“Losing two experienced officials will make it even harder for the IRS to administer and enforce the tax code.” — Caroline Ciraolo (ex-somebody at the IRS)
Good. No, excellent.
Now all we have to do to help these pore IRS souls is simplify the tax code — e.g. flat tax of 8% on gross earnings, no brackets, no exemptions and no deductions for individuals; and 1% corporate rate on gross sales, no deductions.
#PostcardTaxReturns
Whilst I absolutely deplore this heinous act…
…who among us hasn’t felt exactly the same way each and every time we submit our tax return?
All I can say is: “Put me on her jury.”
As any fule kno, when a government is strapped for cash they will perforce come up with new ideas for “tax revenue streams” (a.k.a. “innovative methods to steal money from the public”). Needless to say, they can’t just come out and say “we’re going to steal more of your money” because that might lead to public hangings…
…sorry, I went off to a warm and happy place there for a few moments.
Anyway, the theft has to be concealed beneath a maskirovka of some sort, and the best one (apart from “national interest”) is “public health”, which shouldn’t fool anybody but it does, repeatedly and regrettably.
Examples of this abound, the latest being that of Head Thief, U.K. Division — sorry, I meant Chancellor of the Exchequer — Rachel Reeves, who wants to tax (wait for it) milkshakes.
The Chancellor has drawn up plans to impose a sugar tax on milk and yoghurt-based beverages for the first time, after concluding that they are damaging public health.
The levy will drive prices up by as much as 24p per litre, with officials expecting 93 percent of drinks on the market to be affected unless they change their recipes.
I think the British public should express their rage profound disappointment at this proposal by reverting to an age-old mechanism:
But they won’t, because as long as it’s for people’s health, you see, it’s acceptable. (That sound you hear in the background is the bleating of sheep.)
…in so many ways.
Well, there’s this thought, as April 15th is also National Buy-A-Gun Day (link in pic):
…wherein all sorts of shooty goodness is on display.
And a closing thought:
From the U.S. Senate comes this little bit of commonsense:
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) on Monday introduced legislation that would sell off millions of dollars of the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) firearms to pay for the national debt.
As America approaches Tax Day on Tuesday, Ernst introduced the Why Does the IRS Needs Guns Act to reform how the agency handles firearms. The Iowa senator introduced the legislation after reports from Open the Books have suggested the IRS would one of the top 50 largest police departments based on its headcount and stockpiling of firearms and ammunition.
“Since 2006, the IRS spent $35.2 million on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment (CPI adjusted). The years 2020 and 2021 were peak years at the IRS for purchasing weaponry and gear. Just since the pandemic started, the IRS has purchased $10 million in weaponry and gear,” Open the Books wrote.
Since 2020, the IRS has spent at least $10 million on firearms and ammunition for its roughly 2,100 special agents.
Here’s Joni, outside D.C.:
And Rep. Barry Moore (R-AL) introduced the House companion legislation:
“Arming these agents does not make the American public safer. My legislation, the Why Does the IRS Need Guns Act, would disarm these agents, auction off their guns to Federal Firearms License Owners, and sell their ammunition to the public.”
Moore takes the cake with this exit quote:
“The only thing IRS agents should be armed with are calculators.”
As the old (and bitter) joke goes:
“Taxes are funds taken from citizens at gunpoint.”
“No, they aren’t!”
“Really? Try refusing to pay them.”
Bastards. Disarm them. All of them. Perhaps they’d be a lot less arrogant towards us if they were unarmed.
I’m truly enjoying the havoc and chaos that Musk and his DOGE squad are inflicting on the Gummint.
I’m not so sure about this one, though:
Acting IRS Commissioner Melanie Krause felt slighted after Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem struck a deal for the tax agency to share data with DHS on illegal aliens. She decided to resign and take the government buyout that Trump offered.
Sources told the Washington Post that disagreements over the agency’s direction also factored into Krause’s decision to leave.
To be sure, I don’t give a rat’s ass about Krause — or pretty much any IRS apparatchik, fuck ’em all — but on reading further, her reason for quitting stuck with me:
Trump and Musk want to overturn the entire privacy regime that prevents the IRS from sharing data with other government agencies. They’re contemplating building a “cross-government data-sharing system,” reports the Post, “that would allow agencies to use personal tax information to hunt for fraud in social safety net programs.”
Nice goal, but I’m not so sure about that “cross-government data-sharing system” thing — most of all when it comes to tax-related data.
Remember the immortal words of John Cowperthwaite: “If I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.” And no “statistics” are more deadly in government hands than financial ones.
I’m against giving government personal data, even in that most innocuous of functions, the decennial census. Financial data, that could be shared between government agencies (such as, for example, the FBI and ATF and not just Social Security)?
I don’t fucking think so.
The old joke was that the IRS didn’t care if you were a citizen or an illegal alien, as long as you paid taxes on your wages and earnings; while the INS didn’t care if you paid your taxes or not, as long as you were a legal resident. It was a joke back then, but it’s going to stop being a joke, in every way possible, if this “cross-government data-sharing system” becomes a reality.
And remember, while I may — may — trust that this Republican government is going to do The Right Thing with all this data that’s going to be shared (and that’s not a sure thing, by any means), I have no illusions about how this data is going to be used by any future government, no matter what its label may be.
It’s going to be used against us — you and me — for whatever purpose they may dream up.
The only way I might agree to this fuckery is if there’s an absolutely cast-iron guarantee that the IRS is going to disappear altogether in the (very) near future, to be replaced by a National Excise Office that would collect taxes exclusively from foreign governments (tariff fees) and merchants (end-user sales taxes) — i.e. when the godless 16th Amendment is nullified — and we all know that none of that is going to happen anytime soon.
I would stipulate that this sharing of tax data be limited strictly to root out corruption in the SocSec network — i.e. it’s a one-time, one-function application — but we all know that this stipulation would be ignored before the ink was dry on the paper, to await the arrival of a future government or government department which would use it as a tool to oppress and destroy our freedoms.
No, this data-sharing thing is a bridge too far, and I don’t care how badly it’s needed — Musk has yet to prove that to me or anyone else — or how much easier it would make DOGE’s job.
My personal data doesn’t exist in order to make anyone’s job easier or more convenient. So leave it the fuck alone.