A handful of interesting things that stumbled on our internets recently:
- Over at the LegalMatch law blog, Kate Langmore reviews the prospects for a tax resistance campaign by opponents of California’s Proposition 8.
- An ex-cop is working on a reality TV show designed to catch cops breaking the law. In the first episode, they catch cops lying to obtain a search warrant and then film them busting into their targeted house — only to find Christmas trees growing where they expected to find a marijuana farm, and surveillance cameras transmitting their surprised expressions back to KopBusters central.
- Wendy McElroy has been journaling a year of frugality at her blog — getting the jump on what’s likely to become an increasingly popular genre.
- At Tax Update Blog, Joe Kristan reports that the IRS’s “Offers in Compromise” program doesn’t seem to have much to recommend it:
One tax attorney writes:If you watch too much late-night cable television, you probably have seen commercials that make it appear that paying federal taxes is no big deal, because you can always work out a “pennies on the dollar” deal. Don’t count on it.
I regularly tell my clients that Offers in Compromise based on doubt as to collectibility are a crap shoot. You can meet all of the suggested requirements and the IRS can still legally reject your Offer merely because it feels it’s not in its best interests.
Of course, by the time you find out that the Offer is not in the government’s best interest you have voluntarily given it all of the information it needs to seize your assets and have also given them at least an additional year (the filing of an Offer extends the statute of limitations) to collect the tax.
- Kristen McKee’s working on some pre-new year’s resolutions. “One thing I’ve noticed in my deschooling process is my shift from helpless victim, to active participant, in many different areas of my life,” she writes. One of those areas is taxes: “In the past, I paid my taxes the easiest way I could figure out so I could get the most money back, or the way I knew most others to do it. This year I am trying to be true to what I really feel is important and learn how to minimize or eliminate the taxes I pay that go to fund a war.”
- Francois Tremblay investigates how shared belief generates power and notices the charmingly naïve and unashamedly naked liberal ideology hanging loose at Check Your Premises.
- More local currency news: Introducing the Milwaukee Bucks.
