This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Taxes

  • IRS pays bonuses to tax-delinquent employees

    I guess not paying your taxes on time is a big deal if you’re an IRS employee, or at least that’s the message that they send.

    More than 2,800 workers got bonuses despite facing a disciplinary action in the previous year, including 1,150 who owed back taxes, said a report by J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. The bonuses were awarded from October 2010 through December 2012.

    George’s report said the bonus program doesn’t violate federal regulations, but it’s inconsistent with the IRS mission to enforce tax laws.

    “These awards are designed to recognize and reward IRS employees for a job well done, and that is appropriate, because the IRS should encourage good performance,” George said. “However, while not prohibited, providing awards to employees who have been disciplined for failing to pay federal taxes appears to create a conflict with the IRS’s charge of ensuring the integrity of the system of tax administration.”

    They won’t pay taxes on the money that they earned, so give them more money – makes perfect sense to me.

  • If You Thought Your Taxes Are Outrageous . . . .

    . . .you’re right.

    We Americans will pay more in US Federal and state taxes this year than we spend on food, clothing, and housing combined.  Details can be found here.

    That guy in NYC was wrong.  It’s not the rent that’s too damn high.

  • Not a good week to be the President

    Well it isn’t even Wednesday yet and already President Obama is having some serious migraines.  First there were the Benghazi whistle blowers (and apparently there are even more waiting in the wings) whose testimony is both scathing and damning.  Then there was the IRS scandal, in which the IRS targeted both conservative (specifically but not limited to the TEA party), and Jewish groups.  NOW there is news out of the Associated Press that they had tons of their phone records seized in an apparent dragnet to find leaks.  If he wasn’t already in hot water he sure is now, and the shuckin an jivin isn’t cutting the mustard that it used to.  Many of the journalists and news services that the Obama administration could count on as go to guys are starting to ask very tough questions.  Watching Jay Carney or the President’s most recent press briefings look down right uncomfortable.

    Let’s deconstruct some of this real quick to see just how much trouble the President is in.  Let’s start with the big one last week; Benghazi.  At first glance it’s pretty straight forward, someone screwed up and people died.  Ask any Joe that ever had a 2LT call for fire and they’ll tell you it happens a lot more than we’d like to admit.  But there’s more to it than that.  We know for instance that Tyrone Wood’s team from Global Response Staff (GRS) were clearly aware of the attack at the consulate in Benghazi at 2140, and were ordered ordered by higher not to go.  They left anyway at 2205 local.  We know that Glen Doherty’s team was actually in Tripoli, and had to bribe or even hijack a plane to go to Benghazi.  We know that an SF LTC was ordered to stand down by higher (presumably AFRICOM) and said to the acting Chief of Mission “this is the first time the diplomats had more balls than the military.”  We know that Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith were overcome by a petroleum fire in their safe room after the compound was breached, and we know both were dead by the end of the night.  The ride back to the CIA annex by Woods’ team was under fire and one of the vehicles had flat tires but nonetheless made it to the compound where they received sporadic fire all night.  At some point during this Doherty’s team managed to make it into the compound before the final assault which included mortar rounds began.  When it was over Woods and Doherty were dead.

    What followed was undeniably a cover-up for political purposes.  A really shitty video was blamed and the denials for support were covered up.  UN ambassador Susan Rice became an unwitting pawn in this and went on all the Sunday talk shows with this truly ridiculous story, which we already knew was wrong.    From all that we’ve been able to glean they knew within 24 hours that it was Ansar al-Sharia, and they knew that this was specifically a terrorist attack.  White-wash or cover up, the American people were lied to, and they kept on lying to us.  Even now they’re making like this is all politics.  It begs the question if they’ve lied about this monumental goof, what else aren’t they telling the truth about.

    And then there’s that IRS bit.  See this is actually the most serious for the President and his team.  Why?  Well look at the first bullet point of Article 2 of the Nixon Articles of Impeachment.  As Joe Biden might say “it’s a big F**king deal.”  The fact that he even joked about it in 2009, is all the more disturbing.  Asking a Jewish group “what you feel about Israel,” or asking a conservative group who their donors are is not only highly irregular, but flat out illegal.  The key words being used for this scrutiny should have everyone’s jaw dropping.  Giving undue scrutiny, or harassment to a group concerned our president is violating the constitution is extremely disturbing.  More than that we’re now learning that this wasn’t just a few low level joe schmos, but high level people were aware of this program, and if they did not encourage it they certainly did nothing to stop it.  Potentially the head of the IRS may have lied to congress in May of 2012.  The president is trying to downplay it saying that investigation is needed, but there’s already been one, and it’s pretty clear what happened if not whose behind it.

    Then there’s that little bit about the AP.  Now as far as we know none of the phones were tapped, but as many as 300 reporters may have been effected.  In the journalist world nothing, and I mean nothing will make them go on the attack like even the insinuation that someone’s spying on them.  Keep in mind that this can not happen without the Attorney General, Eric Holder signing off on it.  This was all done in secret, without anyone at AP’s knowledge, and is potentially violating the First Amendment.  This is pretty important too, because if there has been one group covering for Obama more than anyone else, it has been the press.  Stories that might be considered embarrassing to the Obama administration have for years not received the full attention of the press with a few notable exceptions.  I truly think these days are over.  Whatever else happens from here on out the Obama administration is going to have a lot of explaining to do.

