At first, I was skeptical about getting rid of the income tax and replacing it with nothing. How could we exist after that? The truth is, if we ended the income tax today, it would cut federal funding by 40%. If you think that's extreme, then think of it this way. If we slashed today's federal budget by 40%, it would return us to the budget we had way back in...1997.

If you coupled that with abolishing the Fed (preventing the government from just printing more money), then Congress would be forced to control its spending. So where would the funds come from? The same place it came from for roughly 300 years - tariffs, corporate profits, and the States. Again, I used to think tariffs were an outdated method that was no longer practiced, but I found out that wasn't true. Most countries, but not the US, place "value added taxes" on imported products, pricing imports higher than their own products. I don't care what you call it, the reality is that it's a tariff. Read more about it here. And learn how you might not have to pay income taxes here.

I would be very interested on knowing more about this. For example, is the platform of the CST compatible with the Fair Tax initiative (sales taxes + excise taxes + tariffs)?

Ron Paul has introduced H.R. 2755…
Posted September 24th, 2008 by Desert Rat
…the “Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act“, which will repeal the Federal Reserve Act and abolish the US Federal Reserve at the end of 1 year after its passing into law.

The 1 year time frame will be a “winding down” period, overseen by the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, who will continue to pay employees and operate day-to day dealings.

The OMB Director will begin liquidating the Fed’s assets, which will put into the General Fund of the Treasury. The Secretary of the Treasury and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget will report back to Congress at the end of 18 months.

The Texas Congressman has been a long time critic of the US Federal Reserve, ran a grassroots campaign for the Republican Party nomination of President of the United States. Paul was derided by many within his own party for his stance on the Iraq War. Despite poor showings in polls, Rep. Paul used his presidential campaign as a bully pulpit for small government and a strict interpretation of the US Constitution, which has since found an increasing acceptance by conservatives, including political commentators Glenn Beck and Chuck Norris.

This is my absolute favorite anti-income-tax argument. Most claims that Americans aren't required to pay income tax rely on legal interpretations so tortured only a tax resister could possibly believe them. But the Ohio thing has just enough plausibility to give even sane people pause.
It all started when Ohio was preparing to celebrate the 150th anniversary of its admission to the Union in 1953. Researchers looking for the original statehood documents discovered there'd been a little oversight. While Congress had approved Ohio's boundaries and constitution, it had never passed a resolution formally admitting the future land of the Buckeyes. Technically, therefore, Ohio was not a state.
Predictably, when this came to light it was the subject of much merriment. One senator joshingly suggested that his colleagues from Ohio were drawing federal paychecks under false pretenses.
But Ohio congressman George Bender thought it was no laughing matter. He introduced a bill in Congress to admit Ohio to the Union retroactive to March 1, 1803. At a special session at the old state capital in Chillicothe the Ohio state legislature approved a new petition for statehood that was delivered to Washington on horseback. Congress subsequently passed a joint resolution, and President Eisenhower, after a few more jokes, signed it on August 7, 1953.
But then the tax resisters got to work. They argued that since Ohio wasn't officially a state until 1953, its ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1911 was invalid, and thus Congress had no authority to enact an income tax.
Baloney, argued rational folk. A sufficient number of states voted for ratification even if you don't count Ohio.
OK, said the resisters, but the proposed amendment had been introduced to Congress by the administration of William H. Taft. Taft had been born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1857. The Constitution requires that presidents be natural-born citizens of the United States. Since Ohio was not a state in 1857, Taft was not a natural-born citizen, could not legally be president, and could not legally introduce the 16th Amendment. (Presumably one would also have problems with anything done by presidents Grant, Hayes, Garfield, B. Harrison, McKinley, and Harding, who were also born in Ohio.)
Get off it, the rationalists replied. The 1953 resolution retroactively admitted Ohio as of 1803, thereby rendering all subsequent events copacetic.
Uh-uh, said the resisters. The constitution says the Congress shall make no ex post facto law. That means no retroactive admissions to statehood.
Uh, we'll get back to you on that, said the rationalists.
A call to the IRS elicited the following official statement: "The courts have . . . rejected claims that the Sixteenth Amendment . . . was not properly ratified. . . . In Porth v. Brodrick, 214 F.2d 925 (10th Circuit 1954), the court dismissed an attack on the Sixteenth Amendment as being 'clearly unsubstantial and without merit,' as well as 'far fetched and frivolous.'"
Just one problem. The Porth decision didn't specifically address the Ohio argument. It just sort of spluttered that attacks on the 16th Amendment were stupid.
OK, they're stupid. But great matters have turned on seemingly sillier points of law. It's not like the Ohio argument couldn't have been defeated on the merits. One suspects that from a legal standpoint "ex post facto" doesn't mean exactly the same thing as "retroactive." And of course the weight of 150 years of history, during which time everyone thought Ohio had been properly admitted, ought to count for something.
I'm not defending the crackpots. But if you're a parent you recognize that "because I said so" isn't much of an argument. Guess it's different if you're a judge.

