Sixteenth Amendment

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.

Proposed in 1909 and ratified in 1913. This Sixteenth Amendment overturned the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. (1895), which had held unconstitutional a direct tax by Congress on income. A tax on income derived from property was a direct tax which Congress could impose only by the rule of apportionment according to population pursuant to Article I, Secs. 2 and 9 of the Constitution. The Pollock decision was a surprise because merely 15 years earlier the Supreme Court had unanimously upheld a similar tax during the Civil War, the only other time that Congress had tried to tax income directly.

After Pollock the Court did uphold creative taxation by Congress based on a theory that they were levied on mere "incidents of ownership" and thus were constitutional excise taxes: (1) an inheritance tax, (2) a tax affixing revenue stamps to memoranda for the sale of merchandise on commodity exchanges, (3) a war revenue tax upon tobacco being resold, and (4) a corporate income tax as an excise "measured by income" justified by the privilege of doing business in corporate form.

On April 13, 2000, an organization called We the People Foundation for Constitutional Education, Inc. sent delegates to Washington D.C. to argue that the 16th Amendment was not properly ratified.