The Constitution, Law, and Income tax First let me say this, I'm not a Sovereign citizens, i'm not trying to not pay taxes, i'm not trying to argue if it is legal or not that you have to pay, you do. What im more interested in is the concept, notions and rulings before 1913 and the amendment, legality, conflicting Constitutionality, etc.... 1911-1913 very shady time in USA political history. They could admen the Constitution to make a law Constitutional. Article I, Section 9 No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken. Also the arguments of Jefferson and Jackson on our monetary system. Wasn't the whole point of the revolutionary war not to pay taxes to Lombard Banks, Bank of England? And the whole Idea of America was to make its own money and not borrow or have money backed by these private companies/people? Pollock v. Farmers' Loan &amp; Trust Company, 157 U.S. 429 (1895), affirmed on rehearing, 158 U.S. 601 (1895), was a landmark case of the Supreme Court of the United States. In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down the income tax imposed by the Wilson–Gorman Tariff Act for being an unapportioned direct tax.
1911-1913 very shady time in USA political history. They could amend the Constitution to make a law Constitutional. There's nothing shady about that in the least. In fact, it is the point of constitutional amendments: to provide a mechanism to change the constitution when it prohibits something that an overwhelming majority of people -- well, of congress and of state legislatures -- think should be allowed. A constitutional amendment can reverse the provisions of Article I; it can reverse a constitutional ruling by a court (or at least reverse the ruling's effect); and it can certainly overcome arguments by Jefferson and Jackson, which have very little legal weight if any. Wasn't the whole point of the revolutionary war ... It doesn't matter what the point of the war was. What matters is that the constitution controls what the government can and can't do, and the constitution can change. The constitution countenanced slavery until it didn't. The constitution required senators to be chosen by state legislatures until it didn't. The constitution forbade income tax until it didn't.
In Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961), the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a similar provision in Maryland's constitution violated the First Amendment and could not be enforced. So presumably the North Carolina provision is similarly unconstitutional and unenforceable. It's not clear why it wasn't removed in 1971. I found references to a 2009 incident in which an avowed atheist named Cecil Bothwell was elected to the Asheville, NC city council. Opponents apparently threatened to mount a legal challenge to his eligibility under the Article VI provision. It's not clear if they actually tried to do so, but in any event, Bothwell served his full four-year term and was then re-elected for another.
As of present moment, under no circumstances. That said, the law may and probably will change around that. But the time has not come just yet. Trying to predict what the law will be is out of scope of this site.
Since you asked, and it's a perfectly legitimate question, here's why it doesn't violate the Fifth Amendment (from Garner v. US): The Fifth Amendment doesn't say "you can't be made to say anything that hurts you." It says "no person...shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." The only time Fifth Amendment protection applies is if you are being forced by the government to make a statement that could open you up to an accusation or conviction of a criminal offense. It's fairly broad (if it would help prove any aspect of the charge, you can claim immunity), but it's also restricted (you can't claim it unless it really would tend to incriminate you). That means that you could only argue the Fifth Amendment if your tax return might help prove a criminal case against you (the fact that disclosing income leads to you needing to pay tax does not qualify as "self-incrimination"). But the amount of income is not one of those things that might incriminate you -- you can get income through all sorts of ways. The thing that is incriminating is revealing the source of the income, and you can claim Fifth Amendment privilege for that. So: The only time you could possibly claim privilege is if you were being forced into a statement that might tend to incriminate you in a criminal proceeding. A statement that makes you liable for tax doesn't mean it might incriminate you. Filing an income tax return isn't inherently incriminating. The fact that you have income not included in any other part of the return (illegal income goes under "other income") doesn't imply you've committed a crime -- lots of people have other income. The amount of income can't be incriminating. The source can be, but you can claim Fifth Amendment privilege for that if it might incriminate you. And lawful income under "other income" still might give rise to a reasonable fear of prosecution, so the fact that you're justified in claiming Fifth Amendment privilege in source of income doesn't mean you're guilty of a crime. Note that there are cases where you are flat-out exempt from filing tax returns under the Fifth Amendment: Marchetti v. US and Grosso v. US found that registration and tax on gambling could be blocked by a Fifth Amendment claim, which didn't even have to be asserted at time of filing, because merely filing the special return would establish you as a gambler (heavily regulated/often criminalized at the state level). The difference with the normal income tax form is that everyone (just about) files one, and so filing it doesn't mean you're a criminal. If there was a separate line along the lines of "Income from Illegal Drug Sales," that might be one thing (anything other than $0 is inherently incriminating). But all the questions are broad, and have many legal sources of income associated with them.
It depends in part on what you mean by &quot;money&quot;. US $100 bills are a prime example of &quot;money&quot;. Art 1 §10 Cl. 1 of the US Constitution says No State shall ...coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts... Under the constitution, only the federal government can &quot;print money&quot; in the &quot;universally usable&quot; sense. Anyone can print or otherwise &quot;emit&quot; objects with economic value, and such objects can be voluntarily accepted in trade. State and local governments can incur debts and thus spend money now that they do not yet have, as long as there is no legal limit on a government's ability to go into debt. California could issue IOU-bucks with the intent that a holder could redeem them as real federal money or as gold or silver at some point. This limits the ability of a state treasury to print money, since in principle and practice it is redeemable in gold or silver. Each state has some set of laws and constitutional provisions that prevent writing rubber checks ad infinitum, for example only allowing debt for large capital projects (building) and requiring voter approval; requiring expenditures to not exceed projected revenues; granting emergency debt-mitigation powers (e.g. hiring freezes) to the governor when a state does go into unauthorized debt. In California, Art IV §12 of the state constitution requires a balanced budget, meaning that the state cannot create infinite obligations without infinite revenues. From the legal perspective, private banks do not create money, although non-legally, people may talk about what banks do as &quot;creating money&quot;. At that point in the discussion, we will have left law and moved to the realm of economic theory.
