Category Archive 'Inflation Reduction Act of 2022'

08 Aug 2022

87,000 More IRS Agents!

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Well, Manchin and Sinema sold out and the democrats (with Vice President Harris voting to break the tie) successfully passed their hilariously-named “Inflation Reduction Bill.”

Beyond the deluge of dollars going to regulate the planet’s climate and to fund every left-wing cause, there is one other really key detail, which Raheem Kassam puts into the correct perspective. Read it, and look forward to your own next audit.

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioner Charles P. Rettig told Congress his agency wouldn’t increase audits on households earning less than $400,000 after being handed circa 87,000 more agents in the Orwellianly-monikered Inflation Reduction Act hurried through the U.S. Congress this weekend.

Which means they absolutely will be doing that, if historical promises by agency heads in front of the lawmakers they pretend to answer to are anything to go by. And they are.

In other words, they just used your taxes to increase your taxes so they could hire 87,000 IRS agents to rifle further through your taxes in case you owe more taxes.

IRS estimates (which we know are always excellent) reveal supposedly uncollected taxes of around $1trn each year. Or, as I like to call it, one-eighth of a “war on terror.”

Can you imagine how many nuclear drag queens, beagle experiments, or foreign abortions your government could (and will) buy with that cash?

Be a sport and help keep your fellow citizens informed of this scorching hot mess of a bill:

Indeed 87,000 new IRS agents is greater than the number of people living in Biden’s home town of Wilmington, Delaware (71,000, I’m reliably informed).

Even Senator Susan Collins has pointed out this move “more than [doubles] the size of the agency and [gives] the IRS more employees than the number of Pentagon, State Department, and FBI employees as well as Border Patrol agents combined.”

Democrats have been keen to pursue this strategy of spending (your) money to make (more) money (off you) for a while. …

RTWT

IRS rules, like all regulations, are commonly ambiguous when applied to reality. If interpreted in your favor, hurrah! you get a tax deduction. Interpreted the other possible way, you cheated the government, you owe taxes and penalties.

The auditing process works like this. The regional office sends out the auditor. His or her job in reality consists of making the IRS money by interviewing you, going over your return with a fine tooth comb, disallowing deductions you took, and assigning interest, possibly along with penalties. The auditor is not your friend. He has a job to do, i.e. he is there to get more money out of you.

You can play it two ways. You can get indignant, stand up for your rights as a free American, argue with his decisions and pledge to fight, or you can appear confused, innocent, and dismayed. “How could I have made such a mistake?” If you are humble, cooperative, and apologetic, you’ll wind up paying the disallowed deductions plus interest. If you are hostile and belligerent, that auditor will look again and find more ways to screw you over, and you’ll get penalties on top of that interest. If you are enough of a pain in the ass, they’ll prosecute you and put you in jail.

An awful lot of Americans, not far down the road, are going to experience being audited for the first time.

28 Jul 2022

Joe Manchin Sells Out

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Matt Purple says he’s getting “thirty pieces of (inflated) silver.”

I, for one, never thought he would do it. I never thought Joe Manchin, who was elected in West Virginia after running an ad in which he literally shot the 2009 cap-and-trade bill, would sign on to Joe Biden’s Build Back Better climate agenda.

Yet sign on he has. Last night, Manchin announced that after over a year of logjamming Biden’s spending plans, he’d struck a deal. The legislation he agreed to weighs in at a ballpark of $700 billion, a sharp climbdown from the $6 trillion Democrats had initially asked for. But it’s still a lot of money, and even more importantly, it’s a major psychological boost for the left. Now, barring some let-the-world-burn chaos from goth kid Kyrsten Sinema or revolt from House Dems, Build Back Better will be signed into law.

Before we get to the green stuff, let’s pause for a moment and consider the clinical insanity of dumping hundreds of billions into the economy at a time of massive inflation. The Democrats audaciously claim that the package will somehow reduce inflation. They even went back and renamed it the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, a bit of Orwellian chicanery. They cite the bill’s tax hikes on big corporations as proof it will slice the deficit and help control rising prices.

But then they make similar claims about every spending package and the deficit only ever seems to widen. Irrespective of what you think of the tax hikes — and raising taxes amid recession fears and rising interest rates is a serious gambit — the fact remains that they’re still dumping hundreds of billions of new spending into the economy. Inflation simply means too many dollars chasing too few goods; can anyone seriously argue this won’t exacerbate the problem?

RTWT

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Jeffrey Carter, at Points and Figures, is justifiably outraged.

Finally, Senator Joe Manchin got what he wanted and rolled over. At least, that’s what we are hearing. Hence, a new spending bill will make its way through Congress.

Increases in government spending are INflationary. They don’t take inflation down.

Government has input into the costs of goods and services but it doesn’t set the price. The “scorecard” I saw showed how all of this spending is revenue neutral. That’s always a joke.

Details are sketchy but supposedly:

15% minimum tax on corporations

Eliminating Carried Interest tax rates on Investment

First, raising taxes during a recession is not a good idea. Second, the way to spur GDP growth is to decrease corporate taxes and taxes on investment.

Corporations do not pay taxes, they aggregate them. They pass them along to their customers. If they pay higher rates of tax, they don’t increase salaries for employees nor do they invest in property, plants, and equipment.

Interestingly, Democrats want Biden to stop sending refined oil products overseas to try and decrease gas prices in the US. You’d think that would work because it would increase the available indigenous supply. Except, there is not enough storage for those products so it would all be wasted.

This bill kills an incentive for any company to invest in storage facilities to make the Democratic scheme work.

One of the smart things Reagan did to kill the inflation beast was to cut taxes on investment. For those that don’t know, carried interest is the money that people receive when they successfully operate private equity, real estate, hedge, or venture fund. If you are a general partner at one of those funds and cover the costs of operating the fund, 20% of what’s left of the profits accrue to you.

There are various tax codes for different funds. But, you generally pay the long-term capital gains rate on gains. That’s a big incentive to invest.

Democrats just crushed the incentive.

RTWT


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