The Main Consequence of a Tax Lien is Junkmail

As I noted a little over a month ago, the IRS filed a new tax lien against me in our local court system. This was a renewal of the lien they had filed the previous year, with updated numbers. It hasn’t had any practical effect on my life or my resistance and has not been a cause for alarm.

However, it has prompted an asston of junkmail. Just today I got seven different pieces of mail from various outfits offering to settle my tax debt for pennies on the dollar (for a fee). Over the weekend I got several more. The lien must have just gotten published somewhere.

Most of these are designed to look official rather than commercial: “URGENT DOCUMENT ENCLOSED: BACK TAX NOTICE” reads one envelope. “VIOLATION SUMMARY ENCLOSED” reads another. “Tax Debt Urgent Notice” reads a third. “SUMMONS ENCLOSED — DELINQUENCY NOTICE” announces a fourth.

It must be a lucrative business, to have all these companies sending all this carefully-misleading mail.

In other news…

  • Protesters in South Kivu were denied a permit to march and were stopped by a line of police when they tried. So they did as they do in Kivu, and announced a tax strike.
  • Attacks on traffic-ticket-issuing robot cameras continue around Europe, with machines destroyed or disabled in Italy and France in recent weeks. Meanwhile in New York City, protesters held up signs warning drivers about speed camera placements.
  • An IRS mail room employee in Alabama “became sick today after being exposed to a package containing an unknown, potentially hazardous liquid” that spilled from “an international letter”.
  • A homeowner in Cornwall stopped paying council tax when her property was made worthless by damage from a leaking water pipe the council refuses to fix. The council relented and wrote off some of the back taxes but she keeps resisting, and they’re fighting her again.
  • Crispin Sartwell reminds progressives that increasing taxation is a poor method to fight economic inequality. Excerpt:

    Taxing rich people redistributes their wealth to defense contractors, which are owned and run by rich people. About 40 percent of discretionary spending goes to federal contractors; a primary result of a wealth tax or a much higher tax rate on the wealthy will be a recirculation among corporate titans.

    Service on the national debt totaled $325 billion, so a significant and ever-growing portion of the money obtained in the apparent pursuit of equality will be redistributed to bondholders, or recirculated through the world banking system. The governments of China and Japan each own over a trillion dollars in U.S. debt, for example, and so we’ll be taxing American rich people and redistributing their wealth to foreign governments, and to rich people elsewhere in the world.