Tax protester statutory arguments

Tax protesters in the United States advance a number of statutory arguments asserting that the assessment and collection of the federal income tax violates statutes enacted by the United States Congress and signed into law by the President. Such arguments generally claim that certain statutes fail to create a duty to pay taxes, that such statutes do not impose the income tax on wages or other types of income claimed by the tax protesters, or that provisions within a given statute exempt the tax protesters from a duty to pay.

Statutory arguments, though related to, are distinguished from constitutional, administrative and general conspiracy arguments. Statutory arguments presuppose that Congress has the constitutional power to assess a tax on incomes, but that the Congress has simply failed to levy the tax by enacting a specific statute.

In connection with various arguments that the Federal income tax should not apply to citizens or residents within the fifty states, some tax protesters have argued about the meanings of the terms "state" and "includes."

One argument is that in most subparts and the general definition in the Internal Revenue Code defines "state" and "United States," are what other amending code sections refer to as "a special definition of "state"," where the statutory definitions include the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and some other territories, without mentioning the 50 states. Under this argument, the definition of "state" within the Code in general, or within those certain subparts of the Code, refers only to territories, or the possessions of the federal government, or the District of Columbia. Alaska and Hawaii were formerly included in the "special" definition of a "state" until each was removed from that general definition by the Alaska Omnibus Act and the Hawaii Omnibus Act when they were respectively admitted to the Union.

Under the following tax protester argument, the term "state" is used in an international meaning of "nation" or "sovereign." The argument is that this meaning refers to the foreign status of each state to every other state including the federal state, under private international law. Under this argument, all court opinions on the subject of states being foreign to each other (and also to the federal state and possessions) have upheld this concept, and have distinguished between meanings of foreignness by using the terms private international law and public international law. Under this argument, the latter term deals with the authority the 50 States delegated to the United States government to represent American interests outside of America, grouping all those that are bound by the United States Constitution as one body, relative to those that are not bound, such as France or Britain. Under this argument, the term "private international law" signifies the foreignness of the sovereign states, or nations, of the United States system to each other, within the system.

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