Posted on 03/11/2006 10:20:29 AM PST by K-oneTexas
End the $100 Billion Witch Hunt by Herman Cain
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) claims in a February 2006 report that for every dollar spent chasing unpaid taxes, they can recover about $4 for federal coffers. To close the expected 2005 “tax gap,” the IRS would have to spend $100 billion in an attempt to recover $400 billion. That’s $100 billion of our tax dollars spent to hunt us down for unavoidable errors trying to comply with the tax code.
It’s not enough that many of us have to write checks to the IRS this time of year. Congress wants to write the IRS a bigger check to chase down our unavoidable errors.
U.S. senators from both sides of the aisle are predictably enraged that taxpayers would dare underreport their incomes, and liberal media stories gleefully note that the tax gap could nearly pay off the federal budget deficit. There is a fairer and more inexpensive way for Congress to pay off the deficit – stop overspending. The media’s story angle conveniently avoids the fact that members of Congress – not taxpayers – write the confusing tax laws and authorize all deficit spending.
In response to the IRS report, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, vowed to hunt down taxpayers who supposedly abuse the tax code by inflating the value of their charitable contributions and deductions.
Senator Grassley, why don’t we hunt down those in Congress who waste our tax dollars on failed entitlement programs and pork projects? Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND), ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee declared, “It just leaps out at you as one of the most significant opportunities we have.” What should leap out at you is the fact that lawmakers produce deficit spending and the confusing tax code.
Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, predicted this would happen. In Federalist Paper Number 12, written in 1787, Hamilton cautioned the negative effects of a system of direct taxation. These effects included perpetual addition of new tax laws, new collection methods and the noncompliance that would necessarily follow. Mr. Hamilton was correct, to the tune of $400 billion today.
Without an income tax code, the federal government cannot as easily monitor our economic activities, and Congress cannot write new tax laws advantageous to their preferred groups. These facts were perhaps no better articulated than by Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), who last year stated at a fundraiser, “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” Translation: “We’re going to take more of your money so we can buy more votes.” It is time Congress stopped robbing us of our liberties by taxing our income and our time.
We now have a significant opportunity to replace the confusing income tax code mess with a consumption tax – an opportunity that Congress has squandered. Even Hamilton recognized the advantages of a consumption tax over a direct income tax in Federalist Paper Number 21, also written in 1787,
“The amount to be contributed by each citizen will in a degree be at his own option, and can be regulated by an attention to his resources. The rich may be extravagant, the poor can be frugal; and private oppression may always be avoided by a judicious selection of objects proper for such impositions.”
Under a consumption tax such as a national sales tax, also called the FairTax (HR 25 and S 25), we would do away forever with automatic withholding, the alternative minimum tax and forced FICA deductions. We would, for the first time since 1913, regain our economic freedom.
Following the release of the aforementioned IRS report commissioner Mark Everson stated, “At some point you get to a tradeoff between liberties and closing that gap.” Let’s do both, by replacing the tax code with the FairTax. The $400 billion gap will go away, and our liberties will return.
© 2006 North Star Writers Group
(I'm not a judge and there ain't enough of me to be a jury. (Zell Miller, A National Party No More))
The Federal plantation Massa is addicted to our money and will do anything to rob more and more from us.
Meanwhile the cowardly SHEEPLE lack the courage for a tax revolt, all the while plunging themselves deeper and deeper into debt for SUVs, bigger houses and plasma TV sets.
Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and ALL the founding fathers are rolling in their graves and weeping over the loss of the Constitutional Republic and...the inevitable Civil War II that will tear this country apart.
This piece of openended crap is what started the foul mess:
AMENDMENT XVI
Passed by Congress July 2, 1909. Ratified February 3, 1913.
Note: Article I, section 9, of the Constitution was modified by amendment 16.
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
Woodrow Willson presided over this
Good way of saying that income taxes and the IRS are all about the government controlling the people. Nothing more, nothing less.
if you're going to have the income tax which is BS to start with, you gotta have the referee.
