Poor IRS

Joseph Farah echoes the points I made last week about the idiocy of newspaper editorials feeling sorry for the IRS as being victims of an unwarranted witch hunt. Since my last piece on this issue, I have been asked about the comments in some of the editorials that the claims of IRS abuse have been discredited as false. This is just not true. The horror stories that came out during the congressional hearings were true, but were only the tip of the iceberg of IRS abuses.

As I have mentioned several times before, the IRS is still filled with Clinton followers and they are still harassing people and organizations that criticize the Clintons and their Fellow Travelers. Congress has refused to do a serious investigation of this for a number of reasons. First, just as with the huge amounts of evidence against Bill Clinton during his impeachment, most Congress-critters just plain refuse to even look at the evidence. It is also true that many of our rulers are themselves afraid of IRS retribution, as well as the classified information about them that was in the FBI files that the Clintons copied for their own blackmail use. Mr. Farah knows this all too well, because he and his organization have been the victims of the Clintons use of the IRS to punish him for daring to criticize.

As with anything such as this, it has to make you wonder about the overall reliability and truthfulness of any newspaper or media organization that would tell outright lies in support of more power for the IRS.

KMK

Missing The Point

There are some things that adapt well to the power of the Internet, and some that don’t. I have always believed that real estate sales are a perfect match, especially for long distance searches. I wish the web were as well developed as it is now ten years ago, when we were shopping for property in the Ozarks from 2,000 miles away in the San Francisco Bay Area. It would have made the process so much more efficient for us as buyers, as well as for the several Realtors we worked with who had to waste a lot of time ferrying us to properties that were not suitable for our needs. I preached the benefits of using the ‘net in all of the seminars I gave to Realtors around Arkansas, Missouri & Oklahoma.

It seemed like the real estate profession had been slowly but surely adopting the web. That’s why I was disappointed to read this article that claims the National Association of Realtors is backing away from its policy of making more information available to the public. In a move that can only be described as paranoia, it sounds like they feel threatened by this openness and are retrenching and trying to prevent the public from having free access to too much information without having to work through licensed Realtors.

Any profession that is so paranoid as to try to force clients to get information through them, including some in the tax practitioner community, is doing a disservice to its clients. I agree with David Coursey that the web is too pervasive to allow such a monopoly to succeed. Forward looking Realtors will set up their own sites and leverage it to their advantage without the NAR.

KMK

When It Rains…

As if things haven’t gone badly enough for Arthur Andersen – convicted of obstruction of justice, losing all of their auditing clients, facing years of investor lawsuits – they now have the IRS on their butts for their overly aggressive tax shelters. The security of a Big 8 (what it was when I was in college) CPA firm doesn’t seem as attractive right now.

KMK

Truth – What A Concept

This is the first time I have heard of a TV station refusing to run an ad attacking a GOP candidate with lies about Social Security. Unfortunately, I’m not holding my breath waiting for that concept, of being truthful, to be applied to the liberal propaganda inherent in the newscasts.

KMK

Less Stress

I have to agree with this article that having pets around keeps things mellow. One of the big benefits of working at home is being able to spend time with our kids, which currently consist of five cats & three dogs, plus one llama. We no longer have any sheep, so there are no more baby lambs in diapers in the house, or the office, as was described in this 1993 San Jose Mercury article about my office in Fremont, CA. It must be working, because so far, I haven’t had any heart attacks or strokes, common occupational hazards in the tax profession.

Of course, it also helps to keep your mind off of things rather than dwell on them.

KMK

Envy & Income Taxes

Our tax system is designed to stick it to the evil rich.

Missing Out

Any serious user of the Internet knows that the difference between connecting via dial up modem and a broadband method is night and day. Living up here in the boonies, we could only dream of having access to anything better than the one slow dial-up service that is available to us. In fact, I have always made very clear to everyone that the main criterion for selecting a new place to live, if we ever sell our ranch, would be some place with access to either cable or DSL Internet. Late last year, I even came very close to opening another office, in downtown Harrison, just to have access to the cable Internet.

Since this January, we have been using the DirecWay two-way satellite. Overall, it has been great, allowing us to do things that would be impossible over dial-up, such as listening to & watching Rush Limbaugh‘s show. This came at the perfect time, because we can no longer pick it up via over the air radio.

The satellite has been very reliable, except for times when there are heavy clouds, which does happen about once a week. We had been pestering our local phone company for years to make DSL available up here. Even with the satellite, we still want DSL as a backup. Although our phone company just started connecting some customers to DSL, we have been informed that our line is well beyond the distance limits of DSL technology from the closest switching station. So, we have resigned ourselves to being satisfied with and grateful for the satellite. At $69.95 per month, I consider it a bargain considering the huge increase in productivity it allows. That is why it boggles my mind to see that so many other people around the country are refusing to sign up for broadband service, often for even less than we are paying. Unfortunately, if more people don’t sign up, more of the broadband companies will be going out of business.

KMK