I think that Ron Paul's bill is smart way to address how to get back to contitutional government. It would take an adjustment period to "cut" are current government bloat. While we must advocate CP principles, there is going to have to be an adjustment period to avoid crashing the entire system. I think it has to be a more gradual plan, rather than an instant revolution, as well as a gradual withdrawl from the interventionist foreign policy. A good anology would be the withdrawl of troops from Iraq, you can't just cut and run; that would be disasterous.

of course, then again, I'm a couch politician lol

Very true - any changes we make have to be phased in. Our current system is too dependent upon its bloat.

I was invited to speak at the End the Fed rally in Philadelphia along with 3 other speakers on Saturday 11-22. There is a march from City Hall to the Fed building starting at 11:22am. At 2pm, there will be a 2-hour rally at Independence Hall in the Independence Ballroom (http://www.independencevisitorcenter.com/ihalltickets). This is where I will be giving a 20-minute speech regarding H.R. 2755 and monetary policy. I was asked to give a short bio for the program and for the introduction to my speech. I mentioned my involvement with the CP extensively in this bio, hoping to expose more people to our party.

The organizers are expecting over 1,000 people at the march, and several hundred at Independence Hall for the rally afterward. If anyone is in the area, come on over and make your voice heard for economic and political liberty.

http://endthefed.us

John Matthew Leone
CP of NJ, Gloucester County

As for 'phasing out' the Fed. Considering all the actual and potential damage from that institution, immediately is not soon enough.

One doesn't gradually remove a cancerous tumor.

O.W.

I have to disagree, changes have to be gradual (I'd be happy with phasing out the FED over 3 years). Abrupt changes cause market uncertainty, and can cause a backlash.
Don't let the bigger picture cloud up the present. What matters is that we get there!

Even when they introduced reserve notes into our system, they let them exist side-by-side with our treasury notes for a couple years while the system switched over and people could get used to them.

I don't think we should abolish the IRS. I think we should change the wording of the IRC to reflect its constitutional function and do away with all the ambiguous language that makes the average citizen and judges think that the laws apply to them.

It is unconstitutional to tax the labor of a man who has a right to live in this country and who is either a natural-born citizen or one who has officially adopted this country as his own through legal immigration and naturalization. The labor of a free man is his property, it is his inalienable right to work to make a living by whatever means his mind and body can provide so long as it does not infringe on the rights of others.

However, being an employee of the Federal government (I'm only speaking of federal income taxes now) is a privilege and not a right. The word privilege means "private law". It is therefore, constitutional to create a private law for those who are in a position of privilege to raise funds to cover expenses, such as retirement, by imposing a federal income tax on those who work for the federal government. It would allow us to support a pension fund for those who serve in the federal government without taxing the other citizens.

The private citizen has the choice to either save some of his wages and set them aside for when he retires or to ask his boss to create a pension fund by deducting a certain amount from his wages and putting them into an account that has the potential to bear interest.

Those who work for the federqal government should have the same right to save for themselves or to allow the government to withhold part of their wages and any money they make from the benefit of their government employment, such as consulting fees, and putting those funds in a retirement account, such as social security. But it should be by choice.

When you look at the IRC carefully, and notice the wording of the definitions, you will find that the constitutionality is intact, but the wording is crafted in such a manner as to give the impression that all citizens are supposed to pay into the program and relinquish a certain percentage of their wages.

What we need is a clear rewording and the forthright rewriting of the code to eliminate all confusion and thus restore to common knowledge the rights that were never really lost, but have been given up by those who, by the fraudulent wording of the current IRC, have signed statements under penalty of perjury that they had taxable income.

Once that is done, then federal employees can pay for their own pension plans and not live off the backs of private citizens.

It would also force them to have realistic pension payments, based on what they saved or had withheld, not by what they can vote to icrease by raising unconstitutional taxes on their "underlings", the private citizens.
For more information on this subject, I highly recommend the book, Cracking the Code, by Peter Hendrickson.