Tag: income tax

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general freedom government transparency tax policy

Latest Learned About Lois Lerner

Lois Lerner, IRS, collage, photomontage, puzzle, investigation, illustration, editorial, abuse, law, foundations, harassment,

Is it time to spell out the IRS as the Internal Revenue Scandal?

The IRS has so many scandals under its belt.

But the biggest, from a broad, threat-​to-​the-​republic point of view, surely remains the agency’s targeting of Tea Party and conservative organizations seeking 501c(3) and 501c(4) nonprofit status. Agents ideologically tagged their applications for special obstruction in the run-​up to the 2012 presidential campaign. And after.

I don’t bother Googling to get my IRS-​scandal updates, I just visit the indefatigable Paul Caron’s TaxProf Blog. Day in, day out, for the past 700+ days and counting, TaxProf has aggregated all the latest reportage and analysis about this abuse of power.

Lois Lerner — former head of the IRS’s stomp-​conservative-​nonprofit-​applicants division — has both declared herself innocent of any wrongdoing and asserted her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself.

But evidence is piling up of her actual attitudes and what-she-knew-when.

TaxProf points to an email by Lerner from way back in February of 2012 in which she advocates training for IRS staffers in the fine art of “understand[ing] the potential pitfalls” of providing too much information to Congress. A 2013 email by Lerner states that she can understand “why the IRS criteria” leading to the targeting of Tea Party and other groups “might raise some questions.”

The documents are out in the wild now, thanks to Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act requests. JW has been relentless in trying to hold the IRS accountable.

Which has to be one of the very toughest jobs on earth.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Lois Lerner

 

Categories
national politics & policies tax policy too much government

Commiserations on Tax Day

It’s April 15, my eldest daughter’s birthday. I used to tell her she wouldn’t have to pay taxes like everyone else, because IRS folks wouldn’t dare make her file on her birthday, would they?

Seriously, when it comes to family and taxes, I’m just glad that my wife does all the work. 

My job is getting the birthday cake.

You can understand why I’d shirk the tax work. There are 40,000 sections to the tax code, and no one understands it all.

This complexity has costs. And not just to my sanity. A whole industry has risen to ease the burden of figuring out our taxes. One hates to begrudge anyone an honest living, but really, most of today’s tax accountants would better serve humanity in some other job.

Simplifying taxes should be as important as tax reduction. Instead, because our representatives and our president just cannot stop themselves from spending more and more of our money, they are raising taxes. It’ll be on the proverbial rich, in the immediate future, but they won’t stop there.

They can’t stop there. 

Why? Because if you took all the wealth — not just the income, but all the wealth — from every millionaire in the country, you still couldn’t pay all the future obligations of the federal government.

My darling daughter aside, April 15 is no day to celebrate. It’s tax day, and it marks the degradation of our nation at the hands of our politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
tax policy

Connecticutting The Dots

Connecticut used to be one of the go-​to places for escaping state income taxes.

But in 1991, Governor Lowell Weicker hatched the novel idea of burdening Connecticut residents with the same direct tax on income with which Americans have been saddled in so many other states. Despite the deep unpopularity of his proposal, Weicker rammed it through. That meant sacrificing any chance at re-​election. But he was hailed as a hero by all fans everywhere of government bloat and flattened economies.

The Constitution State has indeed suffered a flatter economy in the years since. The Yankee Institute points out that since 1992, Connecticut businesses have hired no new workers on net. Even as the country added more than 20 million jobs. Over the last decade, Connecticut suffered a net loss of some 113,000 residents. If your tax policies tell productive people to get lost … they do.

Connecting the dots between higher taxes and stalled growth may be easy for most graduates of Economics 101. Even most politicians probably grasp the connection. But many just don’t care.

In 1991, residents were told that the income tax burden would never exceed 4.5 percent. But in 2001, it jumped to 5 percent. Now the current governor, Jodi Rell, wants to hike the top rate to 6.5 percent.

What the … Rell? Folks aren’t leaving the state fast enough for you?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.