Pollock v. Farmers Loan and Trust, 157 U.S. 429 (1895)

LINK TO CASE: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=7292056596996651119

WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollock_v._Farmers%27_Loan_%26_Trust_Co.

SIGNIFICANCE: This was the first attempt after the civil war to implement an income tax. It was declared unconstitutional because it was a direct, unapportioned tax upon real property.

In this case the Supreme Court found an 1884 tax law similar to the 1864 Tax Law in the Sprinter v. United States, 102 U.S. 586 (1885) to be an unconstitutional direct tax. Why the difference?

Well, unlike in the Springer case, Charles Pollock and the other litigants had NOT been duped into filing an income tax return and assessing themselves with tax. Their beef was with the corporation that had withheld income tax from their dividends.

The majority of the Supreme Court sided with Pollock et. al. and threw out the entirety of the income tax provisions of the 1894 Act because it found the imposition of tax on rents to be an unconstitutional non-apportioned direct tax on the rental property itself. A major reason for this result was that the tax on real estate in the 1884 tax law did NOT have a federal nexus, meaning the “income” did not originate with the national government, and thus was PRIVATE.

The Plaintiff also properly averred their status in the court record as a nonresident alien and a Fourteenth Amendment American national, just like the case of Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad, 240 U.S. 1 (1916).

The MAIN thing that the Sixteenth Amendment did was to EXPAND the definition of DIRECT TAX to include chattel property. Otherwise, it conferred no new taxing powers:

That narrow view of what a direct tax might be persisted for a century. In 1880, for example, we explained that “direct taxes,” within the meaning of the Constitution, are only capitation taxes, as expressed in that instrument, and taxes on real estate.” Springer, supra, at 602. In 1895, we expanded our interpretation to include taxes on personal property and income from personal property, in the course of striking down aspects of the federal income tax. Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co., 158 U.S. 601, 618 (1895). That result was overturned by the Sixteenth Amendment, although we continued to consider taxes on personal property to be direct taxes. See Eisner v. Macomber, 252 U.S. 189–219 (1920).

[National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519, 598 (2012);
SOURCE: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=12815172896965834886]