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Senators are not supposed to be directly elected. Nor are income taxes supposed to be constitutional. Fortunately, we gave up banning the production and sale

• jcranmer 11y ago
  Fun fact: the 16th Amendment does not mean what you think it means. It was written in response to the Pollock decision, which said that a tax on income derived from property was in essence a property tax. Hence why the amendment explicitly refers to "incomes, from whatever source derived." Income taxes were, even at the time, considered constitutional (and were in fact in effect for decades prior). Indeed, the Pollock decision was later overturned, so one might say that the 16th amendment is one of the more useless ones in the Constitution.