Census Bureau Admitted it Over-Counted Democrat States and Under-Counted Republican States

 I knew that the Census Bureau had been engaged in trying to over-count Democrat strongholds and to under-count Republican strongholds prior to the release of the 2020 Census results.  Those results increased the number of Representatives in the House of Representatives for Texas and Florida by one less than independent population experts expected.  Other states, such as Arizona, did not gain at all, contrary to the expectation of some.  But, I missed the announcement by the Census Bureau in late May that they had errored by over- or under-counting in the following states:

Over-counted:  Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York

Under-counted:  Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas

True to the nature of the federal bureaucracy, all of the over-counting occurred in the Democratic states and five of the six under-counted states were Republican states.  It makes me wonder if the under-counting in Illinois was predominantly in the larger area of the state represented by the five of the 18 members of the House from that state who are Republicans.  Sure enough, the new congressional district map for Illinois now has only four districts that favor Republicans.  The one competitive district before, which was held by a Republican, now leans Democrat.  One might have expected that the death toll due to killings in Chicago might have led to the loss of more than one Congressional seat in the Chicago area.

Minnesota had been projected by many to lose a seat, which it did not, perhaps due to the over-counting in Minnesota.  New York had been widely expected to lose two seats, but it lost only one, perhaps due to over-counting.  Of course, the Census Bureau announced its major errors too late to allow for corrections.  We may be stuck with these errors now until the 2032 election.

We have learned that the old media, academia, and federal bureaucrats are all functionaries of the power-lusting Democrat Party elite.  The intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the Justice Department were all in the tank to falsely accuse Trump of Russian election collusion and of improprieties with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy.  Then they accused him of inciting a riot that they claimed killed five policemen.  He did not incite a riot and no policemen were killed.  One later died of natural causes and four later committed suicide.  It is mighty depressing to be a policeman in a Democrat run city these days.  As for the IRS, we have the example of them running a tyrannical syndicate ungoverned by the rule of law and clearly willing to use their power to go after Tea Party and pro-Constitution organizations.  Now, it is about to have 87,000 more agents to attack small businesses and manufacturing firms, who the Democrats count as their enemies.  Then there will be all those additional bureaucrats in charge of the alternative energy economy with its expensive, unreliable energy mandates.

The federal government consists mostly of people who are not your friends.  At least not if you are an American who thinks independently, believes in productive work, has earned some property, and does not want to force his fellow man to do his will.  The Democrats love using the power of government to make you do their will, however.

Executive Branch Corruption Prevention vs. Foreign Contributions of Value

The President of the United States of America is constitutionally tasked with enforcing the laws of the nation within its constitutionally delimited powers.  That enforcement function implies that he must not allow corruption within the Executive Branch.  It is his duty to root it out, reveal it, and prosecute it.

During the Obama presidency, his administration had numerous incidences that appeared to be examples of severe corruption and which he ought to have seriously investigated.  However, it is highly plausible that Obama was actually involved in some or all of these instances of very plausible corruption.  None of these corruption instances were properly investigated.  It is not unusual for an administration to fail to investigate instances of corruption for fear of embarrassment or for fear that they will lose votes in the next election because they were caught in their planned corruption.  This is especially true of the Democrat Party, whose corruption is commonly so pervasive that they cannot even be embarrassed by the fact of it and are only ever embarrassed by the ineptness that caused them to be overtly caught engaging in it.

Now let me give you a few of the very plausibly corrupt actions that occurred by politicians under the Obama administration:

• Lois Lerner and the IRS holding up more than a hundred Tea Party, Constitutional Government, and Patriot tax-exempt status requests which kept many of them from expounding policy arguments that the Democrat Socialist Party did not want Americans to hear before the 2012 election.
• The Uranium One, whose controlling ownership was Russian, but also partly Canadian, deal to buy American uranium which required the approval of several Obama agencies, including the State Department, then headed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Prior to these approvals and during the approval process, huge donations were made to the Clinton Foundation by Uranium One officers and Bill Clinton was offered $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow at a meeting that recommended investments in Uranium One.
• Hillary Clinton stole more than 60,000 e-mails from the U.S. government while Secretary of State, routing them through an insecure server in the basement of one of her homes.  When these were demanded back, she destroyed about half of them, claiming they were only personal notes.  Even among those that were returned, numerous instances of information requiring secure handling were found.  The hard drive and other storage media for the e-mails had been destroyed, in violation of the legal requirement that the e-mails be returned to the government and for a proper investigation into security violations.  After Clinton had the e-mails destroyed she and the media pretended that Trump had called upon the Russians to steal these already destroyed e-mails.  This is the Democrat Socialist Party way to turn a violation of the law to advantage.  This invitation to steal narrative became part of the myth of Russian collusion by Trump.
• A deal was made by the Obama Attorney General Lynch with Bill Clinton on the tarmac of an airport not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her theft of the State Department e-mails and for any security violations.
• Violations of the FISA court requirements occurred at least four times in requests made by the Obama FBI and intelligence agencies for FISA warrants to spy upon the Trump presidential campaign.  This violation of law is at least as serious as the Watergate burglary that ended the Nixon presidency.  Numerous high-level Obama officials were involved in the Spygate scandal and were collaborating with the intelligence agencies and other persons in the United Kingdom, Russia, Australia, Ukraine and Italy.
• Vice President Joe Biden using his special envoy assignments with Ukraine and Red China to win sweetheart deals for relatives who had nothing to offer in exchange for large sums of money except the fact that they were related to Joe Biden.

