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Medieval serfs paid 25% of earnings to their
landlords, but they still got "free" food, land and protection. Conquering
empires customarily taxed the losers. When British colonists in North
America refused to pay the taxes demanded by King George III of England,
he sent an army to enforce the rules. The American Revolution wasn't just
fought over a tea tax, but over the British monarch's "divine right" to
impose a 3-5% income tax on the Colonists. Eight years of killing,
maiming, property destruction, sinking expensive ships, and decades of
bitter relations...just over a 3-5% tax! That's less than the 7.25% State
Sales Tax that Californians are now paying on almost everything but
tea! With practically NO resistance! Someone has found a bloodless
way to accomplish what King George couldn't. Watch out for
crocodiles! They move so slowly that no one notices until.......gotcha!
When you volunteer to pay your taxes each year
(and each paycheck), you can thank Walt Disney and Donald Duck. The US
Government used them to convince people that they were taxpayers, even
though the law did not make them so. Once upon a time, there was virtually
no income tax. Only nonresident aliens and US citizens not living in one of
the States had to pay taxes and then only after they had earned over
$20,000, the equivalent of nearly $350,000 in 2002. The tax rate was only
1% up to 7% on incomes above $500,000 ($6 million). Very few people were
subject to the tax in the first place -- only about 1% of the wealthiest
Americans were originally required to file. However, in 1942, things
changed even though the law and the Constitution didn't.
A year after the United States
entered the Second World War the federal government needed additional
revenues to pay for the war effort. Congress had
given away much of the government’s usual means of financing itself,
printing its own money, when it created the
Federal Reserve in 1913. A voluntary income tax had been
in place for 29 years, but for Constitutional reasons, fewer than 11 percent
of Americans had to pay the income tax at that time. As a result, Congress
enacted into law the Victory Tax Act of 1942, which included concurrent law
for automatic wage withholding. The Victory Tax was a direct tax on
income. However Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution
requires that direct taxes be apportioned to the several states, not
citizens directly, and therefore it was unconstitutional. The government
attempted to legitimize these new laws by citing Article 1, Section 5,
Clause 2 of the Constitution: "To support Armies but no apportionment for
money to that use shall be a longer term than 2 years."
The new legislation gave Henry
Morgenthau, then Secretary of the Treasury, two voluntary income taxes to
which he needed the voluntary compliance of US citizens. In December 1942,
Morgenthau came up with a brilliant idea to encourage Americans to volunteer
to pay by making the income tax a patriotic duty. To help implement this
idea, Morgenthau ordered John J. Sullivan, a Treasury Department official,
to contact Walt Disney.
Remember there was no television in the
early 40s. The only visual medium the government could use to reach the
public were films at movie houses. Going to the movies was a popular
pastime, and citizens usually attended nearly every week. Walt was asked to
fly to D.C. to discuss an urgent special request. At first, Walt was
reluctant, but Sullivan insisted. Sullivan did not disclose the purpose of
this meeting, and Walt assumed it had to do with the promotion of War Bonds.
The next day, when Mr. Disney arrived to meet with Morgenthau and Internal
Revenue Commissioner Guy Helvering, it was announced that the U.S. wanted
him to "help us sell people on paying the income tax." Confused, Walt
questioned why the government just didn't jail people who did not pay the
income tax. Mr. Helvering retorted, "Walt, we want people to be enthusiastic
about paying their taxes." Walt did not know that an unconstitutional income
tax could not be used to jail American citizens for non-payment. That was
then.
Walt returned to California with a
six-week deadline to make a short animated film and get it into the theaters
by
February 1943. Other projects were postponed, and a full time
crew labored around the clock on the new film. When the preliminary
storyboards were completed, Walt went to Washington DC to preview them
before Morgenthau.
Let’s all go to the movies…
It was a movie leader, much like a
newsreel or preview, added to nearly every movie in the midst of World War
II. The story began with Donald Duck reluctant
to pay income taxes. Listening to a radio broadcast about taxes, Donald
gradually realized that paying the income tax would help win the war. With a
whole perspective, Donald quickly fills out his income tax
return, and so anxious to pay the tax that he races to Washington to
deliver his tax return in person.
There was a brief silence
after Walt had finished presenting
The New Spirit and
then Morgenthau's secretary asserted that she
hated the Donald Duck character. An aide stated that he had expected to see
a cartoon of "Mr. Average
Taxpayer." Morgenthau made no comment.
