politics

there's literally a constitutional amendment saying congress can issue taxes however they want. The supreme court is so full of its own shit they think they can rewrite every law they don't like.

They not even hiding it now. They control the court, so they control the law.

This is one issue where I get angry with the democrats. They could have stacked the courts a long ass time ago and prevented shit like this.

Do any of these fucken galaxy brains stop for a second to think what reality would be like the minute the government can't fund itself? Because, I do, and I'm targeting their houses first.

I'm glad there's no Justices on the Supreme Court taking lavish vacations, homes, RVs, bribes, jobs and planes from wealthy people who are arguing that wealthy people should pay no tax while receiving only bailouts!

So I dug in on this and the batshit thing here is they have a strong enough case to absolutely win with the current court. "Strong" here meaning "believable enough for this court to bullshit."

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

That's the 16th amendment, with the relevant part bolded. The argument is that wealth is not income, and thus this falls back on Article 1 section 9 which states

No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

Effectively they're claiming that wealth taxes are direct taxes (this is another shaky part, legally, and the part referenced in Moore).

Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. Found that a tax on income which was derived from property (rent, dividends, interest, etc.) was effectively a tax on the property, and so was a direct tax.

This was the case that set up for the passing of the 16th amendment, hence the shaky ground.

Wealth is property, holdings, capital, and money - thus by a... Let's call is "selective" view of cases like Pollock, the SCOTUS has reasonable plausibility in saying that this tax is direct, non-enumerated, and not income, and thus not protected.

It's a ridiculous decision that they could plausibly make, but they've shown they don't care if it's ridiculous, only plausible.

Edit: and of course, this was all planned.

The Trump tax bill largely gave up on taxing US companies’ foreign assets in the future — corporate money kept overseas is now generally immune from taxation, even if it is brought into the United States.

Also

When Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, it used a process that imposed a $1 trillion cap on how much the bill could add to the budget deficit over the next decade. So there’s a decent argument that, if Congress had known that the bill would increase the deficit by an additional $340 billion, it would have chosen not to enact any tax law at all.

Lmao at "cutting taxes raises revenue" being a thing Republicans run on

Hmm. Maybe we shouldn’t ask wealthy people who take money from even wealthier “donors” to make decisions about how much we tax wealthy people.

Didn’t Teddy Roosevelt implement wealth taxes via the Estate Tax and Capital Gains Tax?

These aren’t exactly new ideas. We’ve just slowly dismantled them over the past decades.

This tax would aliviate the tax evasion problem Trump has been always talking of. Why do this article then fear republicans could be against the proposal?

Before you crucify me: I know Trump is amongst the tax evaders, but at least he talks openly about the issue.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The specific details of this very complicated change to the US tax code are not especially important — although, for reasons discussed below, they could matter a great deal if the Moore plaintiffs prevail.

These three cases arguably mark the dawn of the Lochner era, which is named for a 1905 Supreme Court decision that imposed strict limits on both the federal government and the states’ power to enact laws seeking to improve workplace conditions for workers.

The plaintiffs in Moore are represented by Andrew Grossman, an adjunct scholar at the right-libertarian Cato Institute, and David Rivkin, a Republican lawyer known for defending torture during the George W. Bush administration, and for filing one of the first lawsuits claiming that Obamacare is unconstitutional.

Macomber, a 5-4 decision mostly joined by pro-Lochner justices, said that “enrichment through increase in value of capital investment is not income in any proper meaning of the term.” That conclusion closely tracks the reasoning of Pollock, which was supposed to have been overruled by the 16th Amendment.

The Moore plaintiffs’ approach will be familiar to anyone who has studied the Lochner era, the age when the Court routinely struck down laws, not because they violated the Constitution, but because five justices deemed them “unwise, improvident, or out of harmony with a particular school of thought.”

When Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, it used a process that imposed a $1 trillion cap on how much the bill could add to the budget deficit over the next decade.

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