Fraud Friday: Variances in punctuation marks


Tax protestor-type arguments sometimes find their way to Tax Court, but they’re never effective and will often only achieve the addition of a frivolous argument penalty. One tax protestor-type argument regarding the Sixteenth Amendment isn’t just that it wasn’t properly ratified and therefore doesn’t permit the taxation of individual income, instead it focuses on states’ bills of ratification that employed variances in punctuation marks. The use of semicolons instead of commas thus renders the entire Amendment null and void, freeing us all from the odious task of paying income tax. (Only four state instruments of ratification contain the language of the Sixteenth Amendment exactly as approved by Congress.) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_protester_arguments; U.S. v. Thomas (1986) 788 F.2d 1250)

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