Citizen
The movement claim that ordinary Americans living in the fifty states are 'nonresident aliens' for IRC purposes is unsupported
A central conclusion of *The Federal Zone* and its derivative texts is that ordinary U.S. citizens living in the fifty states are 'nonresident aliens' for IRC purposes — taxable, on the argument's account, only on U.S.-source / effectively-connected income under § 871, rather than on worldwide income under § 1. The IRC's own definition of 'nonresident alien' at 26 U.S.C. § 7701(b)(1)(B) closes the cell against U.S. citizens by express conjunctive text: an individual is a nonresident alien only if 'such individual is neither a citizen of the United States nor a resident of the United States.' Both negatives are required. A U.S. citizen necessarily fails the first. The accompanying regulation — 26 CFR § 1.1-1(b), 'all citizens of the United States, wherever resident...are liable to the income taxes' — confirms the worldwide-tax rule. The claim has no support in the operative statutory text.
'Nonresident Alien' in the Internal Revenue Code
26 U.S.C. § 7701(b)(1)(B) defines 'nonresident alien' as 'an individual who is neither a citizen of the United States nor a resident of the United States.' The definition has two requirements, both necessary: non-citizenship and non-residency. A U.S. citizen — by the express text of an Act of Congress enacted in 1984 — cannot be a nonresident alien for IRC purposes. This single sentence forecloses the territorial-volunteer reading that *The Federal Zone* and its derivatives depend on.
The Citizen/Alien × Resident/Nonresident Matrix
The IRC distinguishes individual taxpayers along two axes: U.S. citizenship (citizen vs. alien) and U.S. residence (resident vs. nonresident). The four resulting cells map onto real Code sections with distinct tax bases — citizens and resident aliens taxed worldwide under § 1, nonresident aliens taxed on U.S.-source / effectively-connected income under § 871. The Matrix is real; what the alternate-tax movement adds — moving U.S. citizens in the fifty states into the nonresident-alien cell — is not in the Matrix.