages
Jon Roland

A better system would be a purchase tax. Not a sales tax. In other words, an excise tax on purchases, including purchases of labor, payable by the purchaser, provided that it is indirect, that it, that it could be passed on to another purchaser of the product or service produced in the form of a higher price. So the employer of a worker who passes on the labor product to its customer would pay a tax on that purchase of labor, but the ultimate consumer, who can't pass it on, such as a householder purchasing the labor of someone to cut his lawn or clean his house, would not be liable for a tax on such purchases of labor.

The present system of income taxes on wages is unfair not because of how much or how distributed, but because it is unlawful. Tax protesters are (mostly) right. There is no unbroken logical chain of authority back from what IRS agents do to the Constitution. The income tax amendment was not ratified, based on the best available evidence of state legislative records, but rejected, and the report that is was is at least a mistake, and probably a fraud. Even if it had been, the statutes are not logically authorized by the Constitution, the regulations are not logically authorized by the statutes, and the instruction booklets and forms are not logically authorized by either statutes or regulations. What we have is IRS agents inventing claims out of thin air and corrupt courts "deferring" to their assessments, reversing the burden of proof from the government to the "taxpayer" (who is nowhere defined in a constitutional law).

The purchase tax described above would be constitutional, with a similar impact to the present income tax on wages, which is not constitutional.