Since Obama did not root out, reveal, and prosecute these likely cases of corruption under his administration, it is the very proper job that the following President do so.  Indeed, the following President would be slacking his responsibilities if he did not do so.

Ah, but note that in several of these cases there are actors from other countries.  During the 2016 election, had Trump actually received any useful information from the Russians on e-mails they may very well have stolen from Clinton's insecure home server, the Democrats would have said he had received something of value from a foreign country in violation of campaign finance laws!  This is a Get out of jail free card for a corrupt politician.  The same would have been true if Trump had received damning evidence against Clinton from a Canadian or a Russian source connected with Uranium One.

Now, the claim is being made that because Joe Biden is running for President, any evidence of his corrupt activities in Ukraine and China obtained by the Trump administration is something of value received from a foreign country in violation of campaign finance law.  So all a corrupt politician needs to do to be forever protected from investigations of his crimes is to be sure that the witnesses of his crimes are all foreigners and that he continue his political career without end so he can never be investigated and prosecuted.  What an incredible trick and the Democrat Socialist Party appears to have discovered its utility.  Corruption safe and forever.  Rather like Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton staying married forever, so neither can ever be forced to testify to the crimes of the other.  The abuse of power through foreign corruption and a political career are a marriage made in heaven, apparently.

As always, context is extremely critical in rational thinking.  One can understand how the campaign finance laws came to be and their intent.  One can understand how those who wrote the laws may not have anticipated the way the Democrats are currently trying to use these laws to prevent the proof of corruption of some of their leading politicians.  The rational man must understand that any valid intent of the campaign finance laws was to prevent corruption, not to enable it.  

The rational man understands that no campaign finance law can stand in the way of a President's core constitutional functions to execute the laws with proper respect for the individual rights of every citizen and that must mean to do so without corruption.  A President must be free to root out, reveal, and prosecute corruption in the Executive Branch of the government.  And we must note that both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden may have been guilty of corruption as officials of the Obama administration.  That very plausible possibility needs to be seriously investigated and to do so requires that foreign actors be able to deliver information about their deeds to the present administration headed by President Trump.

Space and Good Fences Make Good Neighbors -- Good Neighbors Make Limited Government

Once again the overcrowded cities have voted for the more authoritarian Presidential candidate, while the people of "flyover country" and the "Racist South," from the viewpoint of presumptuous Progressive Elitists, have chosen a less authoritarian candidate.  This again proves that space and good fences make good neighbors, while overcrowded conditions lead to bossy people who want ever so badly to push their values on other people and to micromanage their lives.  Somehow, these "educated" Progressive Elitists always manage to presume that they can manage the lives of people they do not know better than said people can do this themselves.  They pretend politically that they respect these people whose lives need to be micromanaged by them, but in their private discussions among one another, they actually despise the people they believe to be incapable of choosing their own values properly and managing their own lives.

In the 2016 election, it is clear that not only did a majority of Americans in Flyover Country and in the South reject the rule of the Progressive Elitists, but so too did a majority in the Rust Belt.  The Obama years of manufacturing industry suppression and of fossil fuel energy suppression took a big toll on the Rust Belt and led to an upheaval with catastrophic and surprising results for the Democrat Socialist Party.  The low percentage of Americans with jobs worth having and the long stagnant wages had finally become too much for many Americans.  The ever-increasing expense and inconveniences of ObamaCare played a significant role also in the rebellion.  Seeing more businesses go out of business than were created for many years under Obama had its consequences.  The loss of jobs due to the vendetta against coal and the threat of a loss of jobs due to the Democrat desire to suppress fracking not only hurt the immediate industries, but hurt those who transported or used the coal, oil, gas, and the products made from them.  It would hurt those in the plastics industry, for instance.  Meanwhile, many a business and resident either had energy bills higher than necessary already or was facing sharp future increases.  Many were sick of the constant stream of Democrat lies and misrepresentations.  Many white Americans, especially men, were sick of being discriminated against in hiring and in contracting work.  A rebellious upheaval was long overdue.

Donald Trump was the beneficiary of all this and the fact that Hillary Clinton was a very unappealing opponent.  Not that Trump himself was an appealing Presidential candidate.  He leaves much to be desired as well.  But as I have noted, he does have some good policy positions, which if he carries through with them with a Republican House and Senate, might make him a much less undesirable President than Hillary would have been.  Trump will now be put to the test.

