I remember as a teenager hearing the annual results of Money Magazine’s income-tax survey. For this survey they would send out to about 40 accounting firms a hypothetical set of financial facts for an American family of four. Money Magazine would ask these accounting firms to calculate the income tax liability for this typical American family. And every year, Money Magazine would get 40 different answers back. Even the experts can’t agree on how the tax should be computed.

In 1995, I became interested in the legality of the income tax. The more I studied the more questions I had. The income tax statutes plus their regulations amount to approximately 20,000 pages of fine print. When you add to the statutes and regulations Treasury decisions, Internal Revenue manuals and all the relevant court cases, we’re now talking several hundreds of thousands of pages of material.

I reasoned that a study of the congressional and public debates of the Sixteenth Amendment would be a more efficient path to determining the purpose and the authority of the federal income tax. Since no one had written on the subject, my studies took me to Washington, D.C., and the original source documents.

Starting with the Congressional Record, I read the entire debate on the proposed income tax amendment that took place in 1909 and 1913. Next, I reviewed other congressional documents from that time period. I scoured every law, political economy and economic journal from that same period. I read and catalogued about 300 New York Times income tax articles from 1909 thru 1915. Then I reviewed the entire collection of related income tax books found in the Library of Congress that were published prior to 1913. Lastly, I visited the law library of the Supreme Court and picked up the transcript of record (the whole file) for about 20 early income tax cases.

Much of the evidence I discovered was apparently unknown to others who had written on the subject. Realizing that this information needed to be put out there for public consumption, I wrote a book about it. My book, “Constitutional Income,” was first printed in 2000.

I approached my legal analysis of the material I gathered in the same logical way that I tackle an engineering problem. I first gathered all the information that was available. Then I fit all the evidence into an argument that gave weight to all relevant parts in such a way that they agreed with each other. If there is one single thing that engineering school does for you, it’s to teach you how to solve a problem.

The intent and purpose of the Sixteenth Amendment is to bring tax relief to those who earn wages and salaries. Because the income tax was to tax only investment income and business profit, wage and salary earners were expecting the income tax amendment to give them a tax break. The entire body of evidence supports this position.

From a technical standpoint, the Sixteenth Amendment didn’t provide an “income tax exception to the apportionment clause” of the Constitution. The status quo has it otherwise whereby it is assumed a constitutional loophole exists allowing for an unapportioned direct tax on wages and salaries. An apportioned tax is a tax where everyone pays the same amount, or a state as a whole pays the tax for its people in proportion to the population of the state.

There were five early income tax cases where at least one party to the case argued that this exception to the apportionment clause was created by the Sixteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court said “no,” there is no apportionment clause exception. To my knowledge, the Supreme Court has never reversed this position.

In my litigation on this issue, I camped where the Supreme Court camps.

The Supreme Court’s position is right, because that is what the entire body of historical evidence supports. Today’s lower courts are out of step with this position of the Supreme Court.

Through my own litigation on the issue, I hoped to rectify this departure from the real intent of the income tax amendment. I was not successful in my endeavor and now realize the effort necessary to make this change is bigger than a single lawsuit.

My efforts have never been focused on me. Had that been the case, I would have traveled a much different path. Now I will focus on education, as I believe future changes to our tax system will be better thought out if we understand where we’ve been.