And whom will they be going after? You, Mr. & Mrs. Small Business Owners. NY Post:
A key provision in the Inflation Reduction Act — which throws an extra $80 billion to the IRS to improve the agency’s collection of under-reported income — will end up targeting small business owners to pay for the legislation, according to nonpartisan watchdog the Joint Committee on Taxation.
The group estimates that between 78% and 90% of the estimated additional $200 billion the IRS will collect will come from small businesses making less than $200,000 annually.
Just 4% to 9% would come from businesses making north of $500,000 a year — meaning the legislation is in sharp contrast to President Biden’s longstanding claim that he wouldn’t raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000.
“The IRS will have to target small and medium businesses because they won’t fight back,” Joe Hinchman, executive vice president at National Taxpayers Union Foundation, told The Post. “We’ve seen this play out before … the IRS says ‘We’re going after the rich’ but when you’re trying to raise that much money, the rich can only get you so far.”
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. …
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.
Embattled IRS official Lois Lerner will invoke her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself when she appears before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.
In a letter to Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Lerner’s attorney William W. Taylor III cites the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into the issue of whether the IRS singled out tea party and other conservative groups for extra scrutiny.
Lerner, who oversaw the IRS nonprofit department, will be the first person involved with the IRS scandal to publicly invoke the Fifth Amendment.
“Just when you think things can’t get any stranger around here, they take a twist,†Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told POLITICO, adding, “this is a very serious matter.â€
Taylor’s letter requests that Lerner be excused from testifying, but Issa has issued a subpoena to compel her appearance.
“Requiring her to appear at the hearing merely to assert her Fifth Amendment privilege would have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her,†Taylor wrote.
Jonah Goldberg points out that nobody needs to find a specific order in Barack Obama’s handwriting. He has made it very clear, time again, that anyone daring to oppose his policies or himself is beyond the pale.
Obama’s culpability in all of this isn’t restricted merely to his sins of omission. Throughout his presidency, Obama has set a very clear tone.
He’s made it clear that people who disagree with him are fevered, illegitimate, weird, creepy, dangerous, stupid, confused, ignorant, or some other adjective you might assign to a revamped version of the Seven Dwarfs. He’s explained that he doesn’t mind “cleaning up after†Republicans but he doesn’t want to hear “a lot of talking†from them. The time for democratic debate is always behind us with an administration that began with the mission not to let a crisis go to waste, for as Obama said in his second inaugural address, “Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.â€
Moreover, President Obama often insists we live in a country where the “government is us,†where there’s no need to fear tyranny “around the corner†because we could never be tyrannical against ourselves.
Michael Barone cites 1,372 waivers from Obamacare, the NLRB’s intervention to prevent Boeing building an assembly plant in South Carolina, and an innovative attempt by the IRS to apply gift taxes to certain 501(c)(4) organizations guilty of supporting Republican candidates.
Punishing enemies and rewarding friends — politics Chicago style — seems to be the unifying principle that helps explain the Obamacare waivers, the NLRB action against Boeing and the IRS’ gift-tax assault on 501(c)(4) donors.
They look like examples of crony capitalism, bailout favoritism and gangster government.
One thing they don’t look like is the rule of law.
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Warner Todd Huston finds the same “Chicago Way” of doing things applies also to White House press pool access.
The Boston Herald recently found itself excluded from the press pool covering presidential visits. The Herald angrily reported finding out the reason for the ban.
The White House Press Office yesterday refused to address its policy on choosing local reporters for pool coverage, after the Herald was denied full access to the president’s Boston visit this week in part because the administration didn’t like the newspaper’s coverage. A press staffer’s e-mails cited a Mitt Romney op-ed that ran March 8 on the front page, challenging Obama’s policies the same day the president came to town for a fund-raiser.
If you don’t buy the health insurance policy the so-called Health Care Reform Bill mandates, Big Brother has ways of dealing with you, the Daily Caller reports.
Individuals who don’t purchase health insurance may lose their tax refunds according to IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman. After acknowledging the recently passed health-care bill limits the agency’s options for enforcing the individual mandate, Shulman told reporters that the most likely way to penalize individuals that don’t comply is by reducing or confiscating their tax refunds.