    So where does that leave us?  Well Benghazi is most definitely not a “sideshow,”  and despite what some say, help could have been given, if the administration acted immediately after the first attack, and could have helped to fend off the final attack.  If there truly was no help available then why in the world were so many commands caught with their pants down when everyone on the ground clearly stated they needed more security not less?  With The IRS scandal, well need I remind you that is an impeachable offense (not making this up).  Will the president be impeached?  Probably not, but it is possible.  At the very least it will get congress off their asses and taking a close look at how the Gub’ment is being run.  We might have a very real, and practical example of Big Government being so big it literally does not know what it’s doing, or we might have the truly dirtiest part of Chicago politics at play.  Either one is not good for “We the People.”  Lastly we have the AP scandal.  While in itself this is perhaps a minor event in the era of the PATRIOT Act, do not be surprised if there’s serious push back on this one.  Nothing chills a reporter’s bones like the federal government scaring away their souses, and potentially censoring them.

    In my personal humble opinion I think Obama is going to wish he hadn’t gotten reelected.  His second term is not starting off great, and his Dodge Dip Dive Duck and Dodge routine isn’t working anymore.  With Fast and Furious, a DOJ that suppressed a voter intimidation case, a DHS that refuses to enforce immigration, a total overhaul of health care that gives frightening powers to non-doctors, an AG that was held in contempt of congress (a first in history), A stagnant recovery, “Green Jobs” that are just a very expensive way to waste money, and a national debt that is not getting any better any time soon. . . Well to say that things are going to look pretty bad for his legacy is something of an understatement.  The word Impeachable is actually not out of the realm of possibility sadly enough.  Of course if that ever were to happen, Joe “fire a shotgun in the air” Biden will be our new president.  I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t trust that man to run a latrine detail.

  • Dingus: Sequester is Kennedy’s fault

    The standards for having an opinion piece in the Washington Post must’ve been lower3ed considerably, evidenced by the bit written today by Robert Samuelson who blames Kennedy’s 1964 tax cut for today’s sequester problem;

    It was a disaster.

    High inflation was the first shock. An initial boom (by 1969, unemployment was 3.5 percent) spawned a wage-price spiral. With government seeming to guarantee 4 percent unemployment, workers and businesses had little reason to restrain wages and prices. In 1960, inflation was 1 percent; by 1980, it was 13 percent. The economy became less stable. From 1969 to 1982, there were four recessions, as the Federal Reserve alternated between trying to push unemployment down and prevent inflation from going up. Only in the early 1980s did the Fed, under Paul Volcker and with Ronald Reagan’s support, crush inflationary psychology.

    […]

    Since Kennedy’s tax cut passed in 1964 — after his assassination — there have been 43 budget deficits and only five surpluses (1969, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001). Even the surpluses reflected luck more than policy. The last four resulted mostly from the 1990s economic boom, boosting tax revenue, and the end of the Cold War, lowering military spending.

    Nice try. But ya know what else happened in 1964? Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the introduction of combat troops to Vietnam because of the manufactured Gulf of Tonkin incident. In January 1969, the lame duck Congress voted to dip into the Social Security trust fund to pay for the massive spending that welfare and the war were eating up. In 1971, Richard Nixon launched the Wage & Price freeze. In 1979, Jimmy Carter founded the Education and Energy Departments. If you’re looking for reasons to blame for federal deficits, I wouldn’t look at cutting taxes – I’d look at government spending instead and resolute adherence to liberal economic policies that just don’t work.

    But, then the Washington Post is trying to support the President’s policy of raising taxes, despite the fact that tax cuts result in increased revenue – evidenced most recently by the Bush tax cuts in the 2000s.

  • Sequester lies

    Yesterday, the president surrounded himself with first responders while he lectured the American people on the impending spending cuts in the government known as “sequester”. from the Washington Examiner;

    “Emergency responders like the ones who are here today — their ability to help communities respond to and recover from disasters will be degraded,” he said. “Border Patrol agents will see their hours reduced. FBI agents will be furloughed. Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go. Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays at airports across the country. Thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off. Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings.”

    Since when are teachers, child care providers, doctors and nurses, police and fire fighters federal employees? Those services are paid for with local taxes, not federal funds. Of course, that’s the kind of scare tactics to which we’ve become accustomed over the last few decades. I noticed that the President didn’t bother to mention that the whole sequester thing was one of those bright ideas which came out of his White House, yet somehow it’s Congress’ fault.

    The Defense Department is staring down the barrel of 700,000 job losses 495,000 of those jobs are in the DC area, which might be uncomfortable for the White House. The Washington Post says that the sequester might result in a quarter-point jump in the unemployment rate.