The actions he badly needs to take are these:

• Repeal ObamaCare as pledged.
• Reduce Corporate and Personal Income taxes, as pledged, so American businesses can compete better in the global markets from American plants and facilities and so multinational companies can afford to return $2 trillion of earnings abroad to the states to make a huge investment in America.
• Protect the Right to Work Laws so Americans are not forced to join labor unions they do not want to join.  Also deny unions card check and rapid representation elections.
• Nominate a judge for the open Supreme Court position who has a proper understanding of the broad and many individual rights every one of us has.
• End the federal government role in promoting the false catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  Fire the many employees of the EPA, NASA, NOAA, and the National Science Foundation who have insidiously supported this false science and wasted huge sums of taxpayer money on it, while forcing up energy costs in the entire nation in its name.
• Follow through on his pledge to have a government employee hiring freeze.
• Hire good managers for the Veterans Administration and its hospitals, while allowing many more options for veterans to use private sector medical care.
• Stop the practice of government favoring some groups based on their ethnicity or sex. Everyone has equal individual rights and it is the function of legitimate government to protect everyone's equal rights.
• The purpose of a smaller Department of Education should be to end the government monopoly on K-12 education by advancing the widespread use of vouchers to allow all students school choice.  Trump is on-board to start this process, but should expand its scope.
• Reopen federal lands and offshore areas for the development of fossil fuel mines and drilling.
• Sell off much of the federal land so it can become more productive, provide more jobs, and generate more local and state tax revenue.
• Reduce the number of regulations and their expense, as he has pledged to do.
• Simplify the tax code as pledged.
• End the death tax as pledged.
• End the IRS practice of discriminating against non-profit organizations who support individual rights and limited or constitutional government.
• Limit federal grants to colleges to work with defense potential.  This will largely end taxpayer funding to faculty devoted to expanding the role and size of government.
• End requirements that government pay union level wages.
• End the Obama executive action that raised the salary level at which overtime pay had to be paid.
• Reduce the federal minimum wage so that more Americans of low productivity or in low cost of living areas may be employed.  This will be very helpful in allowing the under-educated to get their first jobs and in promoting businesses in both poor city neighborhoods and low cost of living areas of the country.
• Repeal Dodd-Frank, which was a deception to make Americans think the government had no responsibility for the Great Recession.  It made it difficult for smaller banks to operate, thereby adding to the number of banks too big to fail.
• End the government monopoly on student loans for college.
• Reduce government spending on infra-structure, which seems to be the opposite of what he wants to do.
• Produce a new immigration law which makes it easier to immigrate to the U.S., while insisting that immigrants enter and stay in the U.S. legally.
• Promote senior military officers based on their ability, not based on the political party with which they are registered to vote.  Do not discriminate on the basis of sex or ethnicity.
• Review Obama's Executive Orders and change those which are unconstitutional or wrongheaded.  Some right-headed orders may need enabling laws by Congress.  The Executive Orders of earlier Presidents may also need review.  Mind you, Executive Orders can be a proper exercise of presidential management of the Executive Branch of the government, but they should not affect people outside of the Executive Branch.
• Shut down government-run service organizations.  Their work belongs in the private sector.
• Shut down many of the government agencies which number so many that the government cannot say how many exist and which have the authority to issue regulations for which purposes.  These agencies are often performing no valid function of government, are poorly managed, have overlapping authorities, or are obsolete.

If Trump tackles the job that needs doing, he will need all the energy he has over the next four years. I hope he does take on these tasks and works effectively with Congress to get it largely done.  He will also need to communicate well with the American People about what he is doing and why.  It is critically important that the U.S. economy return to at least its longtime average growth rate of 3%.  It should not be hard to enjoy long-term real growth of 4% actually if the government would only get out of the way.  The compound growth of a healthy economy over 40 years will raise the American standard of living vastly more than will any growth restrictive government regulations, laws, or taxes. Americans badly need the hope, change, and opportunities of a reduced government sector and a rich and robust private sector.

Leaving High Taxes and Big Government Behind

This post is based on some very useful references provided in a comment to my prior post on the Cato Institute evaluation of the freedom in the 50 States 2016.

Between 1992 and 2014, the IRS tracked the migration of people and their AGI on their tax forms. The net results of these migrations are indicated in this map where red is a loss of income due to net migration and green is an income gain.

It is interesting to note that of the 8 least free states by the 2016 report of Cato Institute on Freedom in the 50 States of my last post, the following 7 states are either red or light red in this income migration map, indicating a loss of income:

New York
California
New Jersey
Maryland
Connecticut
Illinois
Rhode Island

Out migration from California tends to be strong to Arizona, Nevada, Washington, and Oregon.  All of these states are more free than California and the least free is Oregon, which perhaps explains why its income increased the least of these four states.

New Hampshire, the freest state, had a small increase in income due to migration. Oklahoma and Alaska were #3 and #2, respectively, and both have risen in recent years in freedom, so their newly deserved reputations were not yet established in many of the years 1992 - 2014.  Indiana at #4 has been more stable in its freedom and clearly has performed much better in minimizing losses than its neighboring states of Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio in this time period.  Indiana's weakest ranking of #26 was in fiscal policy which includes taxes and that is a particularly strong factor on the out-migration of income.  Tennessee, Idaho, Florida, and Arizona of the 10 most free states are also all green in this income migration map above.  #5 South Dakota is white, or income neutral, and #9 Iowa is pink.

