Under the twisted premise of losing the popular vote and “no taxation without representation”, TIME’s Mark Weston proclaims that the approximately 65 million Democrats who voted for Hillary Clinton should pledge “we won’t pay taxes to the federal government… until democracy is restored.”
Because, It’s just not fair?
Twice in the past 16 years, a Republican candidate who finished second in the popular vote has won the presidency. This year, Donald Trump won the electoral vote with about 46% of the popular vote, while Hillary Clinton received about 48%. If the parties stay this evenly divided, another electoral mishap is more likely than not in the next 20 years.Most Republicans are quite content with this system. Appeals to fairness have not persuaded them of the need to amend the Constitution to establish direct presidential elections, preferably with a runoff if no one wins 50% of the vote. Nor does the real chance that a Democrat could win the presidency with fewer votes than a Republican alarm them. Even the taunt, “Are you afraid of a direct election? Can’t you win a straight-up vote?” doesn’t faze them. Democrats must, therefore, pester Republicans where it hurts: the pocketbook.
Is signing a pledge to not pay taxes legal? Yes, if no overt act of conspiracy is involved, and the pledge itself is hypothetical. No one knows when or if it would be carried out.
A national movement not to pay federal taxes in the future would put Republicans on notice: they do not have the right to impose a hard-right, second-place presidency on a moderate nation every dozen or so years. If the Republicans won’t help amend the Constitution so that America can resume being a democracy, then Democrats, lacking the representation that supporters of a future popular vote-winner ought to have in the executive branch, should not submit to paying taxes to the federal government.
How would the pledge work?
First, an online group such as MoveOn.org, Change.org or both, should circulate a petition. The pledge is not just a powerful protest; it is also effortless, requiring no legal or financial sacrifice at all for years, possibly decades.
Second, the pledge should only apply to federal taxes. We would still pay state, local, sales and property taxes. This is a protest against our 229-year-old system of electoral votes, not against taxation in general.
Third, if a Republican wins the election without winning the popular vote again, we should still pay what we owe in federal taxes—just not to the IRS. Instead, people would compute their federal taxes, file a Form 1040 and write a check to a national escrow account, preferably in a well-established Canadian or British bank that is beyond the reach of the U.S. Justice Department, because whoever opens this account probably will be in violation of U.S. law. In the check’s memo line, people should write, “Funds to be transferred to the IRS as soon as America resumes being a democracy.”
If the U.S. government wanted control over the trillions of dollars in this escrow account, it would have to replace our antiquated electoral system with a fairer way of electing presidents. Then, when 38 state legislatures have ratified an acceptable Constitutional amendment, the escrow officer could cheerfully transfer the account’s trillions of dollars to the IRS.
The beauty of a no-taxation pledge is that it almost certainly won’t have to be carried out. The mere threat could be enough to propel a Constitutional amendment. If millions sign now, Republicans will know that a third modern Republican runner-up presidency is impossible; Democrats will not be cooperative again.
The cry, “No Taxation Without Representation,” inspired America to declare its independence in 1776. It can also lead to a rebirth of democracy in our own time.
Sadly, it appears, Mr. Weston missed out on what America’s constitutional democracy means. As we noted previously, despite what the disaffected left now says about the “outdated” electoral college system, there was and still is solid reasoning behind it’s existence. The power of the individual states weighed very heavily on the founding fathers who created the electoral college system specifically to avoid the mass centralization of power in high population density areas. And, while we certainly understand why the left would look to now discredit such a system, the fact is that there would be no United States of America without it as smaller states simply never would have opted in to the union.
Per the map above, absent the electoral college system, presidential elections would be almost entirely determined by a handful of cities including New York City, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. And while the left would prefer to ignore the opinions of those in the “fly-over” states, we would suggest that their representation in the electoral college is a vital underpinning of American democracy…without such representation we’re not sure why the fly-over states would choose to remain a part of a union where they had no say.