    Of course, it’s all because the Administration is holding out for higher taxes instead of meaningful spending cuts. And, oh, yeah, they think that they can depend on savings from withdrawal from Afghanistan for spending reductions. You know like that savings we were supposed to have from the withdrawal from Iraq – no one is talking about that magical surplus which never materialized.

    Congress isn’t ready to raise taxes again, so Obama is stuck playing the blame game. From the Washington Times;

    GOP House Speaker John A. Boehner said Tuesday the House has twice passed a plan to replace the so-called sequester with “common sense cuts,” but Mr. Obama has so far been unwilling to find enough savings from overhauling Medicare and Social Security. The president, he said, is relying too heavily on plans to increase taxes again.

    “Just last month, the president got his higher taxes on the wealthy, and he’s already back for more,” Ohio’s Mr. Boehner said in a statement. The Democrats’ “new-found concern about the president’s sequester is appreciated, but words alone won’t avert it.”

    Also from the Times, sequester is forcing defense contractor to send jobs overseas;

    First Line Technologies of Chantilly, Va., makes cooling vests for troops to wear underneath their body armor and employs about a dozen people. Having experienced rapid growth last year, it was readying to hire about a dozen more workers before the uncertainty over sequestration developed, company President Amit Kapoor said.

    Now, First Line Technologies is looking to market its products overseas and will hire employees abroad. Its strategy is to move quickly into overseas markets to avoid layoffs or having to close.

    We still have 47 months of this shit ahead.

  • Pelosi; no spending problem

    Pelosi no problem

    I agree with Nancy, the folks in DC seem to have no problem spending our money. I don’t know what gave anyone the impression that they did. Well, other than the fact that they’re running out of our money and they need raise taxes in order to ease their craving;

    “We have to recognize that, which cuts really help us and which cuts hurt our future? And cuts in education, scientific research and the rest are harmful, and they are what are affected by the sequestration,” she said on “Fox News Sunday.” “So, it is almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem. We have a budget deficit problem that we have to address.”

    See, that’s what a “budget deficit problem” means – they’re going to raise our taxes, because you know, after Jimmy Carter created the Education Department, our children are fricken geniuses, so no cuts there – and since he created the Energy Department, we’ve weaned ourselves off of foreign oil and gas is so much cheaper now than it was then, so where can we cut there? So the only thing we can do is raise taxes because, aside from the Defense Department, there’s really nothing else we can do balance the budget. No. Really.

    And John McCain fully supports raising taxes. See? That’s why I didn’t want to raise taxes on the rich – it’s like chum in the water for Congress.

  • That compromise thing

    So, after all of that talk about “working together” with Congress, I’m guessin’ that by “bi-partisan” the president means “My way or the highway”. It seems that cry-baby John Boehner presented the president with a compromise plan to avoid the “fiscal cliff” we about to go forward over. Boehner’s plan raised taxes on folks making over a million bucks, but that wasn’t good enough for “I Won” according to Fox News;

    White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, though, said it “doesn’t ask enough of the very wealthiest in taxes and instead shifts the burden to the middle class and seniors,” and cannot pass the Senate.

    Within minutes, Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck fired back: “After spending months saying we must ask for more from millionaires and billionaires, how can they reject a plan that does exactly that?”

    Buck accused President Obama of “moving the goal posts” and in the process “threatening every American family with higher taxes.”

    Boehner, with no less than his leadership standing on the line, is trying to walk a tightrope in negotiations as the president demands tax hikes that many Republicans adamantly oppose.

    And yet, it’s not class warfare, no, not a little bit. It’s not about pandering to a base of grubby little grabby cretins. If the administration is so worried about shifting “the burden to the middle class and seniors” why isn’t he doing everything he can to avoid the Obama Tax Hike that are pending in a few days? Who is going to be hit hardest when the Obama Tax Hike hits if not the lower income folks who are going to suddenly get hit with taxes for the first time?

  • Why I’m no longer a Republican

    Thank you, Republican Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma for reminding me why I hate the Republican Party almost as much as I hate the Democrat Party. From the New York Times;

    In a private meeting of the House Republican whip team, the group responsible for vote counting, Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma broke with the rest of the leadership and said the party should join with President Obama for now, Republican aides said. The meeting was first reported by Politico.

    “The first thing I’d do is make sure we don’t raise taxes on 98 percent of the American people,” he said in an interview Tuesday night. “We’ll get some credit for that, and it’s the right thing to do.”

    Punk ass gutless sissy. If you truly believe that a tax hike on Americans will not help the economy, why give Obama this? And since we all know, as evidenced by this chump move, Republicans are gutless, they won’t try and correct this later like Cole says. Caving into the administration on this will not get you any credit from me.

    Cole is not looking out for his constituency. For one thing, the Obama Administration will never let the impending tax hike take effect, because then Americans would know that the “Bush tax cuts for the rich” line is a lie because everyone’s taxes are going to go up substantially, some people will suddenly have to pay taxes as a result.

    No, I don’t make over $250,000, but I do understand what raising taxes on those people will do to the economy, even if this administration can’t see past the end of their little class warfare noses.