by BigTex » Mon 28 Apr 2008, 14:34:45
In addition to my responsibilities here, I am a tax attorney, and ALL arguments about the legality/constitutionality/morality of the income tax are a complete waste of your time and energy.
Much better to hire someone who understands how the system ACTUALLY works, rather than someone who understands how it SHOULD work.
I'm not commenting on whether any of the tax protest movements' arguments are interesting or not, I'm just saying that you shouldn't test an anti-gravity device by jumping off the top of a building.
Focus on what works.
***
FYI, "USC", or United States Code, is where the federal laws appear after being passed by Congress and signed by the President. The USC publishing methodology allows, among other things, acts of Congress that impact different existing laws to basically amend existing section of the United States Code, rather than adding on to the list of federal laws endlessly.
You may also notice that any public law will have different section references than the USC reference. This is because section 1 of the 2008 FREEDOM ACT may actually be an amendment to 29 USC 312 (I just made that up).
When you see "CFR", that is a reference to the Code of Federal Regulations. These are the rules that the applicable federal agencies charged with enforcing federal laws write in the process of figuring out how to interpret an act of Congress that is within their enforcement jurisdiction.
For the IRS, there is the Internal Revenue Code, which is a portion of the United States Code, and then there are the Income Tax Regulations prepared by the Treasury Department. In addition to the law and the regulations, there is a whole galaxy of guidance, interpretations, rulings, opinions, and other views that come from the IRS regarding the proper answer to a given tax question.
On the judicial side, tax cases can be heard in either federal court of in the Tax Court, depending upon how the dispute arises. Either court is going to give a lot of deference to the Internal Revenue Code, the Income Tax Regulations and will give varying degrees of deference to other pieces of IRS guidance.
I hope that helps clarify how some of the tax system rules work.
One of the rules that most practicing attorneys will tell you is that if your best argument is that something is unconstitutional, you've probably got a pretty weak case (especially outside the criminal law arena). Not always, but usually.
Last edited by
BigTex on Mon 28 Apr 2008, 14:52:42, edited 1 time in total.