Latest Budget Figures Show Light At End Of Tunnel. No Need for States to Increase Taxes

Deficit Mongers & the IMF – The Left aren’t slowing down any with their lies about tax cuts causing deficits.

Some lottery winners challenge IRS, tax court rulings – Lottery winners have been selling their future payment streams to investors and trying to claim the income as long term capital gains, which are subject to lower tax rates than the ordinary income tax rates that would apply to regular lottery income. IRS and the Tax Court are claiming that such sales should be taxed in the same manner as the regular payments would be. As with most tax issue, it is extremely expensive tax-wise to receive too much income in a single year because it pushes the recipient into the higher brackets than if the income were spread out over several years. Up until 1986, we had a mechanism to alleviate some of the damage from a big spike in income. However, our rulers in DC decided that income averaging was saving people too much money, so they eliminated it for everyone except farmers.

IRS to Audit Nature Conservancy From Inside – As with most huge bloated charities, there are plenty of opportunities for funny business and conflicts of interest. As I’ve always said, if you truly want to support very helpful charitable causes, it’s best to give directly to the small groups who do the actual work and not to the big guys who use most of the money for their humongous overhead. For fans of big cats, my favorite is still Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge, South of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Every dime they receive is used to care for the animals they have saved.

The Next Tax Cut. Unlike the Democrats, Bush looks set to encourage saving. – Bush will have to overcome the “tax cuts for the rich” propaganda if he expects to enact these tax free savings accounts.

Minimum Required Distributions From IRAs – I am constantly hearing about bad advice as to how this rule works.

Will Greed of Elderly Bankrupt Us All? – Increasing costs of entitlements show no sign of ever being under control.

Gates quietly spends $14 million buying homes near Medina estate – What good is having a ton of money if you can’t buy yourself a peaceful safe place to live? I’m surprised he’s only buying up four acres around his current five acre estate. I know that if we had a lot more money, we would be buying up thousands of acres around us. While the buffer zone we currently have with our 285 acres is great, owning a few square miles would be ideal. If we had Bill Gates size money, we would probably just buy an entire county.

Conservative groups break with Republican leadership – This is great. Bush and the other GOP spendaholics in power have been taking conservatives for granted, believing they have no place to go except their party. For those people who want to send Bush and his drunken sailor cohorts a message, voting for Libertarians would go a long way.

Courtesy of another Fark PhotoShop contest:

What is Poverty? – It’s really hard for any objective person to not see how well off our citizens are who are considered to be below the poverty line. Their living standards, and the things they have, would have classified them as very well off not too long ago.

Tax Withholding Proposed for Independent Contractors – Here is the other shoe dropping after the recent tax gap propaganda. If this plan to deputize more people as government tax collectors doesn’t encourage more use of the corporate form, people are less intelligent than I thought. I have already seen plenty of businesses refuse to work with any service that isn’t incorporated just to avoid the potential for the workers being classified as employees. This new rule, if enacted, would push more business owners to the same conclusion because payments to corporations are not subject to the same 1099 reporting or tax withholding rules that apply to payments to unincorporated individuals and businesses.

Creativity of elite cheaters costs taxpayers billions

Preparing for the tax preparer can make all the difference

Protesters: Tax prep firm is deceptive about loans – This really isn’t anything new. The quickie refund anticipation loans (RAL) that tax prep firms like H&R Block provide have always been aimed at the same lower intelligence crowd as the other legal loan sharking operations, such as cash advance services. These people don’t mind paying the fees and huge interest charges that work out to be effective interest rates in the hundreds of percent.

National Taxpayer Advocate Releases Report to Congress, Cites AMT as a Top Problem Facing Taxpayers – Interesting that even IRS is admitting that the insane AMT is ensnaring more and more people who were never intended to be its victims by our rulers, who continue to keep their heads in the sand in regard to any remedy.

This report also cites a tax gap of $132 billion. As I’ve explained before, this number is no more than a SWAG and cannot be backed up by IRS. They use big numbers like that in order to try to get more money for their own operating budget from our rulers in Congress. The bigger the amount of supposedly uncollected taxes, the more readily the money hungry politicians are to fund and allow increased collection actions by IRS. It’s too bad none of our rulers, nor anyone in the media, has the guts to challenge the official IRS statistics on something that, by definition, is impossible to measure; as I have been doing for several years. In all of my efforts to track down the official IRS calculations of the infamous widely cited tax gap, IRS personnel at very high levels have actually admitted to me that it is nothing but a SWAG (scientific wild ass guess). Their rationale is that since the actual amount is indeterminable, their SWAGs are as genuine as any other number anyone else may want to come up with.

I do dispute the size of the IRS’s imaginary tax gap because it has been my experience that most people overpay their taxes by not claiming all of the deductions to which they are legally entitled. This is most often due to lousy bookkeeping, as well as the use of tax preparers who think their job is to maximize the IRS’s take.