Neither of those clauses has anything to do with whether a tax on the use of Whatsapp is legal: The first clause tells users that they are responsible for any taxes that may be owed. It says nothing about whether such a tax is or is not legal. The second clause says that users may not charge for Whatsapp services. It says nothing about whether the government may impose a tax for the use of the services. That is all beside the point, though. Even if the TOS explicitly said, "No one may tax the use of our services," that would have no legal effect. Saying that you're exempt from taxation does not make you exempt from taxation.
Are there any restrictions on the taxes or duties a U.S. state can levy? Yes. For starters, states may not use taxes or other means to impede the federal government in its constitutional exercises of power. This precedent stems from a case called McCulloch v. Maryland from 1819. In 1816, Congress established the Second Bank of the United States. Many states were not fans of this action. One of them, Maryland, established a tax on all notes of banks not chartered in Maryland. When the head of the Baltimore branch of the bank refused to pay the tax, litigation commenced and it was eventually appealed to the Supreme Court. SCOTUS held that the Constitution grants implied powers to Congress that allow Congress to implement a national government using its express powers and state action may not interfere with such exercise of power. Taxation, of course, is just one way a state may attempt to interfere with federal power. Can states impose duties on goods that merely transit their territory? Generally no. The Commerce Clause bars states from implementing taxes that discriminate against interstate commerce or that put burdens on it by subjecting commercial activities to numerous or unfair taxation. The Due Process Clause complements this concept by requiring there be a definitive link between a state and the person, property, or transaction which it seeks to tax. This goes back to the SCOTUS decision in Southern Pacific Co. v. Arizona where the state enacted a law barring trains from operating in the state with more than 14 or 70 passenger or freight cars, respectively. The Court held that this was a substantial burden on interstate commerce because trains would need to be broken up before they passed through AZ. Also, you couldn't just stop on the tracks and "break up" the trains, so that had to be done at a stop before getting to AZ. The court determined that with this law, AZ effectively controlled the length of trains as far from its borders as El Paso and Los Angeles. The alternative was to operate all trains at the lowest level allowable by any state, which would lead to AZ dictating train lengths around the country. In determining the validity of the law or regulation, a court uses a balancing test to compare the burden on interstate commerce with the importance of the state interest (the AZ law was purportedly for safety reasons).
In National Federation Of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the court addressed the matter of withholding funding, with respect to obligatory expansion of Medicaid, where ACA required states to expand Medicaid coverage, or lose all federal Medicaid funds. The effect, as described in the ruling was "[t]he threatened loss of over 10 percent of a State’s overall budget", which constitutes "economic dragooning that leaves the States with no real option but to acquiesce in the Medicaid expansion", and "The Medicaid expansion thus violates the Constitution by threatening States with the loss of their existing Medicaid funding if they decline to comply with the expansion". A law which withholds more than Medicaid funding would therefore clearly be at least as coercive as ACA. It is some interest that the ACA ruling put specific comparative numbers on the effect of the highway funding law underlying SD v. Dole, which they decided was "less than a half a percent" of the state budget. In contrast, in the case of Medicaid funding, their estimate was that Medicaid costs are about 20% of a state's budget, and the federal government pays 50%-80% of that. That means, picking low numbers, the effect of withholding Medicaid funding would be about 10% of a state's budget. The line between persuasion and coercion then seems to lie between .5% and 10%. The presumably introduced bill is here, for reference. The core paragraph is (a) None of the funds made available in any Act may be used to make payments to any unit of local government that permits individuals who are not citizens of the United States to vote in elections for State or local office. However, the introductory clause identifies the purpose as being To prohibit Federal payments to a unit of local government that allows individuals who are not citizens of the United States to vote in elections for State or local office, and for other purposes. The substantial difference is that propositions are not offices: the bill introduces ambiguity in legislative intent (the words of the statute say one thing, the potentially enforceable sections introduced into US Code say something else). The bill does not define "unit of local government", so we could search for existing definitions of that term. 31 USC 6701: primarily "a county, township, city, or political subdivision of a county, township, or city, that is a unit of general local government as determined by the Secretary of Commerce for general statistical purposes" (I don't think school, fire, hospital and water districts count). Alternatively 42 USC 12746: a city, town, township, county, parish, village, or other general purpose political subdivision of a State; the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau, the Marshall Islands, or a general purpose political subdivision thereof; a consortium of such political subdivisions recognized by the Secretary [HUD] in accordance with section 12746(2) of this title; and any agency or instrumentality thereof that is established pursuant to legislation and designated by the chief executive to act on behalf of the jurisdiction with regard to provisions of this Act. To get the desired effect, the sponsor wants the definition in 2 CFR 200.64, which includes school districts (and that chunk is about federal grants, thus apt for the bill). The statutory authority for this interpretation is 31 USC 503.