Each civilization follows the path of a particular religion that represents it; turning to other religions, it loses the one it had, and ultimately loses them all.
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego: Composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa; translated by Richard Zenith based on the 1998 Assírio & Alvim edition, edited by Richard Zenith), §306.
According to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, the many surprise visits each year looked bad, and “making this change is a common-sense step.” (The IRS wants to still be able to surprise-visit taxpayers whose assets it is seizing. . . .)
Let’s hope that the reform, even if partial and inadequate, is for real. It’s long overdue.
But can we trust these “revenuers”?
The agency periodically says that it will now respect taxpayer rights, now be nicer, etc., usually soon after publicity about awful IRS abuses. As a result of such attention, some IRS personnel are then probably nicer in some ways to some taxpayers sometimes.
And things could always be worse.
Indeed, they may be getting worse. Our Congress recently moved to expand IRS funding by $80 billion over the next ten years (part of the laughably named Inflation Reduction Act). Over the last few years, the IRS has spent millions on “weaponry and gear.” And the question of what to do about the latest bad-looking IRS abuses of the taxpayer never seems to go away.
It will probably never be realistic to expect the IRS to always play nice and in strict accordance with all pertinent legalities and constitutional rights.
But if the Congress that funds the IRS actually represented us, the American people, maybe these issues would’ve been solved a long time ago.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
On this question, the agency has stacked the deck in its favor by commissioning an “independent” review by a left-wing think tank, New America, already on record in support of giving IRS officials authority to do this.
Basically, the IRS handed $15 million (of taxpayer money) to New America to say “Yes, based on our very independent review, we agree with you and ourselves about thus expanding your power over taxpayers.”
Under the proposed IRS Direct File program — already being tested in a pilot program — taxpayers would use government software to let IRS crunch the tax numbers.
Mark Tapscott’s report for Epoch Times cites many objections to the scheme.
Among the most pertinent is voiced by David Williams, president of Taxpayers Protection Alliance. He notes that when individuals and private tax preparers fill out tax forms, they’re typically trying to keep the tax take to a minimum. But the IRS won’t have the same incentive to maximize deductions and refunds.
Moreover, “There is no reason to trust the IRS with even more sensitive financial information. . . .”
Participation in the IRS Direct File program would not be mandatory, at least not initially.
Once established, though, the program would make it easier to mandate participation for at least some categories of tax returns.
And let us not pretend that such a development would be surprising. Governments tend to use precedents of newly granted power to expand that power.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
When the people lie prostrate, when the people groan under heavy burdens, when the people just can’t take it anymore — and when an election is coming up — that is the time for politicians to relieve everyone’s burden.
A bit.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen favors considering a temporary gas-tax holiday to emulate some of the states. Reviving the Keystone oil pipeline — no, not something to consider, she says. But she’s okay with a brief gas-tax break.
Let’s do better.
I propose a millennium-long gas-tax holiday, government-barriers-to-drilling holiday, regulation-of-all-industries holiday. Under my plan, government gets all the way out of the way of all markets so we can all be as prosperous as possible, whether or not a big economic crisis is underway.
But would there be any such crises — long-term and intractable economy-wide crises, I mean — if my plan were enacted?
When government does everything possible to injure the economy and prevent recovery, it takes a long time for markets to bounce back from shocks. If ever.
Un-fetter the markets, though, and economic actors would be able more rapidly to adjust to major jolts. If gas imported from overseas plummets, producers could then quickly adapt by expanding production. They cannot readily do so now because government imposes so many barriers.
The politicians’ preference for modest, namby-pamby reprieves are not only substantially weak, they send the wrong signals. They get doled out as if government were doing us a special favor . . . by not beating us up so badly for a very little while.
We need freedom. On an ongoing basis.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Mike Stenhouse explains how this coalition leapt into action against a legislative effort to impose universal vaccination. (We use the term “vaccinated” loosely, since any ameliorative effects of the vaccines reportedly fade pretty quickly and don’t actually prevent COVID-19.)
The mandate’s penalties for noncompliance would have included monthly $50 fines, doubling of recalcitrants’ state income taxes, and fines upon employers of $5,000 per unvaccinated employee.
