Debt Ceiling: bad news

 

JD Rucker at The Discern Report saw it coming:

The debt ceiling battle may be over. We’ll know for sure Wednesday when the vote is scheduled, but it seems Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy may have come together. Considering the most basic and obvious elimination of fruitless spending — 87,000 IRS agents — was NOT addressed, this seems like a huge loss for patriots.

McCarthy will herald spending cuts, but they won’t be in the same ballpark as the absolute overhaul that is necessary to give this nation any hope for the future. Instead, we will continue down our path to unavoidable Modern Monetary Theory crushing the country into oblivion. . . .

McCarthy caved.  Another win for the Uniparty.

Read the rest of the report here. 

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The Coordinated Attack on Your Money

Michael Wilkerson at The Epoch Times (via The Liberty Daily with no paywall) outlines “The Coordinated Attack on Your Money.”  This one paragraph is scary enough:

Do you think your money is safe in your bank account? Multiple laws allow the government to seize your assets through the process of civil forfeiture even if you haven’t been charged, let alone convicted, of a crime. We saw how this worked in Canada during the truckers’ peaceful protests over vaccine mandates when the government simply issued a decree authorizing it. If your bank fails, new laws created following the global financial crisis of 2008–09 allow the bank to turn your savings and other deposits into securities to shore up the bank’s capital. The Internal Revenue Service can tap funds in your bank account if the agency claims you owe taxes, even if the IRS made an error or you’re in a dispute process. And banks have canceled accounts of individuals and entities who pose “reputational risk” by, for example, supporting conservative candidates, speaking out on election integrity, or challenging the prevailing COVID-19 narrative.

Click here for more.  It gets especially ugly when you see what the feds are trying to do to stop cryptocurrencies – and why.

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The Melting Pot is Boiling Over

A.F. Branco at his best, via Townhall:

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IRS: Internal Radical Service

 

The great David Horowitz and his colleague John Perazzo have a new pamphlet just out and you can access it for free online.  Here’s Mr Horowitz’s introduction:

How the IRS abuses taxpayer dollars to advance leftwing causes
illegally and unconstitutionally

On August 7, the Democrats passed a bill that authorizes a ten-year, $80 billion hike in federal funding for the Internal Revenue Service, which will make it possible for the IRS to hire 87,000 new agents and will make it larger than the Pentagon, the State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.

The IRS has already been weaponized as a national federal police force to harass, punish and obstruct conservative and religious organizations. Under President Obama, the IRS blocked the efforts of hundreds of Tea Party and other conservative groups to apply for tax-exempt status. The objective was to prevent those groups – and the millions of voters whom they might potentially have influenced – from having a voice in our democracy.

But this persecution of conservatives is only half the story. Over the years, the IRS has allowed hundreds of billions of tax-payer dollars to fund left-wing tax-exempt foundations violating its own rules, while denying conservative foundations the same access. This has had the effect of creating a lobby within the Democrat Party that has transformed it into a radical force bent on “fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

The IRS violations include providing taxpayer subsidies to Democrat election campaigns; to underwriting Black Lives Matter riots which caused billions of dollars in property damage and led to the deaths of scores of individuals; the Internal Revenue Code's explicit requirement that all charitable activities should “promote the public good”; and the funding of racist policies which violate the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution.

This booklet -- Internal Radical Service -- documents these violations and their destructive consequences. We publish it now as an appeal to Congress to investigate the abuses, and restore the integrity of an organization which has become a major threat to our democracy.

Click on the link here for access to the pamphlet. 

# # #

The IRS Will Target You Next

So you think the IRS was weaponized under the Obama administration (think Lois Lerner)?  Thomas Gallatin at Patriot Post has more bad news for you:

Democrats aim to supercharge the agency
 to hit up the middle class for more tax revenue

Democrats are one vote away from weaponizing the Internal Revenue Service against the American middle class. With Joe Manchin doing an about-face on his opposition to Joe Biden’s Build Back Better spending binge, now reduced in scope and dubiously called the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS is on the cusp of a windfall to the tune of $80 billion.

To put that in perspective, the IRS’s annual budget is $12.6 billion. The additional $80 billion would be spread out over the next nine years, with the predictable Washington selling point that this IRS “investment” will reap a projected $200 billion in additional tax revenue thanks to more accurate tax collection.