This is funny as well as ridiculous. Many holes in it, yet I’m going to fill one for sure, and that is, UNLESS any of these disgruntled voters are exercising a federal privilege by working for or in some capacity of the Fed. govt. they have not earned “income” nor “wages,” therefor they DON’T owe any STATE or FEDERAL “INCOME” taxes, period.
I’d love to see them learn the facts and truth about the “income” tax thievery scam, file properly and stop allowing this criminal cabal to tax their UN-privlidged private sector activity which produces the property we commonly call “income.” http://losthorizons.com/
Do it
I dare ya
Cowards
This would be great , because it would be them starting something we ALL could get in board with and starve the beast
Put up or shut up
Calling your hand , lay it on the table
EotS, you can get on board today with or without these people. If you are still paying “income” taxes on UN-privlidged work activity, in other words, if you are working at something or somewhere that has NO federal connection, you need to do a self assessment when you properly file your tax form and indicate that you are in the private sector and therefor your activity which produces the property(income) is not taxable. You may move back and forth between the private sector as well as the public sector when you work. Not a problem. Any public sector work is taxable, any private sector work is NOT taxable. The constitution as well as the IRS code declares this. Read Cracking the Code, author Peter Hendrickson, and visit his website, http://losthorizons.com/
Every American should learn the facts and truth and file properly!
Good defense for the rapist or serial killer.
Your honor, I did not vote for that law, I should be released.
– or –
I should be released “because, It’s just not fair”.
“… we won’t pay taxes to the federal government… until democracy is restored.”
I take this to mean NEVER, then… right?
When the REPUBLIC is restored, the ‘federal government’ (so-called) will cease to exist as it is now.
In fact, those in it now will cease to exist as well.
Subject line: One of my readers drew my attention to your comment about Time magazine…
…urging (or reporting on someone else urging) Hillary Clinton supporters to withhold income taxes. The irony is that while the ranks of Clinton supporters doubtless contain a higher proportion of persons who actually owe the tax in any given year, most of her supporters don’t owe any at all in the first place.
The details of how and why this is so are not rocket science. But they are too involved to reasonably get into in an email like this.
Please let it suffice to say that I speak as not only the author of three books and countless articles and research papers on the income tax, but also as the first American in history to secure complete refunds of EVERYTHING withheld from me in connection with the tax– including Social Security and Medicare taxes. This was accomplished by the application of my research in conjunction with the publication of my first book in 2003. See a very useful introduction to that work at http://losthorizons.com/The16th.htm.
Since then, scores of thousands of other Americans have done the same, year after year, securing hundreds of thousands of complete refunds from the federal, state and income-taxing municipalities, totaling several billion dollars in the aggregate. See about 1,200 fully documented examples at http://losthorizons.com/BulletinBoard.htm.
Unsurprisingly, the government (federal especially), even while steadily honoring the claims and filings of Americans who have learned the true, limited scope of the income tax and how to ensure that they are not improperly treated as within it when they are not, has done everything it can to suppress and discourage the spread of this information short of assassination. See a presentation on that suppression-effort history at http://losthorizons.com/Documents/SelectedCuts.htm#7.
Anyway, the Time proposition is a product of complete ignorance about the nature of the income tax. As I said at the beginning, it is amusingly ironic.
The tax does apply to gains from the profitable use of federal stuff, and people enjoying such gains are over-represented in the ranks of Hillary supporters as compared to the general population. At the same time, ignorance about the true nature of the tax, and that it applies to nothing else (meaning that the rest of Hillary’s supporters don’t owe it in the first place) is by no one more strongly encouraged than the kind of progressives who rally ’round candidacies like Clinton’s.
Gotta love it.
-Pete Hendrickson
I posted this with the “enthusiastic” permission of Pete for the purpose of shedding his knowledge on the Hillaryites being encouraged to stop paying income taxes. He posted this over at zerohedge after a reader of CtC informed him of the article. I too had sent him the article as it had to do with income tax, and he sent his comment to me that he had sent into zerohedge.