State Senator Samuel Bell submitted the legislation, S2552, on March 1 of this year. Because the country was by then returning to something like pre-pandemic “normal life,” the bill seemed dead on arrival.
But then the Boston Globe shifted into overdrive to revive the legislation, which also received new support from local media.
That’s when ParentsUnitedRI.com and others sounded the alarm. In just a few weeks, the bill became radioactive, hurrying former sponsors to renounce their support.
The state legislature’s current session ends June 30. Stenhouse suggests that although the senate president could still fast-track the Draconian proposal at any time, “there is likely no political appetite for such a heavy-handed measure, especially in an election year.”
If Bell’s bill does die in the current session, it’s even less likely to be revived in the next. Whatever political appetite there may be right now to stomp people who make the “wrong” decision about getting vaccinated, popular opposition has done its work, making medical tyranny much less likely.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Backlash can be good. Against lousy ideas, for example. Sometimes, the response to the backlash is to relinquish the lousy idea, at least temporarily.
We must hope for more than a moment of reprieve from the Internal Revenue Service’s plan to require facial ID recognition of persons who use certain functions of its website.
Both Republican and Democratic congressmen, among many others, were outraged.
It’s good that many congressmen regard some forms of surveillance as beyond the pale. (Meanwhile, legislation to promote scanning of everybody’s online messages at will, Lindsey Graham’s EARN IT Act, is back in Congress. Bipartisan Backlash, can you take a look at this?)
The IRS said that it wanted to use facial recognition technology to help prevent scammers from posing as taxpayers.
But a database of such facial info would itself pose a huge security risk. For decades now, we have been inundated with stories about major databases being hacked.
Nor would legal access have been restricted to the less-than-trustworthy IRS. A third-party vendor would have been involved.
So the IRS has retreated, saying they grasp “the concerns that have been raised” and pledging to pursue “short-term options that do not involve facial recognition.”
The Biden administration has also proposed expanding IRS staff by 80,000+ personnel and permitting minute governmental monitoring of the bank accounts of millions of Americans — notions now in abeyance but undead. And who knows what other innovations in overseeing us are coming up?
Stay on call, Bipartisan Backlash.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
This story started out lousy and then swerved into neutral. But there are still problems under the hood.
At the very end of 2020 (good riddance, 2020!), U.S. distilleries were suddenly faced with a ludicrous FDA tax of $14,000 for using their facilities to make alcohol-based hand sanitizer.
These adaptive distilleries — about 835 of them — have long used alcohol to make booze, of course. But early last year, lockdowns began to massively reduce demand for alcoholic beverages in certain venues. It made sense to begin producing hand sanitizer in order to meet the massively new pandemic-induced demand for sanitizer.
Win-win, until, in the last days of 2020, FDA decided that such flexible pivoting deserved what amounts to a penalty. Bureaucrats decided that producing hand sanitizer changed how the 835 distilleries should be classified. Entities so classified — as “over-the-counter drug monograph facilities” — are supposed to pay the $14,000 fee.
Media coverage and the outcry by already-walloped distilleries has, however, led the Department of Health and Human Services to rescind the penalty. HHS has told FDA to stand down. The fee has been cancelled.
So everybody is happy now, the way you’re happy when the sledgehammer swinging down doesn’t bash you in the head after all.
Aaron Bergh of Calwise Spirits wonders whether distilleries will still get hit with such a fee in 2021. What the government giveth, it can taketh. For now, though, like everyone else, he’s just darn relieved.
Happy New Year, folks.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Tim Eyman strikes again.
In deep blue Washington State, the ballot measure activist celebrated another Election Day victory last week with Initiative 976, limiting vehicle taxes. Not to mention Referendum 88, whereby voters kept a ban on government use of racial preferences, enacted via an initiative Eyman had co-authored two decades ago.
And still, there were a dozen more issues on last Tuesday’s statewide ballot thanks to Mr. Eyman’s 2007 initiative, I-960, which mandates “advisory votes on taxes enacted without voter approval.” (Also thanks to state legislators, I guess, for racking up 12 new tax increases this year without bothering to ask voters!)
