How you can resist funding the government →
about the IRS and U.S. tax law/policy →
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Obamacare tax penalties
Here are some items of note that have come to my attention in recent weeks:
I wondered if this might happen: One of the weirder aspects of Obamacare is that the individual health insurance mandate is to be enforced by adding a penalty to the income tax of any individual who fails to get health insurance — but for public relations reasons the IRS is forbidden to use its usual methods of liens, levies, seizures, and the like to chase down this penalty if the taxpayer refuses to pay it.
So now, Obamacare foes are starting to whisper about this cheap-and-easy civil disobedience opportunity.
Though “whisper” isn’t really the right word when you’re talking about Rush Limbaugh.
Are Cryptocurrencies [like Bitcoin] “Super” Tax Havens? asks Omri Y. Marian of the University of Florida.
Marian concludes: “Significantly, cryptocurrencies possess all the traditional characteristics that tax havens do; Earnings are not subject to taxation, and taxpayers’ anonymity is maintained.… Thus, cryptocurrencies have the potential of defeating the recent successes of governments in battling offshore tax evasion.… while governments have paid some attention to this issue, they have so far failed to identify the acuteness of the potential problem.”
Among the things the so-called government “shutdown” brought us was a halt in almost all IRS levies and liens for the duration.
The agency had plenty on its plate before the shutdown, and now it’s already behind in regearing for tax season.
France enacted a populist measure to throw a 75% marginal tax on incomes above €1 million.
Professional soccer teams, whose players may earn large annual incomes but usually over a short viable career, have decided to protest by going on temporary strike, effectively eliminating a round of matches this year — the first time teams have done anything of this sort .
This coming tax season, “shared responsibility” fines for people without qualifying health insurance are going to hit for realsies.
The IRS is by law somewhat hobbled in pursuing people who refuse to pay these fines, and when you combine that with conservative hostility toward Obamacare, you have a recipe for a potential wave of tax resistance.
It looks like the experiment of using private bill collectors to go after unpaid federal taxes is back.
It seems this on-again/off-again experiment has little to do with collecting taxes, and more to do with a tug-of-war between Democrats and Republicans on whether to reward Democrat-leaning public employee unions or Republican-leaning government contractors.
Irwin Schiff, one of the most bull-headed and influential of the “show-me-the-law”-style tax protesters in the United States in recent years, died in prison recently.
He developed cancer while in prison, and died shackled to a prison hospital bed, as his son Peter recounts:
As the cancer consumed him, his voice changed and the prison phone system no longer recognized it, so he could not even talk with family members on the phone during his final month of life.
When his condition deteriorated to the point where he needed to be hospitalized, government employees blindly followed orders that kept him shackled to his bed.
This despite the fact that escape was impossible for an 87 year old terminally ill, legally blind patient who could barely breathe, let alone walk.
While I’ve been studying my Aristotle, links have been piling up in my bookmarks.
Here are some of them:
A new documentary film called The Pacifist is doing the festival circuit.
It concerns war tax resister Larry Bassett, his large act of income tax resistance and redirection, and his attempts to provoke the U.S. government to respond to his stand.
It features interviews of Bassett, interspersed with historical footage from government propaganda films encouraging people to pay their taxes to keep the war machine going, and with a collage of contemporary news footage about American militarism.
It does a good job of helping you get to know Bassett better and to learn about the history of his pacifism and his war tax resistance stand.
Finland evidently publishes the taxable income of every citizen as a public record that any busybody can browse through.
Do you suppose more or fewer people would resist their taxes if such a practice were typical?
Ruth Benn considers issues of taxation, privacy, and openness about our finances at NWTRCC’s blog.
Because of the repeated [budget] cuts, the IRS has drastically stopped pursuing “nonfilers” who do not submit their tax returns.
The number of investigations into nonfilers fell from 2.4 million in to 362,000 in .
The agency has also drastically reduced its investigations of filers who do not pay their tax debts.
In , the IRS let $482 million in old tax debt lapse, but by , that number increased to $8.3 billion.
The federal government “shutdown” is also taking its toll on the IRS.
At a time of year when the agency is usually bulking up its temporary workforce and preparing for income tax filing season, instead it’s sending most of its workforce home, and making the rest work without pay.
Protests by employees are planned, and there’s also a lawsuit in the works that claims forcing the agency workers to work without pay violates labor laws.
There’s a strange feature of Obamacare.
If your income is low, the government subsidizes your health insurance premium.
But if your income is higher than you thought it would be, you’re supposed to pay some of that subsidy back when you file your taxes.
But there’s a limit to how much you have to pay back.
Because of this, the government is paying out about a billion dollars in subsidies that people don’t qualify for and yet will never have to repay.