Walt was insulted and very angry. He
defended his cartoon and argued that using Donald Duck was like MGM loaning
the talents of Clark Gable to the government project,
because Donald was Disney's biggest star at the time. Disney Studios were
even expecting to LOSE money because The New Spirit was being given
to theaters free, and those theaters that
had already booked Disney shorts would
cancel and replace it with the free one. Disney eventually
lost over $40,000 in bookings in a fiscal year Disney Studio had begun over a million dollars in
the red.
Morgenthau reluctantly
approved The New Spirit. Since
the Treasury Department had not contacted the studio until after
mid-December and income tax payments were due
in mid-March back in
those days, Disney had to rush to put it together the in record time--four
weeks.
Donald's declaration of "Taxes to beat the Axis"
trumpeted the patriotic demand
to pay taxes. Walt ordered a full-scale publicity campaign to coincide with
saturation bookings at theaters. The New Spirit was an instant
success and Walt had agreed to make it "without profit" as he had for all
the war related work the Disney Studios did. The Treasury Department
estimated that about half of the US population, 60 million Americans, had
seen the film, and a Gallup Poll indicated that voluntary participation in the income tax increased 37 percent.
A Treasury
official summarized the tax explosion to Congress in 1943:
Up until 1941 we never received as many as 8,000,000
individual income-tax returns in a year. In 1941 that number increased to
15,000,000; in 1942 it increased to 16,000,000. This year we expect
35,000,000 taxable individual income-tax returns
Tax historian John Witte:
“In 1939 about 15% of the people paid income tax. That’s all, period. At the
end of the war, we had 80% of our families paying income tax.”
Another
Donald Duck propaganda film,
Der Fuehrer's Face, and
The New
Spirit were nominated for an Academy Award in documentary short
subjects in 1943!
After the Treasury Department collected
billions of dollars in new revenue, Walt Disney submitted his bill for
$80,000 in expenses that didn't even cover the production costs. The Treasury Department didn't actually have these
funds and Morgenthau had to submit a request for the money to Congress in a
defense appropriations bill. Disney was accused in Congress of being a war
profiteer and the House of Representatives disapproved the
appropriation on a vote of 78 to 63.
 Newspaper coverage
of the Disney attempt to recover some of its costs stirred a public uproar and the
studio was flooded
with negative letters often with the slogan "Not a dime for Disney".
Walt was forced to write off the venture as a loss.
In 1943, the
Treasury Department again asked Walt to make a short cartoon to
encourage Americans to pay their taxes. The purpose of this piece was to
encourage Americans to save for their quarterly estimated tax payments to
fund the war effort. A brilliant bit of propaganda,
The Spirit Of
'43
played upon the
emotions and the attitudes of patriotic Americans not be selfish and
contribute to ultimate victory - winning the war. Donald is torn between a thrifty patriotic duck who
resembles an early Uncle Scrooge and a wild spending, zoot-suited duck
who obviously had Nazi leanings. Arguing over what Donald should do
with his paycheck. Donald eventually hits the free spender and runs off
dutifully to
pay his taxes. To avoid the hullabaloo this time the Treasury Department asked Congress first and
they approved $20,000. That wasn't enough to make a new cartoon so some
elements from the previous The New Spirit were reused.
The Spirit Of ‘43 makes
no mention of the coming of "withholding" from workers' paychecks,
but it quite obviously promoted the desirability of voluntarily withholding until quarterly payment came due. Beardsley Ruml,
Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of New York would later introduce
pay-as-you-go tax withholding in the work place so citizens would never
again be "caught short" on tax day.
The Same Voluntary Tax Remains Today.
The Victory Tax Act was renewed in 1944
and was to expire when the war was over, yet remains in effect today,
codified under the Internal Revenue Code at code section 3402 in subtitle C
- Wage and Employment Tax, not the "Income" Tax. When the war was over,
the Feds simply could not let go of its newfound treasures. The constitutionality of this
direct tax on income was never challenged by Americans. The psychological
power of the propaganda] developed in The Spirit of '43
through its imagery, jingoism and
appeal to civic duty to - as the film's narrator puts it... " pay your taxes gladly and
proudly" to fight an evil and powerful enemy. The propaganda
flick accomplished its goal to get Americans to pay this unconstitutional, voluntary tax. Anyone
questioning the tax might well be associated with the enemy by the end of
this film clip.