And where will the lion’s share of this “lost” tax revenue come from? Despite the Democrats’ favorite talking point of making the wealthy pay their “fair share,” the vast majority of the collected tax revenue will come from hard-working middle-class Americans. . . .

Read the rest here.

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The IRS wants to spy on your bank records.

 

The IRS wants to spy on your bank records.  The last time we witnessed grotesque malfeasance by the IRS was back in 2012-13, when Lois Lerner oversaw the shameful foot-dragging on approving tax-exempt classifications; she "became the central figure in the 2013 IRS targeting controversy in the targeting of politically-aligned groups, either denying them tax-exempt status outright or delaying that status until they could no longer take effective part in the 2012 election."  I would not trust any of the claims being made to support this newest plan.  Here's Sabrina Eaton at cleveland.com:

A measure that would require financial institutions to report transactions to the Internal Revenue Service on any bank account with a balance of more than $600 has upset Ohio’s community bankers and Republican legislators, who are trying to get the provision removed from budget legislation that’s being written in Congress.

The Treasury Department says the proposal that’s drawing objections and others that would require that more information be sent to the IRS will reduce tax evasion and improve collection of taxes that are already due, generating an estimated $460 billion in tax revenue over ten years. It’s being suggested as a revenue offset for the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that the Biden administration and Democrats who control Congress are drafting to spend more money on programs that they say would improve health care, education, infrastructure and counter climate change, among other things.

The Treasury Department says the extra data is being sought to target high earners who underreport their tax liabilities.

What a crock.  Improve education and ... good grief … climate change?  Targeting those who “underreport their tax liabilities”? 

Community Bankers Association of Ohio CEO Bob Palmer argues the proposal constitutes a “strong invasion of privacy,” and expressed doubt the data will help IRS catch wealthy tax evaders. He argues that people who have $600 in the bank typically are not wealthy individuals, and says his organization and its counterparts on the federal level are “pushing back at the administration and saying this makes no sense to us.”

. . .

A statement from Gibbs called the proposal “the type of big-brother style intrusion into private information we should all be worried about.

“Americans should not have to worry about the IRS looking over their shoulder whenever they loan money to family members or purchase Christmas presents for their children,” said Gibbs. “There is simply no need for the IRS to be collecting this information, and I urge the IRS to abandon their mass surveillance plans.”

Read the full report here.  

# # #

The Infernal Revenue Service

 

Here’s Cal Thomas at Newsbusters on torture at tax time:

Thanks to the beneficence of the Internal Revenue Service -- and the fallout from COVID-19 -- we half of Americans who pay federal income taxes have been given until May 17 to file.

Since I began earning enough to file Form 1040 and associated forms, I have only known one person who prepared his own taxes. That was Bill Archer, a Texas Republican who formerly headed the House Ways and Means Committee. I once asked Archer why he prepared his. His reply was that not only did he think it was fun, but because he helped write the tax code, he felt a responsibility to demonstrate competence in filling out the forms.

These days, the forms are so complicated, hardly anyone I know understands them. The instructions need instructions.

I have again filed jointly with my wife (more than 70 pages). She owns a business, so it is more complicated than if we filed separately. Still, the forms require translating a language I have never studied and wouldn't want to. If you call the IRS and ask for help, you are still responsible for interest and penalties if they give the wrong advice.

How complicated is it? Here are just a few examples. Right off the top, I am threatened with prison should I knowingly fudge information on the form. The federal government does threats very well, including those read by flight attendants. Refuse to wear a mask, even if vaccinated, and you risk arrest. Don't even think of tampering with the smoke detector. Even the post office is now spying on us.

How's this for clarity from the estimated tax worksheet: "Add lines 2a and 2b. Subtract line 2c from line 1. Figure your tax on the amount on line 3 by using the 2021 Tax Tables. Caution: If you will have qualified dividends or a net capital gain or expect to exclude or deduct foreign earned income or housing, see worksheets 2-5 and 2-6 in Pub. 505 to figure the tax."

Got that?

There are schedules and forms for everything. They are nearly as numerous as the growing list of gender identities. Under Schedule D, Profits and Losses, there is this gibberish: "Totals for all short-term transactions reported on Form 1099-B for which basis was reported to the IRS and for which you have no adjustments (see instructions). However, if you choose to report all these transactions on Form 8949, leave this line blank and go to line 1b."

