No, Dolphin52, you have not provided any such "numerous authoritative sources" for the definition. I understand why you feel that my request for documentation "doesn't make sense" to you. The request needs to be understood in the context of (A) Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and (B) rules of legal analysis. What you have done is provide numerous quotations  taken out of context  from various court cases and from other sources. Many of the court cases did not even involve federal taxes.

Further, assuming you are still defending the verbiage that was removed from the article, you appear to be arguing that an "excise"  in the U.S. constitutional law sense  is limited to a tax on privileges, etc. That argument is completely invalid.

There are two problems with the argument. First, none of the sources you provided say that all excises (in the constitutional sense) must always involve a tax on a "privilege," and none of the sources you provided stand for that proposition. Second, by contrast, I have specific federal court cases where the courts ruled various events or activities to be taxable events  yet those activities or events do not involve any "privilege."

Later, I'll repost, on this talk page, the actual text that was removed from the article, and I will again summarize  applying Wikipedia policies and guidelines and rules of legal analysis  why the removed material was objectionable. The analysis you provided violates various Wikipedia rules, and it also violates some of the basic tenets of legal analysis.

Now, for some more background.

The argument that an excise (in the constitutional sense), must always involve a "privilege" to be valid is called a "tax protester argument." It is not only legally invalid, but it is worse: it is also legally frivolous. A person can be penalized monetarily for even raising such an argument on a federal tax return or in a federal court. Later, I'll also post examples of actual court cases where people specifically argued, using the "privilege" argument, that their income could not be taxed under the federal income tax laws, and their arguments were ruled invalid.

On a separate note, it should be obvious that the argument that a excise (again, in the constitutional sense, not the statutory sense) must always involve a "privilege"  is legally nonsensical for an entirely separate reason: Engaging in criminal activity is not a "privilege" in any correct legal sense. Yet, the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the federal income tax (which is an excise) may validly tax the receipt of funds in a criminal activity (specific examples: funds received by extortion or embezzlement), even though the wrongdoer is required to return the funds to their rightful owner. And the federal courts have repeatedly and overwhelmingly ruled that the federal income tax is fundamentally an excise, not a direct tax. (I know of only a couple of cases off the top of my head where a federal court actually ruled a particular federal income tax to be a "direct tax," and one of those cases was later overruled). On this basis alone, an "excise" cannot possibly be limited to ONLY a tax on a privilege, etc.

Stay tuned.