Yet, perhaps it matters not at all. Nearly two million votes cast on each of these measures? Three supported by a majority? Nine rejected? Two esteemed Evergreen State newspaper columnists pooh-pooh them as “meaningless.”
“The Legislature has never taken the voters’ advice when they say a tax should be repealed,” writes Spokane Spokesman Review columnist Jim Camden.
That’s a failing of the Legislature, Jim,* not these advisory measures . . . which you seem to acknowledge when you write that these votes at least “provide a good control group for any experiment on the voters’ knee jerk reaction to higher taxes.”
If legislators cared to know.
While dumping on the dozen measures as “an empty remnant of an earlier initiative,” The Columbian’s Greg Jayne notices that “their presence on the ballot this year reminded voters, over and over again, of the Legislature’s spendthrift ways.”
Helping create an anti-tax mood that spurred support for I-976.
Not bad for being meaningless.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* I use his first name because I know Mr. Camden from decades ago when he was a reporter covering House Speaker Tom Foley, who after suing to overturn the 1992 citizen initiative for term limits became the only Speaker defeated for reelection since the Civil War.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
“The Trump years may have cemented Colorado’s blue-state status — time will tell,” writes Alex Burness in the Denver Post, “but voters in the Centennial State continue to hold a hard line on anything that has even a whiff [of] new tax.”
Burness is talking about Proposition CC, a measure placed on Tuesday’s ballot by the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature, which would have allowed state government to keep and spend $37 million annually coming into government coffers over the state’s constitutional spending cap, rather than refunding those dollars to taxpayers as required by the Taxpayer Bill of Rights passed back in the 1990s.
The elite supporters of Proposition CC devoted more than $4 million to promoting the measure, outspending opponents better than two-to-one and arguing that government desperately needed the money for education and transportation. Opponents cried foul over the official ballot summary voters read, which began with the words “Without a tax increase . . .”
“But the measure lost,” Burness informs, “and it wasn’t close.”
“The measure’s failure amounts to a significant victory for supporters of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights,” Colorado Public Radio reports. “That constitutional amendment requires voter approval for all tax increases, sets a revenue limit for every government in the state and requires any surpluses be returned to taxpayers.”
“Who’s in charge?” TABOR author Douglas Bruce asked years ago. “We, the people, who earn the money, or the politicians who want to spend it?”
The answer from supposedly blue-leaning Colorado voters was unequivocal.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Photo credit: Pictures of Money
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Even people who get their information only from major network news know that, in their mad rush to promise free health care, Democratic presidential hopefuls would raise taxes for nearly everybody including the “hard-working middle class.”
How do they know?
Because at least one of the eager promisers won’t give a straight answer.
Her name is Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Like Bernie Sanders (but not Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden) she is offering “Medicare for All,” which Fox’s Tucker Carlson calls straight-up socialism.*
George Stephanopoulos, Chris Matthews, and “other strident Democratic partisans” have been pressing her on the tax hike issue, and at the recent, fourth national primary debate, Warren continued to evade. Even Sleepy Joe knows that universal single-payer health care spending would require more taxes than can be squeezed out of the very rich and the big corporations (which Warren, Sanders, and other Democrats incessantly push). But Warren just will not say the words: yes, your taxes will go up. She continually feints to her follow-up argument, that since overall health care costs would [according to plan] go down, we would all come out ahead.
Tucker Carlson, citing an Urban Institute study, gives the answer the democratic socialists won’t: their promise would require spending 3.4 trillion tax dollars per year — $10 grand per person per year, including every child, retiree, and prison inmate.** Warren expects us to repress our common sense and believe that cramming all health care spending through the federal government will increase efficiency.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has the right word for Medicare for All: utopian.
Noting that Obamacare failed to live up to its promises, Azar predicts the ultimate result, “Medicare for None.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* And not altogether implausibly, since medicine is a fifth of the American economy and (presumably) since socialism is an economy run by government.
** Tucker’s list.
Illustration from a photo by Gage Skidmore
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts