The ultimate fraud?

[Baron Munchausen]

You thought Enron/Tyco/Worldcom were big scams? You thought the Halliburton 'no bid' bonanza in Iraq was corruption? What if... the 16th Amendment authorizing personal income taxes was never ratified? In that case, the US Government has been illegally extorting trillions of dollars from ordinary citizens for nearly a century.

Well, a guy who has been claiming that the 16th Amendment was never ratified has been sued by the government and won the right to present his case in court.

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http://www.givemeliberty.org/RTPLaws...2005-09-30.htm

Twenty-five years ago Bill Benson, a former Illinois Department of Revenue investigator, began a cross-country trip across the forty-eight states that comprised the Union in 1913 seeking documentary evidence regarding the ratification of the 16th Amendment. This was a most important undertaking, because the government uses the 16th Amendment as its sole authority to tax an individual’s wages and salaries.

During his two-year trip, Benson collected thousands of certified legal documents from both state and federal archives documenting exactly how the 16th Amendment was acted on by each state legislature and handled by the office of the Secretary of State for the United States.

In the end, Benson had assembled an irrefutable mountain of evidence showing that during the final days of the William Howard Taft administration in 1913, the 16th Amendment was fraudulently declared by the U.S. Secretary of State, Philander Knox, to have been properly ratified by the requisite number of state legislatures. Bill Benson, and his co-researcher Red Beckman, documented the results of their work in a two volume research report entitled, “The Law That Never Was.”

Until now, no federal court has agreed to examine the vast body of legal evidence compiled by Benson. Indeed, the federal courts, both District and Appellate, have consistently refused to tackle the troubling issue, claiming the matter of the fraudulent ratification of the Amendment to be a “political question” for Congress to decide, and beyond the jurisdiction of the courts.

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Needless to say, this is gonna be interesting.

[El_Phil]

Words cannot express how much I want that guy to win. I would laugh for weeks watching the US goverment going spectacularly bankrupt.

Of course its never going to happen, regardless of if the guy is right or wrong he is going to lose, the alternative is unthinkable. Still it would be funny if he did win.

[Ed Kolis]

/me activates thread cloaking device to keep this thread away from Atrocities

[Combat Wombat]

How I would like this to be true but if he was to win and the US Government at a minimum had to just pay back the money to the people that are alive it would destroy the government.

[Xrati]

This would be great if it was true. It would force the government to come up with a new tax plan where again the people would have their representatives vote to incorporate the Bill. Finally, some accountability of our elected officials! Could you imagine how "people friendly" this new Bill would have to be so that the politicians could count on getting re-elected. Just in time to vote themselves a pay and benefit cut to match the new tax plan. Sometimes change is GOOD!!!

[El_Phil]

Yeah like that's likely. On the day the Devil drives to work on a sno-cat to deliver chocolate teapots that'll happen. Pay cuts? Don't make me laugh.