16TH AMENDMENT

16th Amendment

16th Amendment

The original Constitution requires that direct taxes be apportioned among the states according to population. An income tax is not so divided, so the amendment was needed to allow the parties to the income tax that constitutes”direct” taxes.

Some tax protesters contend that this amendment is not really part of the Constitution - which was never ratified! Therefore, they say, the income tax is unconstitutional. This argument was popularized by Bill Benson in a book called "The law that never was."

Surprisingly, this argument has a little something for him. When the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified by state legislatures in ...