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.

Stephanopoulos Fails to Correct Dean’s False $304 Tax Cut Claim – Are there really viewers who expect true objective journalism from the Clintons’ former campaign manager?

Republicans target Virginia Governor Warner’s tax increases

Democrats Put Tax Proposals In Context of Systemic Change

Judge Grants Request of IRS Office of Professional Responsibility to Disbar CPA – Another tax protestor promoter gets nailed. This former IRS agent, Joe Bannister, has been trying to get support for his use of the same old completely discredited tax protestor scams. What’s surprising to me isn’t that he was disbarred; but that he isn’t looking at a long prison term.

…AND MAD DONKEYS.

Health Savings Accounts – More changes to an under-used tax deduction. I’m not a big fan of these kinds of plans because I find it a lot easier and more effective to use C corporations to cover all medical costs.

Who Says Eliot Spitzer Is a Hero? – I’ve had similar thoughts as Neil Cavuto has about the power-mad crusade Spitzer is undertaking in the name of saving investors from unscrupulous fund managers. Breaking the law or violating written contracts is a valid area of concern for him; but telling private businesses how much they can charge is overstepping his authority.

Wal-Mart Settles Insurance Policies Suit – Imagine that. Some people aren’t happy about Wal-Mart making money from dead former employees.

All Tax Talk, No Action? – Luckily, tax lawn are written by the Congress. So, even if George Bush were to follow in his father’s footsteps as a one term president, the GOP controlled House & Senate would hopefully not go along with the DemonRats’ plan to repeal Bush’s tax cuts and soak the “rich” (anyone earning over $25,000 per year).

The Clark tax-increase scheme

Make Way for More Tax Cuts. They’re catching on like wildfire around the globe.

Dean’s Flip Flop on Taxes – This guy is a certifiable loony toon and a godsend for the Bush reelection campaign.

IRS will track Free File taxpayers – There seems to be a bit of an over-reaction to this. When you e-file, it’s already a given that you are giving IRS special personal information. IRS keeping separate tabs on returns received under their Free File program doesn’t seem to be much different than other classifications they use, such as returns that were self-prepared versus done by professionals.

The Dean Tax – This is a good rebuttal to the idiotic website called BushTax.com that claims Bush’s tax cuts are screwing the little people and rewarding the evil rich fat cats. I checked that site out a number of weeks ago and thought it was too stupid to even comment on, but Ron Rapp has spent the time and done a nice job debunking each of the fallacies used by the Bush haters. It’s really more of the same kind of leftist propaganda and outright lies about the positive effects of tax cuts that the DemonRats and the media still spout about the Reagan 1980s cuts.

Those of you receiving these postings via email may have noticed long gaps between receiving anything. Those have been caused by problems with the Bloglet and Blogger services and are an unfortunate fact of life on the ‘net. As always, you can find all of my postings on the main web page and in the archives, going back to November 2000.

I have found that a much more reliable delivery service for web log postings is by subscribing to the RSS feeds that are produced with each posting. I have found the easiest way to do this is through an aggregator service, such as my favorite, Bloglines. It’s free and has been amazingly efficient for checking on dozens of blogs much more efficiently than having to log onto each site one by one. It also cuts down on the volume of email. With close to a thousand spam messages coming in each day to my email accounts (after having been whittled down by my ISPs), I enjoy the ability to focus directly on the latest postings from the blogs I’ve subscribed to via Bloglines.

Another nice feature of Bloglines is that it accumulates unread postings for each of my subscribed feeds. Several of them I only check once or twice a month; so I can feel confident that everything since my last visit is still available.

I encourage anyone who has learned the benefits of reading blogs to try out Bloglines to make keeping up with the growng volume of information much more efficient. With this election year, there will be a record number of news items to keep up on.