this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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Could you please kindly tell me what IRS stands for?
The Internal Revenue Service. It's the U.S. tax collection agency, created a bit over a century ago under, shall we say, questionable circumstances.
What do you mean by questionable circumstances?
They are referring to some fringe "tax protester" conspiracy theories which dispute that the 16th amendment was properly ratified. You can read about them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_protester_Sixteenth_Amendment_arguments#Sixteenth_Amendment_ratification
Suffice it to say, these 'theories' have been largely rejected, including by the states themselves, and by the SCOTUS.
Sorry, saw your response just after I had posted the same in response to his comment.
There is no historical agreement that states ratifying the income tax itself actually happened.
There is no historical agreement that the earth is round, but guess what?
When the second argument that is listed in Wikipedia is that Ohio doesn't count when it had been a state for over a century before the amendment was proposed, I start to think these arguments are specious at best. It seems every judge the case had gone before agreed with that stance, which also sounds like historical agreement to me. Given the amendment was proposed due to the Supreme Court overturning income tax as unconstitutional, it also appears the courts were more than willing to rule against income tax prior to this supposedly dubious amendment.
Do you have any evidence that is stronger than the Obama birther conspiracies?
If you sole-source Wikipedia, I don't know what to tell you. But I'm not going off on a research excursion to prove myself right from things I've read over decades. It's of no import to me whether you believe me; if you're truly curious, look into it yourself. The origins of the income tax are more complex than one article can assert.
You're right, Wikipedia is a terrible primary source, because it isn't a primary source. So, while you should never reference it in a paper or dissertation, the sources it references are perfectly valid. The good news is, I'm not writing an essay or dissertation, and I don't have to follow the correct rules for those. I did you the favor of clicking two links deeper (it took about a minute) and finding the information where they talk about all those cases that the judges totally threw so they could force you to pay illegal taxes. Now, I can't make you turn that link purple, but if you do you might get the other side of that argument that you apparently haven't stumbled across in your decades of examination. Good luck.
So, your assertion is that the IRS is a good source for information about the validity of the IRS? Case law doesn't cover whether ratification actually happened, but rather that the courts are going with it.
They are a better source than anything you've provided, yes.
I tend not to comment, but this is peak nutter commentary so I feel compelled. You're following the standard format of...
Nutter: Let me tell you about my unproven conspiracy theory!
Anyone else: that's wild, can you prove it?
Nutter: Do your own research, I don't care if you believe me (i.e., I can't prove it because it's insane).
100% unrefined Facebook gran behaviour.
Look, I've been in journalism since 1998 and off Facebook since 2014. If you want to believe I'm full of shit, you're of course free to, but that's a terrible analogy.