I like Herman.
But reading this "It’s not enough that many of us have to write checks to the IRS this time of year. Congress wants to write the IRS a bigger check to chase down our unavoidable errors."
I wonder what percent of tax underpayments turn out to be unavoidable errors... I would bet it's less than one fourth.
This wouldn't happen if the tax laws weren't so confusing and confiscatory. If there was a strict, low flat income tax, compliance would be at or near 100%.
no i'm saying that if their was no "cop" everyone would speed. I agree taxes laws need to be less confusing and agree with everything else you said.
A new IRS report on tax cheating, the first in fifteen years, looks at which groups cheat the most on taxes and how much revenue is lost because of it:
Tax Cheating Has Gone Up, Two Federal Studies Find, by David Cay Johnston, NY Times: Historically, when income tax rates fall, so does tax cheating. But that is not what happened after President Bush started cutting taxes five years ago. A new report by the Commerce Department found ... a 37 percent increase in unreported income from 2000. In a separate report, the Internal Revenue Service looked at both unreported income and improper deductions and concluded that Americans shortchanged the government by $345 billion in 2001 — an amount almost equal to the projected federal budget deficit for 2007. ...
The I.R.S. report concluded that proprietors of small businesses, investors and farmers cheated the most. Workers who had 99 percent of their wages reported to the government and taxes withheld from their paychecks were the least likely to cheat. Mr. Everson acknowledged that the estimate is probably low ... The biggest single revenue loss came from proprietors of unincorporated businesses ... who shorted the government an estimated $68 billion in 2001. Cheating by partnerships, most of whose members are wealthy professionals or investors, was put at $22 billion, while cheating by landlords and those collecting royalties was estimated at $13 billion. In percentage terms, farmers cheated the most ... failing to pay the government $6 billion, or 72 percent of the taxes they should have.
Econonists View: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/02/who_cheats_the_.html
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NY Times Feb 15 2006
Tax Cheating Has Gone Up, Two Federal Studies Find
The biggest single revenue loss came from proprietors of unincorporated businesses, who typically file a Schedule C with their tax return, who shorted the government an estimated $68 billion in 2001. Cheating by partnerships, most of whose members are wealthy professionals or investors, was put at $22 billion, while cheating by landlords and those collecting royalties was estimated at $13 billion.
In percentage terms, farmers cheated the most, the I.R.S. said, failing to pay the government $6 billion, or 72 percent of the taxes they should have.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/business/15tax.html?ex=1142226000&en=cb6c4327360299dc&ei=5070
the IRS would have to spend $100 billion in an attempt to recover $400 billion.
And I like the word "recover" as if it was theirs to begin with.
The idiot who presided over this fiasco was William Howard Taft.
The IRS puts this same stuff out every year. It has resulted in it getting draconian powers so that everyone is afraid of it.
We need an amendment to the constitution that states that any law, regulation or executive order that cannot be understood by the average high school graduate is null and void. Or we could lower the bar even further by using the average recent college graduate.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Bravo, I am uncertain to just what degree you were being sarcastic but I fear that this strikes far too close to the truth to be considered anything other than straight talk.
How do you figure? Wilson wasn't inaugurated until March 4, 1913. We actually have Republicans to blame, for the most part.
I'm tired of these IRS gestapo reports of people "cheating."
Most people do their best to comply with an incomprehensible tax code, especially small businesses. Then when some low IQ bureaucrat determines the small business owes more taxes, he's called a "cheat." Bull pucky.
You can't comply with the incomprehensible. These low-life IRS bureaucrats interpret the code to give themselves standing with their idiot supervisors - the more you squeeze a taxpayer, the more status these fascist bureaucrats earn.
I don't know what possessed this country to pass the 16th, but the socialists who did should be cursed for eternity and the bodies dug up from the grave and hanged.
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