Overall, the freer states were the Rocky Mountain states, the Great Plain states from Oklahoma north, and the Southeast with the exception of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas.  There are no red states in these areas.  Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas are pink, but three of these states are in the #16 - #25 grouping for freedom.  Missouri is further hurt by not being a Right to Work state.

Here is another interesting map from Peter J. Nelson of the Center of the American Experiment entitled Minnesotans on the Move to Lower Tax States 2016:

In the map, the bluer the color the greater the loss of taxpayers earning more than $200K a year.  We also find that most of the low freedom states have higher losses than do high freedom states.  All of the 9 states with gains equal or greater than 1.00% are in the top twenty most free states by the Cato Institute ranking.  Tax policy is under the Fiscal Policy ranking and in this area South Carolina is ranked #23, Nevada is #25, and Wyoming is #21, so there is a stronger correlation with the overall freedom ranking than there is with the Fiscal Policy ranking subset of freedoms for these high income in-migration states.  Some of these high in-flux states do have very high Fiscal Policy rankings, however, with New Hampshire, Tennessee, Florida, Montana, and Idaho having Fiscal Policy rankings from #1 to #8.  So general freedom may be more important for a subset of the wealthier migrators and tax policy alone may be the most important factor for another subset of these wealthier migrators.

Overall, I would judge it likely that income migration is affected strongly by tax policy, but it is also affected strongly by a desire for freedom in general.  Different people have different weightings on these aspects of freedom in their personal set of values.  Good government seeks to provide everyone with the freedoms their individual rights entitle them to.  When a state government offers a better service to freedom, rational and productive people will come to that state. Good things happen to states and the local communities when more rational and productive people choose to live there.

Impeaching the Crooked Obama IRS Head

Thanks primarily to government e-mails and information obtained by Judicial Watch, House Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) introduced a resolution this week to impeach the IRS commissioner for "high crimes and misdemeanors."  IRS Commissioner Koskinen has obstructed justice while protecting the criminal actions of Lois Lerner, whom the Obama Justice Department has just refused to prosecute even as the investigation into her and other IRS managers' activities is still underway.  

Representative Chaffetz has based his call for impeachment of the IRS Commissioner on these points:


• He failed to comply with a subpoena resulting in destruction of key evidence. Commissioner Koskinen failed to locate and preserve IRS records in accordance with a congressional subpoena and an internal preservation order. The IRS erased 422 backup tapes containing as many as 24,000 of Lois Lerner's emails - key pieces of evidence that were destroyed on Koskinen's watch.

• He failed to testify truthfully and provided false and misleading information. Commissioner Koskinen testified the IRS turned over all emails relevant to the congressional investigation, including all of Ms. Lerner's emails. When the agency determined Ms. Lerner's emails were missing, Commissioner Koskinen testified the emails were unrecoverable. These statements were false.

• He failed to notify Congress that key evidence was missing. The IRS knew Lois Lerner's emails were missing in February 2014. In fact, they were not missing; the IRS destroyed the emails on March 4, 2014. The IRS did not notify Congress the emails were missing until June 2014 - four months later, and well after the White House and the Treasury Department were notified. 

Meanwhile, Obama claims that there is not a smidgen of evidence of wrong-doing in his IRS or his Department of Justice.

All-Controlling Governments Are Identity Theft Accomplices

When governments take on the task of micromanaging our lives, they acquire massive records on the personal information of individuals and their interactions with others.  This information is needed to perform the micromanaging.  It is needed to exercise control of those ruled by the Ruling Class.  It is acquired with the force of law because the Ruling Class is curious.  It is acquired so the Ruling Class can construct still more arguments to control still more aspects of the lives of those ruled.  It is highly useful as a means of enrichment through investments and bribes using insider information for the Ruling Class as well.

Such Big Governments, having their hands in a mind-boggling number of affairs, are massively unfocused.  The People are necessarily uninformed and baffled voters.  The Ruling Class itself is poorly informed about most of the activities of the government and certainly is massively ignorant about the effects of governmental policy.  The All-Controlling Governments are characterized by mismanagement and a core incompetence.  Among the many consequences of this incompetence is the demonstrated inability of All-Controlling Governments to protect the massive information on the People from abusive uses and from identity thieves.  This inability to protect that information or to use it to persecute the opponents of All-Controlling Government is an under-appreciated argument against the Big Government model of rule.

Now that government can manipulate massive databases of private and personal information on individuals, the protection of this data from identity thieves, blackmailers, unethical commercial operations, and enemy governments is a critical responsibility of any government that claims, however falsely, that it has an interest in the welfare of the People.  The federal government has long known that its protections of such data are grossly inadequate.  It has done irresponsibly little to provide improved protections.  Indeed, with the recent creation of the ObamaCare health insurance exchanges it hugely increased the medical and financial data on Americans.  These ObamaCare exchanges are well-known to have an incredibly cavalier concern for data security.  The massive medical computer records required by ObamaCare are another private information leak.