Say what?

No civilized society should force its citizens to go through this annual torture.

. . .

The rest is here.

#  #  #

Wokeness erasing America

 

Most excellent commentary from Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness:

If wokeness should continue and “win,” by now we all know where it will end up. After all, this is not a prairie-fire, peasants-with-pitchforks, spontaneous bottom-up revolution.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.

. . .

Full article is here.

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Good headline news

image credit: breakpoint.org

At Conservative Treehouse: True The Vote Wins Historic $2 Million Settlement Against IRS….

At Legal Insurrection: VERDICT: Jury awards Gibson’s Bakery $11 million against Oberlin College

# # #

IRS “apologizes” for targeting Tea Party and liberty groups

cartoon credit: Christopher Weyant [The Hill] via Pinterest

  

The media is reporting that the lawsuits filed against the IRS by various Tea Party and liberty organizations have been settled. This extract is from the report in The Washington Post: 

The Justice Department has reached settlement agreements with groups that alleged their constitutional rights were violated when their applications for tax-exempt status received extra scrutiny because their names contained words such as “tea party” or “patriots,” court filings show.

In one agreement, which still must be approved by a judge, the Internal Revenue Service admitted that its treatment of the organizations was “wrong” and expressed a “sincere apology” for what happened.

. . .

The targeting of tea party organizations that applied for tax-exempt status was a major controversy of the Obama administration, as hundreds of conservative-leaning groups received scrutiny. In some cases, it delayed the processing of applications for years.

Many felt the conduct was an example of the president punishing his political enemies.

. . .

The Justice Department, too, conducted a criminal investigation but ultimately decided not to bring charges, including against Lois Lerner, the IRS official who oversaw tax-exempt groups.

“Our investigation uncovered substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia, leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted them based on their political viewpoints,” Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Peter J. Kadzik wrote in 2015.

“But poor management is not a crime,” Kadzik wrote. “We found no evidence that any IRS official acted on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution.”

"Poor management"? Weaponizing the IRS is “poor management”? And of course, nobody is going to jail, losing their job, or losing their pension. Read the rest of the WaPo story here. There’s also a report at cleveland.com.

UPDATE at 6:21pm from Rick Moran at American Thinker blog:

The settlement, as unsatisfactory to many as it is, at least closes the book on this sordid chapter in the history of the IRS.  Will it curtail the IRS from using politics to enforce tax law again?  Since no one was punished after this blatant example of political use of the tax agency, I doubt it.

Full blog post is here.

# # #

Trump's taxes

From a website on the US tax code:

The tax code is so long and complicated because it includes every tax law designed to promote a specific cause or benefit a certain constituency. Sometimes Congress uses the tax code to promote social welfare, such as a tax break for low-income housing construction. Congress also alters the tax code to stimulate economic growth, perhaps by making it easier to take business deductions. Other changes to the tax code are strictly political rewards for special interest groups that support congressmen during their election campaigns

Some of my liberal friends take a dim view of Donald Trump because he avoided paying his taxes. Shame on him. The easy answer is that Trump never “avoided” paying federal income tax. In 1995, he didn’t OWE any income tax, so he didn’t pay any. That’s not tax avoidance. It’s compliance with complicated tax laws. If Trump had failed to comply with tax law, that failure would show up on an IRS audit and he’d have paid yuuuge penalties or worse. Remember Leona Helmsley? She went to prison for tax evasion.

In our household, we don’t want to pay one penny more in taxes than we have to, and Trump’s tax team surely has the same goal – just with, er, much bigger numbers.

Ryan Ellis has a more detailed look at the Trump Tax Tempest-in-a-Teapot. From the Forbes website:

Trump Tax Return Story Exposes Policy Ignorance Of Political Reporters

Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that they had obtained a copy of Donald Trump’s 1995 New York state tax return (whoever sent it committed a felony). It showed that he claimed a net operating loss (NOL) of about $900 million that year.

What followed was a collective explosion of talking heads over the weekend, with the theatrics inversely proportional to the pundit’s knowledge of tax policy.

To state the obvious, political reporters don’t know a damned thing about taxes. I know this–believe me (to channel my inner Donald). Part of what I do for a living is prepare people’s taxes in the Washington, DC area. As an Enrolled Agent, I run into all sorts of clients. The most political (that is, horse race/hot take) clients compete with performing artists for the least amount of knowledge when it comes to taxes. I’ve even had some of them forget to bring their W-2s to a tax session.

That ignorance was on display in vivid colors over the weekend. We were told that this tricky NOL was some sort of “loophole” that only super-rich bad guys like Donald Trump got to use. We were told that this relieved him of having to pay taxes for 18 years, a laughably arbitrary, made up number that is the tautological output of simple arithmetic and wild assumptions.

. . .

It’s not difficult to see how political reporters got played like a fiddle here. Most of them have never actually run a business, much less learned about the tax rules surrounding them. Most went from college to a series of simple, W-2 jobs (with the occasional freelance gig) in traditional media organs. . . .

Read the rest here.

And why aren’t inquiring media minds investigating donors to the Clinton Foundation?

# # #

Judicial Watch: Lois Lerner and the IRS lied

"Tea Party and other conservative group tax exempt applications

 would not be approved before the November 2012 presidential election"

cartoon credit: ulstermanbooks.com

Ali Meyer at the Washington FreeBeacon reports (h/t American Thinker):

Staff at IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C., buried conservative groups’ tax exemption applications beginning in 2010 and lasting through President Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, according to documents released this week by Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group.

The group released 105 pages of FBI documents, which included interviews with Cincinnati IRS employees who disclosed that applications by Tea Party groups were automatically denied approval and assigned to a special group until they heard from the IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“The FBI’s 302 interviews with Cincinnati IRS employees reveal that the agency adopted a series of policies assuring that Tea Party and other conservative group tax exempt applications would not be approved before the November 2012 presidential election,” according to a statement from Judicial Watch.

The full report is here. 

Will any of the top officials be charged with anything? Perjury for starters? 

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Art credit: amsimaging.com

Betsy McCaughey is a former Lt. Gov. of New York, author, and frequent columnist and TV news guest. In the months preceding the passage of Obamacare in Congress, McCaughey was one of the critical resources for patriots across the country, who relied on her analyses to prepare for visits to their Representatives and Senators, calls to the congressional switchboard, etc. She published another analysis the other day in the New York Post about the latest document dump of ... over 1,200 pages of NEW regulations on Obamacare. Here is her complete article: 

-----------------------------------------

ObamaCare: Death by paperwork 

On July 3, with Americans preparing to celebrate freedom, the Obama administration reduced freedom by adding 1,296 pages of new regulations to ObamaCare.

It was a classic pre-holiday document dump, publishing the mind-numbing rules in the Federal Register on the eve of Independence Day, when few were likely to be watching. So much for transparency.

ObamaCare regulations compel doctors and their office staff, business owners, local officials and virtually everyone else subject to the law to spend hours filling out paperwork with no pay for their labor. It’s a colossal theft.

Now four years old, ObamaCare imposes 159 million hours of paperwork a year on the public. That’s the administration’s own estimate, undoubtedly a lowball.

Even so, it’s up by 48 million hours over last year, when fewer regulations had been rolled out. And there’s more to come.

Among the July 3 rules is one that compels doctors who take Medicare to report 18 different clinical measurements on their patients, such as whether they are overweight and have been counseled about weight control.

Doctors who fail to do it will get whacked with lower payments starting in 2015.

The regulators estimate that this single report could take as long as 108 minutes per patient and consume 5.4 million hours a year nationwide. That’s time that could be spent treating patients or calling them to remind them to take their meds.

Instead, the federal bureaucracy is confiscating those hours to serve its own ends.

Small-business owners get hit hard, too. Notably, restaurateurs face 622,000 hours of work to comply with ObamaCare’s menu-labeling rules.

The American Action Forum, a public-policy organization, notes that ObamaCare is in a class by itself, imposing almost three times as much paperwork as the notoriously complex Dodd-Frank financial regulations, and more than 10 times as much as under the Sarbanes-Oxley financial-reform law.

The Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, is the biggest culprit, responsible for 90 million hours a year of ObamaCare paperwork chores. Most are foisted on hospitals, doctors, insurers and local governments.

Because it includes the IRS, Treasury is the No. 2 culprit, with paperwork requirements up 23 percent this year. The IRS is ObamaCare’s chief enforcer; paperwork misery will continue to soar, especially if and when the employer mandate goes into effect.

ObamaCare gives the IRS 46 new functions, including collecting new taxes and exchanging information about you, your family and your income with HHS and state insurance exchanges.

For example, the IRS requires employers to report the value of insurance you get through work in a new box on your W-2, even though it’s not taxable (yet).

And dealing with the IRS is no longer a once-a-year affair. Have a baby, change jobs or get a divorce, and the IRS will be recalculating your insurance compliance and eligibility for premium subsidies.

“It’s unprecedented in recent history, the amount of responsibility the IRS is being given in an area that most people don’t think of as an IRS function,” J. Russell George, a tax official, told Congress last March.

The administration plainly doesn’t want to tell the truth about these burdens.

For example, it claims that people who are uninsured or lose coverage will spend 12.6 minutes a year to comply with the individual mandate. Preposterous: Even when the Web sites work, it takes far longer to shop for insurance and report to the IRS that you’re compliant.

On July 4, 1776, when American patriots signed their Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, they recounted the crimes of the tyrannical British king: “He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

Nearly 2½ centuries later, our own government is eating out our substance with mandatory paperwork.

Not to mention the drag on our economy.

According to the Heritage Foundation’s 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, America is the only country to have lost economic freedom for seven straight years, now ranking 12th behind Hong Kong,
Singapore, Australia, Canada and seven other nations.

“Burdensome and redundant regulations are the most common barriers to the free conduct of entrepreneurial activity,” Heritage cautions.

But some benefit from this out-of-control regulatory state.

“Government bureaucracies like complexity because it keeps them busy and funded,” warns Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard. She laments that “as a result of these regulations on steroids, innovation, business creation and job growth are being stifled.”

Government bureaucrats are stealing our time, our economic growth and our liberty. Don’t count on Washington to fix the problem.

In the end, only an outraged public can put a stop to this regulatory oppression.

Betsy McCaughey is the author of “Beating ObamaCare 2014.”

Action Alert: Repeal the 16th Amendment

Earlier this week the House voted to hold former IRS gestapo Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress for her refusal to answer questions in regards to her role in using the IRS to target Liberty & Tea Party groups.

One of the most destructive forces in America emerged 101 years ago when the 16th Amendment to the Constitution went into effect. It gave Congress the ability to levy taxes on the income of working Americans and in the process, gave us the Internal Revenue Service, the most widely reviled agency in all of government.

The IRS was spawned by the need to enforce the income tax and the only way to eliminate this agency is through constitutional change.

If the IRS was just collecting taxes, that would be one thing. But we now know the IRS has engaged in a systematic campaign of intimidation against us and like-minded Americans. It’s time to Dump the IRS.

From Tea Party Patriots --

Will you join with us in calling for the repeal of the 16th Amendment?

The amendment, which went into effect in 1913, gives the federal government power to levy an income tax. Yet the Internal Revenue Service has time and time again, abused that power to harass law-abiding citizens with opposing political beliefs – including Tea Party Patriots.

It’s also clear that the federal government cannot be trusted to responsibly and efficiently spend our hard-earned tax dollars. We believe there is simply a better way for Americans to pay their taxes. We believe the tax code shouldn’t be so rife with opportunities for fraud and the IRS is an agency with too much power and a demonstrated willingness to abuse its authority. The current tax system is an antiquated model that has no place in the 21stcentury or a free society. All it does is breed corruption and waste – not to mention rampant inefficiency.

Congressman Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma has already introduced legislation to repeal the 16th Amendment. He believes, as we do, that real tax reform won’t happen until Congress loses its constitutional authority to impose an income tax. Let’s help get Rep. Bridenstine’s bill the attention it deserves, and call for full repeal.

It’s time for a change! It’s time for Americans to have more control over their own money, but we need your help.

Visit www.teapartypatriots.org/repeal16/ to sign our petition to repeal the 16th Amendment! There, you’ll also find other resources to help you in the fight for a fair, fixed and flat tax system. With your help, we will make it happen.

To get your Repeal the 16th Amendment Tool Kit and to find out how you can help stop the abusive IRS, click here.