Article 1, Section 8
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Yeah ..... well ....... ya didn't include one leeetle item that ya really, really shoulda - it's under Article I, Section 9:
"No capitation, or other direct, tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken."
What the above essentially means in modern day English is that the Founders, knowing that
the power to tax was the power to destroy weren't really too keen on the Federal Government taking taxes unequally from individuals directly -
so they PROHIBITED IT.
Essentially, the Founders decided to give the power to Congress to lay two types of taxes - direct and indirect - and it's spelled out this way in the Constitution.
Indirect taxes are authorized to provide for the operation of the government and its legitimate functions and are made subject to
the rule of uniformity, which simply means that
everyone must be treated the same - and is taxed at the same rate as everybody else for similar activities.
Examples would be Federal Excise Tax on tires, or Federal portion of the tax on gas ..... or maybe tobacco. Everyone is treated the same with regard to these type of taxes.
Direct taxes are authorized to ensure the solvency of the nation (to pay debts off in a timely manner - haaah ! .... what a freakin' concept !) and they are made subject to
the rule of apportionment (according to the last census). What the rule of apportionment means is that the Federal government does not collect
direct taxes from citizens – it collects them from the state governments.
Each State’s government (Treasury) is responsible for its citizens’ proportionate share of the total direct tax laid by Congress. The proportionate share that each state must pay is calculated based on the population count for the State in the last census taken. So if ten percent of the population counted in the last census lived in California, the California government would have to come up with ten percent of the Direct tax that was laid by Congress.
Notice that in order to tell each State how much it must pay, Congress
must specify exactly how much money is to be raised by this tax. Once the amount is fixed, then and only then can the State’s begin to make arrangements to raise the money. Otherwise, the states would know neither how much money to raise (above existing treasury levels), nor how much they were actually liable to pay.
So
direct taxes were never to be paid by the citizen to the federal government directly, they are paid by the State governments, thus preventing the tyranny that inevitably results when the government arrives on the doorsteps of the citizens ...... and
demands arbitrary amounts of money from them in the name of tax.
The Founding Fathers were very familiar with this tyrannical reality, and they removed this cancer from the American landcape forever,
or at least they thought they had,
by Constitutionally forbidding the Federal government from ever taxing the citizens directly, unless apportioned to the States for collection.
A Federal Income Tax would be a direct tax, that flies in the face of the prohibition above, contained in Article I, Section 9.
Supposedly the 16th amendment removed that prohibition ..... but there seems to be quite a bit of disagreement as to whether it was actually ratified by the required number of states to have it become valid and law - and even if it did, whether it does in fact remove the prohibition against a direct tax (according to subsequent holdings by the Supreme Court pertaining to it)
Layout - the above is what you know "intuitively" - and your intuitions are quite correct. The Founders would be aghast if they could see us now ..... they are surely rolling in their graves ...... how far we have fallen ......