Americans are forced to provide almost innumerable government agencies and operations with highly personal data about themselves.  Government agencies collect such data from employers, medical providers, financial institutions, other businesses, or by surveillance of our telephone and Internet exchanges with one another.  If one operates a business that does government contract work or serves as a sub-contractor to companies that are government contractors, still more data is collected on individuals.

Let us examine some of the evidence of irresponsibly inadequate protection of our personal data, as well as evidence that the government really does not care very much about protecting that data:

Between January 2003 and June 2006, 490 IRS laptops were stolen.  Many were stolen from the homes or vehicles of IRS employees, but 111 were stolen from IRS facilities.  The IRS has no idea what individual or company financial information or what social security numbers and birth dates were made available to criminals or enemy governments.  An inspection of a sample of as-yet not stolen IRS computers revealed that sensitive data was not encrypted as required and that the computers had copious data on taxpayers and IRS employees on them.  Many of the computers with unencrypted data had inadequate passwords or easy means to by-pass the password requirement.

In 2012, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration told a Senate panel that there were 1.8 million instances of tax returns filed with the IRS using stolen identities.  Investigators estimated that more than $5 billion in refund payments may have gone to identity thieves.  Another audit concluded that the IRS was detecting far fewer fraudulent returns than occurred.  The IRS did detect 940,000 fraudulent tax returns in 2011 for $6.5 billion in returns, but the audit suggested there were maybe another 1.5 million undetected fraudulent returns.  It is especially hard for the IRS to detect returns using the identity of dead people or children.  So, the dead file tax returns as well as cast votes!  The IRS delivered 2,137 tax refunds totaling  $3.3 million to one address in Lansing, Michigan.  Treasury investigators believed that nearly 24,000 fraudulent tax returns with Detroit addresses totaled $74 million.  More than 500 returns were filed from three Florida addresses for more than $3 million in refunds.  The IRS deposited 590 refunds totaling $900,000 into one bank account.  In 2013, it estimated that it paid out $5.8 billion in fraudulent refunds and credits.  Most of this, the IRS says is going to organized crime syndicates.

If you are a victim of one of the fraudulent tax returns, it is a nightmare to get things straightened out with the IRS.  A check-up on the theft reporting of 17 taxpayers was found to generate 58 separate case files because the taxpayer was shunted between so many IRS employees, each time having to prove his identity.  When a tax accountant's computer was stolen and she notified the IRS to be on the lookout for fraudulent returns on her clients, the IRS said each client would have to file a separate theft report.  When a client tried to do so, she was told she could not until she was a victim.  She later became a victim.

The IRS does not just do a poor job of detecting fraudulent tax returns, it provides the criminals with the identity information they need to make convincing fraudulent returns.  In May 2015, the IRS announced that a Russian organized crime syndicate had stolen the prior tax returns of 104,000 taxpayers from the IRS website Get Transcript feature.  The information they obtained can be used to make fraudulent tax returns appear to be much more authentic than they would otherwise be.  The IRS claims that information has only been used to file 15,000 false returns so far for a total of about $50 million.  However, the information stolen can be used for false returns in future years and to take out all sorts of loans on individual American's credit.  Russian hackers have also taken information from the White House and State Department websites.  They also recently listened in on sanctions discussions between the US and a foreign government.

The IRS is being sued by a company in California which stores massive medical records under HIPAA protection because 15 IRS agents stole 60 million medical records on about 10 million individuals in March 2011.  The IRS agents were in the building under a warrant to search only for tax information relevant to a former employee of the company.  They were told the medical records had nothing to do with the warrant authorization and they insisted in taking the unrelated medical records anyway, even threatening to use force to take them.  Among the medical records were those for every judge and employee of the California court system, though most of the records were for people outside of California.  The records included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sex and drug treatments, and much more very personal information.  Given the IRS penchant for attacking Republicans and Tea Party persons, such a stolen trove of medical records could be used for very nefarious purposes, including blackmail.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had 4.2 million personnel records of government employees stolen in one event this year.  Then soon after, we were told that hackers had acquired Social Security numbers for 21.5 million people primarily from people on whom background checks had been performed.  19.7 background investigation applications and 1.8 million non-applicants were involved.  In addition, 1.1 million fingerprints were taken.

Big Government, All-Controlling Government needs, wants, and acquires massive databases of personal data on the People.  But, it has little regard for the privacy of the People, little competence to protect that privacy, and it is all too often willing to abuse the People using that private information.  This is an important reason to oppose Big Government, however many other critical reasons there are for opposing it.

Give Up Your Life Day

Well, it is once again Tax Day and once again the federal government and most state governments have confiscated many of the productive hours of each of our individual lives.  The more hours you chose to work and the more your productivity was recognized by others in trade, the more progressively the hours of your life were stolen from you.  The politicians and bureaucrats used this ill-gotten plunder to buy votes, to live the good life themselves, and to relish their success as our overlords.

