FINAL WARNING: Financial Background
Commissioner of Internal Revenue, who was given the power to
assess, levy, and collect taxes, and was given the authority to enforce
tax laws. In 1868, tobacco and alcoholic beverages were taxed.
The income tax was discontinued in 1872, but after heavy lobbying by
the Populist Party, it was reinstated in 1894, as part of the Wilson-
German Tariff Bill, when Congress enacted a 2% tax on all incomes
over $4,000 a year. On May 20, 1895, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that
the tax was unconstitutional, because it was not distributed among the
states in accordance with the Constitution. Newspapers controlled by
the Illuminati denounced the Court’s decision.
When the income tax legislation was introduced in the Senate in 1894,
Sen. Aldrich had come out against it, saying it was “communistic and
socialistic,” but in 1909, he proposed the 16th Amendment to the
Constitution, with the support of President Taft, which called for the
creation of a progressive graduated income tax. It was ratified in
February, 1913, and levied a 1% tax on all incomes over $3,000, and a
progressive surtax on incomes over $20,000. Although praised by
reformers, conservatives said it was “a first step toward complete
confiscation of private property.”
According to a 2-volume investigative report called The Law That
Never Was, by William J. Benson (who had been a special agent with
the Illinois Department of Revenue for 10 years) and M. J. Beckman, on
February 25, 1913, shortly before the end of his term, Secretary of
State Philander C. Knox ignored various irregularities, and fraudulently
declared that the 16th Amendment had been ratified by three-fourths
(or 36) of the 48 states. Benson traveled to all the states’ archives, and
to the National Archives in Washington, DC, obtaining more than
17,000 pages of documents, all properly notarized and certified by
state officials, that proved that the 16th Amendment was never
ratified.
A 16-page memo dated February 15, 1913, to Knox, from his solicitor,
stated that only four states had “correctly” ratified the amendment,
that Minnesota had not forwarded their copy yet, and that the
resolutions from 33 states contained punctuation, capitalization, or
wording different than the Resolution that was approved by Congress.
The memo read: