Free Republic

It was bad enough, as I wrote here last August, that the Internal Revenue Service appeared to reach an agreement to monitor the pulpits of ill-favored churches. WhatÂ’s worse is that the IRS, directly counter to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requirements, steadfastly has refused to make public key documents pertaining to that decision. So the IRS, acting with the whole power of government behind it, seems to be saying it can monitor and presumably punish churches for the content of their sermons, but the churches canÂ’t know exactly if, how, and why they are being monitored. To fight this...

Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz phoned in on Friday's broadcast of the Adam Carolla Show to discuss his candidacy, the IRS and taxes, big government, his father's America compared to our current America, Jeb Bush and more. ADAM CAROLLA: Thank you so much for calling in and thank you so much for wanting to eliminate the IRS. It's driving me nuts. SEN. TED CRUZ: Well, I tell you April 16th is a day when a whole lot of folks want to move into a simple flat tax and just padlock the IRS. I think that is a powerful populist...

The SEC and IRS, among other government agencies, love, love, love administrative subpoenas to snoop through emails without probable cause. Techdirt writes: The story that we keep hearing is that two government agencies in particular really like ECPA's outdated system: the IRS and the SEC. Since both only have administrative subpoena power, and not the ability to issue warrants like law enforcement, the lower standards of ECPA make it much easier for them to snoop through your emails without having to show probable cause. Last year, in a Congressional hearing, the SEC's boss, Mary Jo White, was questioned about this...

Apple's market capitalization of $730 billion may now be more than double that of Exxon Mobil, but when it comes to taxes paid to the US government, it's no contest: the company with record profitability that so many progressive hipsters adore and for whose products they line up with annual regularity is billions of dollars below its "fair" contribution to the US Treasury. Ironically, it is eclipsed by that other company that so many progressives love to hate: Exxon Mobil, which paid $4 billion more in tax than Apple, yet whose valuation has been cut by 15% over the past...

Fool me once. We were told that the health care system was broken. As a result, the Affordable Care Act was signed into law with the promise that premiums would be lower, we could keep our doctors and our insurance. Fool me twice. When the IRS was accused of targeting conservative groups, the president said there was not even a "smidgen" of corruption. Of course the Department of Justice declined to investigate. Fool me thrice. When four Americans were killed in Benghazi, it was said the cause was an offensive video. Susan Rice went out on a Sunday morning and...

Ted Cruz thinks Americans should arm themselves against "tyranny," and Lindsey Graham thinks that's crazy. As incredible as it sounds, there’s an argument going on right now between two Republican senators (and, potentially, two Republican candidates for the presidency) over whether the American citizenry should be ready to fight a war against the federal government. The two senators in question are Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, and they can’t seem to agree whether the Second Amendment serves as bulwark against government “tyranny.” It all started with a fundraising email Cruz sent making the case that “The 2nd Amendment to the...

They say there are two things that are certain in life: death and taxes. If you're a Democrat, you can add death taxes to that list. The death tax, which was being phased out by President Bush from 2001-2008 but revived by the Obama administration in 2009, currently sits at 40 percent. More background from Heritage: Estate tax (death tax) repeal. The Bush tax cuts phased out the death tax. It was supposed to be completely eliminated after 2009. However, after being dormant for one year in 2009, the 2010 deal between President Obama and Congress brought it back to life at...

Comedian and radio personality Adam Carolla is apparently a big fan of Sen. Ted Cruz. During a Friday morning interview with the Texas Republican, Carolla approved of the presidential candidate and personally thanked him for wanting to outright abolish the Internal Revenue Service. “Thank you so much for wanting to eliminate the IRS,” Carolla began the conversation. “It’s driving me nuts.” “I think that is a powerful populist issue and today is the day when its on people’s minds,” Cruz said, reminding listeners that Wednesday was Tax Day. Carolla argued that taxes are an important issue that gets overshadowed by...

As they rush to file their taxes by April 15, Americans are rightfully frustrated with the complexity of the 74,608-page-long federal tax code. The federal tax code is 187 times longer than it was a century ago, according to Wolters Kluwer, CCH, which has analyzed the federal tax code since 1913. Amazingly, in the first 26 years of the federal income tax, the tax code only grew from 400 to 504 pages. Even through President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the tax code was well under 1,000 pages. Changes during World War II made the length of the tax code balloon...

Around this time every year, Joseph Bankman, a professor of tax law at Stanford Law School and a longtime advocate of using technology to simplify tax filing, gets on the phone with reporters to explain what is wrong with how we do our taxes in the United States. Every year he says pretty much the same thing: No other industrialized country asks its citizens to jump through as many hoops to calculate their taxes as ours. It isn’t just lawmakers or the hapless-seeming Internal Revenue Service that is perpetuating the annoyance of tax time, he adds. Instead it is the...

Wednesday marks Tax Day in the United States, the day when Americans are obligated to turn in their taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

Campaigning for reelection, President Barack Obama often talked about the importance of everyone paying their "fair share" of taxes. The assumption was that there was general agreement about what fair share means. The underlying message is that those who earn more should pay more than they already are; that what the top 10 percent are paying is just not enough. This week, a Wall Street Journal article titled "Top 20 Percent of Earners Pay 84 Percent of Income Tax" by Laura Saunders provides a different perspective than we are used to hearing regarding who pays what income taxes. Nearly "half...

Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen told members of Congress Wednesday that taxpayers who call the IRS seeking help on their taxes this year face an average wait time of half an hour, and only about 40 percent of calls are actually answered. The situation, which Koskinen admitted is “abysmal,” is partly due to the agency’s forced role in implementing President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act (ACA), or Obamacare, he explained. “At this point, when you get through—if you get through—it on average would have taken you about 28 to 30 minutes,” Koskinen told members of the...

I have believed for close to 20 years that the 16th amendment was never properly ratified and that the IRS and all the shenanigans we citizens go through every year is ILLEGAL. For all of my adult life, I have spent 6 months dreading tax season and then 6 months worrying if maybe I had done something wrong when filing them. This year, when our tax preparer (for the first time in my adult life, we actually hired a preparer as I believed that a citizen should NOT have to pay someone else to do their taxes, as it should...

So, it’s tax day.And you know what that means: it’s the day we celebrate the redistribution of wealth rather than its creation. It’s the day the government decides how much of what you make belongs to them - to give to somebody else. Or more to the point, it’s the day the ‘have lot’s’ ante up for the benefit of the ‘have gotz’.It should be interesting to see how President–in-waiting Hillary, champion of the proletariat, celebrates the day. She will most likely  emphasize the the income gap between the haves and the have nots because nothing stirs the heart to...

The plaintiffs in King v. Burwell argue that an IRS regulation unlawfully extends tax credit eligibility beyond what is expressly authorized under Section 1401 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). It appears that this sort of administrative rewrite of the PPACA may be more the rule than the exception. These IRS rewrites have potential consequences beyond the extension of tax credits beyond what Congress authorized. As with the regulatory change expanding tax credit eligibility to some unlawful aliens, the IRS cited no authority for making this change. Fairly administering this law requires implementing it as written, and...

Abolish the Internal Revenue Service? IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has said the government must have an IRS to collect the taxes to fund the government. Mr. Koskinen is right that no matter what kind of tax system we have, there needs to be a tax collection bureau. But those in favor of abolishing the present IRS are correct in that the United States certainly can get along perfectly well without the politicized, abusive and rights-trampling tax agency the IRS has become. Mr. Koskinen and others who defend the IRS claim the problem is with the tax law, which is written...

Judicial Watch has just released a new batch of documents forced out of the IRS that show the Obama administration’s scandalous misuse of the IRS to target Tea Party and other conservatives goes far deeper than realized. Included in the new batch of documents is a February 2012 email from Lois Lerner, who was then head of the IRS’ Exempt Organizations Branch, asking that a special program be set up to “put together some training points to help [IRS staffers] understand the potential pitfalls” of revealing too much information to Congress. Amid the hundreds of released pages, Judicial Watch also...

How long will this country remain free? Probably only as long as the American people value their freedom enough to defend it. But how many people today can stop looking at their electronic devices long enough to even think about such things? Meanwhile, attempts to shut down people whose free speech interferes with other people's political agendas go on, with remarkably little notice, much less outrage. The Internal Revenue Service's targeting the tax-exempt status of conservative groups is just one of these attempts to fight political battles by shutting up the opposition, rather than answering them. Another insidious attempt to...

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke (D) declared on Thursday,“I’m trying to figure out why Al Sharpton isn’t in federal prison for tax evasion.” Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke (D) declared on Thursday,“I’m trying to figure out why Al Sharpton isn’t in federal prison for tax evasion.”