My God you are a child. The fact is the Feds wanted to tax Americans for the sins of their parents and the IRS was the tool to do it.
WTF? Getting money back from over payments from social security gets turned into this talking point. Shit the Republican PR machine is really working hard. You would think conservatives would want the government going after social security “fraud”. Well not really fraud since many times the over payments were unintentional.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/04/23/3429722/irs-records-tea-party/ Because it is unpatriotic to question a Teabagger..
Meanwhile, in a letter released Thursday, J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA), noted that out of the 298 groups set aside for a closer look between May 2010 and May 2012, only six had the words "progress" or "progressive" in their names. "In total, 30 percent of the organizations we identified with the words 'progress' or 'progressive' in their names were processed as potential political cases," George wrote to Rep. Sandy Levin, D-Mich., the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee. "In comparison, our audit found that 100 percent of the tax-exempt applications with Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 in their names were processed as potential political cases during the timeframe of our audit." http://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-progressive-groups-flagged-but-tea-party-bigger-target/
If only they would actually provide the organization names. It would be fairly obvious that an organization called, for example, "Progress Towards Better Schools In Our Community" is much less political than, for example, "Tea Party Patriots Against the Muslim Pretender".
But that link is to a report by a Democrat. He is obviously covering for the White House. We can only trust Republican reports...
I am sure this is just a coincidence but the IRS audited 10% of the Tea Party contributors on the donor lists they demanded. That is an astonishing rate.
I doubt it is a coincidence. I imagine a high percentage of those contributors had claims which triggered the usual flags, and I imagine there is good reason to check and see whether Tea Party contributors in general are playing by the rules...
Legitimate audits are fine, but how do you feel about nuisance audits? I can say I try to be honest when I file my taxes. but the tax code is so convoluted that I have no idea if they are 100% accurate. But perhaps you are right, tea party patriots are 10 times more likely to be tax cheats.
I'm in favor of auditing nuisances. If you meant audits the IRS performs to make a nuisance for the auditee, I feel pretty much the same way about them as I do about zombies and unicorns.
I'm not sure I follow you. There are absolutely historical examples for nuisance audits. Nixon, for one, used them extensively.
You? I don't know, you might be. But some (most?) of the TP organizations are, hence why their applications for tax exempt status trigger alarms with the IRS.
He did? Maybe my memory is wrong, but I thought he asked the IRS to do some and they refused. He did definitely quash offshore account investigations that were heading toward Mitchell, Stans, Kissinger, and himself, but he did that by forcing the reassignment the field agents involved to desk jobs and the desk agents to field jobs. However, just in case my increasingly faulty memory is faulty-- change that to dodos and passenger pigeons...
Are you lazy or just stupid? Here a link you might find acceptable, but please understand there is a long history of IRS abuse. There is a reason the IRS is the most reviled and feared government agency: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/irs-irs-long-history-dirty-tricks/story?id=19177178 I don't care what side of the political aisle you sit, IRS abuse should be chilling.
I don't think I am either. Are you? Your link doesn't seem to be about audits (you do remember we were talking about audits) but rather about using the IRS for intelligence. Now Nixon did talk about using audits. But I despise him about as much as any living person, and I covered a lot of ground on his abuses, and as far I can recall it was just talk-- he couldn't actually get it done. I'm also disposed to forgive JFK a bit on the intelligence front, too (even though I didn't like him very much either) in that Birchers literally threatened his assassination if he were elected (they had a hard time distinguishing between commies and Catholics back then.) In fact it would probably have been legal for the Secret Service to access Bircher tax records and tell the Prez what they found. Probably still would be in cases of overt threats...
That is Super fantastic. The guy that flies under the IRS radar by keeping his income low tells the rest of us we have nothing to the fear from an ubber politicized IRS. Thanks John, you are a real friend.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear..." (You still haven't cited any politically motivated IRS audits from history, you know. You just want to claim that "everybody knows" as far as I can tell.) (Actually I'm a little surprised I haven't been audited-- coupla times my ratios were pretty weird and my income fairly high. My father was in similar circumstances...) I'm not actually "flying under the radar" now, you know-- I have enough money coming in without having to work for it to catch up on stuff around the house-- there's a lot of it-- and to crash diet while doing so. 450 calories a day-- doesn't take much income to support that, but if I were working I couldn't sustain it physically. 50 lbs down since Dec 6th, 50 to go.
We will start with FDR, and then can move on to JFK and Nixon... http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/05/20/fdr-used-the-irs-against-jewish-activists/