Not content with just claiming many of the productive hours of our lives, this is the first year in which the claim that the government owns our minds and bodies generally has appeared on the tax forms.  See Line 61 below:

By virtue of government ownership of every American's body and mind, it claims the right to dictate how every individual will maintain their property in trust for the government, unless that individual pays tribute to the Mongol Horde in order to maintain a pretense of self-ownership.  Of course, self-ownership should mean the payment of tribute was not necessary.  So, there really is no way to maintain the exercise of one's sovereign right to self-ownership within the borders of the United States.  All payment of the tribute or the purchase of ObamaCare approved health insurance does is to cede one's right to self-ownership.  The government claims you must cede self-ownership one way of the other.

Did you know that 8 out of 10 tax filers in 2013 received a tax refund?  Did you know that in 2012 the typical tax filer received a tax refund of about $3,000?  Clearly this happens because the government provides tax tables to employers that demand over-withholding from income and few people adjust their allowances to eliminate this severe over-withholding.  It is clear that this does two things the wily government plunderers love:

• The government gets a large interest-free loan from most taxpayers.
• Most taxpayers are distracted by their refunds from the larger sum of money plucked from their hides.

Interestingly, if the taxpayer in any year should happen to owe the government $1000 or more and that sum is more than 10% of the total tax owed, the government demands an interest payment of 1.995%!  This is not a two-way, mutually respectful relationship.  It is clear that the government is the master and the taxpayer is the servant!

You might think you might just ignore the tyrannical Line 61 claim of government ownership of your body and mind, but the government will take the tribute out of your tax refund, if you have one.  I have heard it said that if you arrange to have no tax refund, unlike 80% or more of the filers, then the government cannot force you to pay the tribute, which they call a shared responsibility payment in the IRS 1040 Instruction publication.  But, the 1040 Form lumps it under the heading of Other Taxes, consistent with Chief Justice John Roberts absurd rationale for declaring ObamaCare a tax, even after it had been insisted over and over during the passage of ObamaCare that it was not at all a tax on the Middle Class.  ObamaCare was passed on the basis of innumerable lies.  This phrase "Shared Responsibility Payment" is most explicitly collectivist and makes it very clear that at most each individual owns only some portion of his own life and mind and body.  That portion is always subject to being reduced so long as the law that reduces the number of shares the individual holds in his own life is accompanied by a tax.  This is the Chief Justice John Roberts ruling.  The presence of a tax in a law allows the law to deprive the individual of any individual right, except insofar as that right is most explicitly spelled out in the Amendments to the Constitution and the courts choose to recognize that right in a reasonably broad manner.

Let us suppose you decide to ignore the abhorrent Line 61 and you have no tax refund coming or it is very small. You might think you are home free. Not necessarily. The IRS has a Catch-22 for almost anything. They may not be able to answer your phoned in question or if they do answer it, you may be more likely to be given the wrong answer than the right one and you will be 100% responsible for "your" error.  There is no sharing of responsibility in this.  But, there are a people in the IRS who are quite cunning and out to get you. So, how do they get you in this case? Did you know that the IRS may impose a penalty of $5,000 on top of any other penalties for what they deem a frivolous return? See page 92 of the Form 1040 Instructions:

"A frivolous return is one that does not contain information needed to figure the correct tax  or shows a substantially incorrect tax because you take a frivolous position or desire to delay or interfere with the tax laws.  This includes altering or striking out the preprinted language above the space where you sign." 

The IRS will brook no challenge to its role as Master.  It will not allow you the "right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" on your tax form filings.  The First Amendment is of no concern to the IRS, though we might think the IRS was a part of the Government.  But then we have all too clearly seen how this IRS does not believe in freedom of speech at all, with its vendetta against Tea Party and Constitution Education organizations.  The IRS makes it very clear that it is an enemy of the Constitution!  It is also very clear that the IRS and the Obama Regime are explicitly enemies of all of our individual rights, including the most fundamental right of all, self-ownership!

A Clearly Rational Federal Court Decision Against the IRS Rule to Offer Subsidies on Federal ObamaCare Exchanges

Among the cases challenging the IRS rule that subsidies for individuals and tax penalties for non-complying individuals and companies would be administered in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, is the case brought by Scott Pruitt, the Attorney General of the state of Oklahoma.  Oklahoma and 35 other states did not choose to establish PPACA or ObamaCare exchanges, as the PPACA law tried to get them to do by taxing every American, but only allowing individual subsidies in those states establishing an ObamaCare exchange.  Non-complying states were to be penalized with taxes and the loss of any partial return of that tax money in the form of subsidies.  That this was the intent was very clear to those who followed the progress of the PPACA legislation through Congress.

Of course, it was also very clear that PPACA was a revenue bill which violated the constitutional requirement that it originate in the House of Representatives.  It is further clear that the only justification for the collectivist claim that the collective gets to dictate how every American maintains his or her body's and mind's health is based on a claim of collectivist ownership of everyone's mind and body.  This is a very clear and certain violation of the American Principle of a very limited government dedicated only to the protection of the equal, sovereign right of each and every individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  I for one am exceedingly furious that the government considers me its slave by depriving me of self-ownership and the right to pursue my own happiness.

United States District Judge Ronald A. White of the Eastern District of Oklahoma ruled on 30 September 2014 that "the IRS Rule is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion or otherwise not in accordance with law, pursuant to 5 U.S.C. [paragraph] 706(2)(A), in excess of statutory jurisdiction, authority, or limitations, or short of statutory right, pursuant to 5 U.S.C. [paragraph] 706(2)(C), or otherwise is an invalid implementation of the ACA, and is hereby vacated."

