thestein51Here’s another one:
12) a lower court decide that: “At the outset, we reject the Government’s breathtakingly expansive claim of congressional power under the Sixteenth Amendment — upon which it founds the more far-reaching arguments it advances here. The Sixteenth Amendment simply does not authorize the Congress to tax as “incomes” every sort of revenue a taxpayer may receive. As the Supreme Court noted long ago, the “Congress cannot make a thing income which is not so in fact.” Burk-Waggoner Oil Ass’n v. Hopkins, 269 U.S. 110, 114 (1925). Indeed, because the “the power to tax involves the power to destroy,” McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 431 (1819), it would not be consistent with our constitutional government, and the sanctity of property in our system, merely to rely upon the legislature to decide what constitutes income.
Fortunately, we need not rely solely upon the wisdom and beneficence of the Congress for, when the Sixteenth Amendment was drafted, the word “incomes” had well understood limits.”
MURPHY v. INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE, DC Cir. No. 05-5139 (2006)