Since you seem to be a bit of a slow blinker on this issue let me repost the facts...
The personal income tax is not an excise tax.
Lately, there is a lot of information, including that from a few attorneys, arguing that the personal income tax is an excise tax. This is not correct, nor is this a legitimate argument, and this short paper is provided to explain why the personal income tax is not properly recognized as an excise, but as a tariff.
First, both tariffs (imposts) and excises are indirect taxes under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1 of the Constitution of the United States, which states:
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;â€
Blacks law dictionary tells us that a tariff is a tax, or schedule of rates for a tax, imposed on foreign goods being imported into the country, or imposed on foreign activity occurring within the United States (America, – including the fifty states).
The Constitution, in Article 1, Section 8, Clauses 3-5, gives the federal government absolute jurisdiction over all foreign matters, affairs, and agreements with foreign nations, and over foreign persons in the U.S. This is done so that the fifty states may present one consistent face to the world to deal with in trading with the United States, rather than having to keep track of fifty different agreements, depending upon which state they were doing business in. This jurisdiction over foreign affairs gives the federal government the power to tax both imports into, and the foreign activity of foreign nations and persons in, the United States.
An excise tax, on the other hand, as stated by the Supreme Court in Flint v. Stone Tracy Co., 220 U.S. 107, 31 S.Ct. 342, 349 (1911), are:
"Excises are taxes laid upon:
(1.) the manufacture, sale or consumption of commodities within the country,
(2.) upon licenses to pursue certain occupations, and
(3.) upon corporate privileges;â€
In further identifying and describing the nature of an excise tax, the court held:
“.. the requirement to pay such taxes involves the exercise of the privilege and if business is not done in the manner described no tax is payable ... it is the privilege which is the subject of the tax and not the mere buying, selling or handling of goods.â€
Flint, supra, at 151 -152
So we see that excise taxes are taxes on taxable activities involving commodities, the possession of a license (like ATF licenses), and corporate privileges. Excise taxes are not taxes on general occupations (or on the work of citizens conducted by constitutional right), rather than on work conducted under a federal license or corporate banner, or involving commodities.
Some of the confusion on this issue of “Is it an excise or a tariff ?†comes from the Supreme Court itself. This is because the Court appears in the Stanton decision in 1913, where the court is testing the legitimacy of taxing the income of a mining corporation derived from its mining activities, to uphold the CORPORATE part of the income tax provisions of the tested legislation as an indirect excise. Also, in the Brushaber v. Union Pac. R.R. Co., 240 U.S. 1, 36 S.Ct. 236 (1916), the court stated,
"Moreover in addition the conclusion reached in the Pollock Case did not in any degree involve holding that income taxes generically and necessarily came within the class of direct taxes on property, but on the contrary recognized the fact that taxation on income was in its nature an excise entitled to be enforced as such unless and until it was concluded that to enforce it would amount to accomplishing the result which the requirement as to apportionment of direct taxation was adopted to prevent, in which case the duty would arise to disregard form and consider substance alone and hence subject the tax to the regulation as to apportionment which otherwise as an excise would not apply to it." Brushaber, supra, at 16-17.
http://www.tax-freedom.com/NotAnExcise.htm