Judge Ronald A. White provided a very rational decision, which is very much appreciated in light of the three judge panel in King v. Burwell who decided that they would not help the plaintiff destroy the PPACA by ruling in accordance with the language of the law.  No, instead they decided on the basis of how they claimed Congress intended the law to work while not considering the actual history even of constraints on Congress in forcing the states to comply with handing control over health care insurance to the federal government.  Neither did they consider the actual discussions and trades within Congress needed to acquire even sufficient Democrat votes to pass the bill.  Similarly, the dissenting judge on the three judge panel that vacated the ObamaCare subsidies and tax penalties in Halbig v. Burwell for the District of Columbia Court of Appeals exercised a similar flight of fancy in interpreting the PPACA.

The Honorable Ronald A. White read the bill as written and said that if Congress had intended the bill to operate otherwise, it would have written the bill differently.  What is more, if Congress decides that the application of the law as written is not what it wants, then Congress can readily pass legislation to change the law.  This is exactly the way a rational person would expect laws to be applied.  Neither the IRS nor the federal courts are the legislative body and neither has the constitutional power to enact or to change laws.  How the 3-judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court that decided the King v. Burwell case could have decided that the law was ambiguous is incredible.  What is more, if it were ambiguous, then it is up to Congress, not the IRS, to eliminate any such ambiguity.  Ridiculous consequences would result from any other principle and the People would lose all power to control any government operating as the 4th Circuit Court ruled government should work.

Unfortunately, the entire District of Columbia Circuit Court decided to rule on Halbig v. Burwell and the Democrat appointed judges are now in the majority on that Circuit Court.  They will hear the case in December.  What is more, the decision by the Honorable Ronald A. White will be appealed to the entire 10th Circuit Court on which 7 of the 12 judges were appointed by Democrats.  The case of Indiana v. IRS is also yet to be decided.  Given the otherworldly ability of Democrat-appointed judges to misinterpret clear English and to ignore the history of the passage of this law, the People of the United States may not be relieved of the ObamaCare tyranny.

But, the state of Oklahoma, Governor Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma, and the Honorable Ronald A. White of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma have all proved themselves Heroes for in their efforts to preserve the rights of the individual in this desperate fight to protect self-ownership against the brutal onslaught of ObamaCare.

When an American Multinational Company Moves Its Headquarters Abroad It Is Patriotic

Unlike Obama, I do not measure patriotism in terms of the amount of taxes paid to and the amount of paperwork prepared for an over-weaning government that uses its revenues and its ever mounting debt to suppress our individual rights.  No, I look at the issue of American multinational companies moving their domicile to other nations with lower internal taxes and which do not tax earnings in the U.S. as a very real act of patriotism. This is fully consistent with the American Principle of limited government whose only purpose is the protection of our equal, sovereign individual rights.  It is very patriotic to punish a malfeasant big government with a decrease in tax revenues.  The lower its revenues, the less mischief it can perform.  This includes a reduction in its anti-business agenda.

In most cases, changing a company's domicile does not actually mean it moves its headquarters.  This is usually very like the case in which hundreds of thousands of U.S. companies are incorporated in the state of Delaware, but have their actual headquarters in a different state.  The location of domicile is chosen for tax and legal reasons and does not imply that any or most of a company's activities will be at the location of domicile.

The federal tax rate on U.S. corporations is 35% and it applies that highest in the developed world rate to all profits made in the U.S. and to any profits a U.S. multinational corporation makes abroad.  So a U.S. multinational corporation pays the nation in which its profit is made the lower tax they levy on corporate taxes.  Then if the U.S. corporation decides to bring that profit back to the U.S. to invest it here in R&D, new facilities, new hires, or new manufacturing operations, the corporation has to pay the difference between the rate charged by the nation in which the profit was made and the higher U.S. tax rate of 35%.  This drastically reduces the amount of profits earned abroad which are brought back to the U.S.  This plays a big role in slowing down the growth of the U.S. economy, which means it slows down the growth in our standard of living.

U.S. multinational companies which do not bring back their profits from abroad also greatly reduce the burden of producing the tons of paperwork in the form of reports demanded by the IRS.  This is a very great reduction of expenses and consequently a boost to profits earned abroad relative to those earned in the uphill battle at home.

To be sure, U.S. corporations do not generally pay the full 35% tax rate on profits earned in the U.S.  There are many exemptions, tax credits, and deductions, though these come at the expense of the added paperwork to claim them.  Nonetheless, the average percentage paid on profits by American companies is about 30%, while their rivals headquartered in other countries pay an average of about 23% on their profits.  Consequently, American companies are paying about 30% more taxes on their profits than are foreign companies.  This is a very sizable competitive disadvantage.