So how did we become
complacent about the Constitution and our freedom from government
oppression? We were flim-flammed by cartoons! Or our parents were
flim-flammed. They were simply told that it was for our own good. Most
people only become a taxpayer by volunteering to file a tax report or
withholding form. The IRS won't tell you the truth. It's not their
job. They work for a private corporation.
So as you volunteer to struggle with
your tax forms each year, remember that Donald Duck talked you or your
parents into volunteering your taxes. And the idea of volunteering
to pay taxes for which you are not required by law to pay is lost in the
mists of history.
Credits:http://www.awn.com/tooninstitute/toonnews/korkus.htm
Craig Goodrich in Rant
Magazine, June 1998
©Disney.
The first 1040 was attractive in its
simplicity. No accountants or computers were needed for its easy
calculations and substantial exemptions. One's personal loss was minimal
(and minimized), especially since this modest tax applied only to the very
wealthy and only if you earned your income from certain sources. A ONE
PERCENT TAX was no huge loss - a mere tenth of what tycoons tithed churches
for a cooler space in the afterlife.
| Tax Rate |
1913 Income Level |
Adjusted for Y2K Dollars |
| zero |
Up to $20,000 |
Up to $341,819 |
| 1% |
$20,000-50,000 |
$341,819 to $854,546 |
| 2% |
$50,000-75,000 |
$854,546 to $1,281,819 |
| 3% |
$75,000-100,000 |
$1,281,819 to $1,709,091 |
| 4% |
$100,000-250,000 |
$1,709,091 to $4,272,728 |
| 5% |
$250,000-500,000 |
$4,272,728 to $8,545,455 |
| 6% |
Over $500,000 |
Over $8,545,455 |
|
Exempt: |
| Single |
$3,000 |
$51,273 |
| Married |
$4,000 |
$68,364 |
Source: American
Institute for Economic Research
Cost of Living Calculator c/o
Steven M. Adelson
Last year there were over 480 different
tax forms, each with a trail of instructions - 33 pages just for the "we'll
make it simple for you"
EZ-1040 short form. Tax Law mutated from 11,400 words in 1913, to 7,000,000
words in 1999. (For comparison, the King James Bible is about 773,000
words.) Almost 300,000 trees were chopped to render the 8,000,000,000 pages
of forms and instructions that the IRS sent out. We paid for all the
government postage, of course. We also paid for the accountants and computer
calculation programs - since U.S. tax forms are written to be ridiculously
complicated, and taxpayers are penalized for not figuring them out. Of those
who called the IRS info hotline, less than half the callers got through, and
of the advice they received, half of it was wrong. America's taxpayers spent
5,400,000,000 man-hours just to complete last year's Federal Tax forms.
What
can you do about it? Contact your congressman and senators to protest and
demand hearings to investigate the unconstitutional structure and function
of the Internal Revenue Service. You can find their name, address, email
address, phone number or fax number at
http://thomas.loc.gov/ . Tell your friends, send them the URL of this page, talk about it, tell
your friends to tell their friends. But the IRS is not moved by
constitutional argumentation and nor is the Tax Court. You must be prepared
with facts and a complete understanding of due process. There are experts
and organizations who can help with strategies and procedures that stop the
IRS cold in it's tracks.
Click here for
TAX FREEDOM!
Be sure to give Sam a phone number.
History of Banking Fraud:
The Coming Battle
By M. W. WALBERT
The Coming Battle
documents from Congressional records, newspaper reports and writings by
the founding fathers and others a chronology of events long forgotten that
shaped our fledgling nation from 1776 to 1899. Read about the manipulation
of our money and its supply, the intentional creation of recessions,
depressions and panics, manipulation of the stock markets, and the
demonetization of silver.
Secrets of the Federal Reserve
by Eustace Mullins
Eustace Mullins' carefully
researched and documented treatise picks up from Walbert's expose' and
brings it to the mid 1980's
Taking Back Your Power
by Allen Aslan Heart
WHAT CAN YOU DO? Stop playing THEIR game. Take back
your power. Stop paying taxes that are not legal or lawful. Stop paying
bills you don't really owe. Stop using THEIR money. There ARE ways if you
open your mind and look for the gaps in their fences that keep the sheeple
in their pasture. Are you chattel or a real person? You are the one who
makes that choice.
© 2007, Allen Aslan Heart / White Eagle Soaring of the Little Shell Pembina Band,
a
Treaty
Tribe of the Ojibwe Nation
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