The Burger King acquisition of Tim Horton's, a Canadian company, is a case given much attention in the news lately.  Moving the Burger King domicile to Canada, a nation with more economic freedom than the sorry present U.S., reduces its corporate income tax rate to 15%!  Canada will only tax the profit made in Canada and will not tax Burger King on its profits made in the U.S. or in any of the other many nations it operates in around the world.  This will actually allow Burger King to bring the profits it has made in those many nations back to the U.S. for investment here, because the U.S. government can no longer tax these profits made by a Canadian company.

It is essential that every American multinational company put as much pressure on the far too voracious American government to reduce its taxes on productive work and to reduce its power to coerce people in violation of their rights to earn a living and to generally pursue their happiness.  A great and patriotic way to do this is to move their headquarters abroad.  If that has the eventual effect of forcing the far too big and nasty federal government to lower its tax rates and to decrease its incredible paperwork burden, it will do much to allow Americans a future with a decent increase in our standard of living coupled with a much improved environment of economic freedoms.

Federal Judge Rules Suit Against ObamaCare May Proceed

One of the many ways the Obama Regime is violating its Signature Law is by claiming that the IRS can impose penalty taxes on businesses and individuals in the 34 states that did not set up the State Healthcare Insurance Exchanges that the ill-designated Affordable Care Act tried to encourage them to do.  The federal government did not have the power to order the states to set these exchanges up and many Democrats who voted for the law made it clear they would not vote for it if their state was required to set up such an exchange.

The intrepid Competitive Enterprise Institute is assisting in a case, Halbig v. Sebelius, which is challenging the legality of the IRS and Obama Regime attempt to impose mandates on businesses and individuals in those states that refused to go along with this highly unpopular law.  A federal judge ruled on Tuesday, 22 October, that this lawsuit may proceed and he will rule on it by 15 February 2014.

The law itself makes it very clear that in the federal exchanges set up in the non-participating states that businesses cannot be taxed for not providing healthcare insurance such as is mandated by the government in the state-run exchange states.  Individuals cannot be forced to buy health insurance in the same way either.  Subsidies also are not authorized in the law for lower income people under the non-state run health insurance exchanges.  Excluding the exchanges in the 34 states that did not set up the ObamaCare state exchanges is certain to kill ObamaCare in short order.  With the people of 34 states only seeing higher taxes because of ObamaCare and getting no benefits at all, it is not believable that the rebellion against this tyrannical law will not amplify greatly.

Of course, the federal courts may simply rewrite the law as the Supreme Court did in NFIB v. Sibelius when Chief Justice John Roberts so feared opposing Obama that he claimed a broad power to tax for purposes not enumerated in the Constitution was the basis for penalty taxes in the ACA.  He did this despite the many, many Democrat Socialist claims when they created the law and voted for it that it was not a tax.  So, the weak-kneed federal courts may fail to protect our individual rights once again.  But then again, maybe this time the federal court will stand on principle and the letter of the law.  Perhaps the fact that Obama has in so many ways violated the letter of the law is taking a legal toll on the patience of the courts.  Perhaps the fiasco of it implementation and rising anger among the People will give the courts some courage.  We shall see by 15 February 2014.

Thank you Competitive Enterprise Institute and Sam Kazman, its general counsel, and their allies!

Additional Child Tax Credit for Tax Refunds for Children in Mexico

An Indiana TV station has a most interesting story on the foolish behavior of the federal government and the IRS in particular.  It has revealed that illegal aliens are filing federal tax returns claiming children as dependents living in the U.S., who are actually in Mexico.  According to tax returns, in one trailer in southern Indiana there are supposed to be four illegal male aliens living there with 20 children, most of them claimed to be nieces and nephews.  The only child actually living there, is one daughter of the only illegal alien living there.  Numerous such IRS falsified filings are resulting in tax refunds of $12,000 or more.  The annual cost to the taxpayer is more than $4 billion and the IRS is doing nothing about it.  The IRS agents are clearly too busy trying to keep non-Progressive Elitist groups from tax-exempt status and trying to take over our medical records and control of our health insurance to take possession of our very bodies.

ObamaCare Reduces Employee Hours at Colleges

Sometimes Justice pays a visit to those who have most assiduously attempted to evade it.

Obama and his Collectivist Party have had extremely high support at our colleges and universities.  Recent college graduates, including many who cannot find jobs, voted for him overwhelmingly not just in the 2008 election, but in the 2012 election when any sane person would have known better.  The faculty and support staff of most colleges and universities have been even more fanatical supporters of the socialist president and the Democrat Socialist Party.  Most of them eagerly supported ObamaCare, the law no one read and most of which was subsequently written in reality by bureaucrats, who are still busy writing it.

The Justice is that most colleges are now under some financial pressure and finding it hard to allow their operational costs to exceed the inflation rate several times over for the first time in decades.  Many, in their mad quest to add more and more administrative personnel, had been scrimping on faculty for a long time.  In 1975, full time non-tenure track faculty and part-time adjunct teaching staff were 43% of the faculty at U.S. colleges.  In 2009, they had grown to 69% of the faculty.  Tenured and tenured track faculty have shrunk dramatically, which supposedly would mean that teaching skills have decreased as well.

It now turns out that ObamaCare is causing numerous colleges to reduce the hours of their long-growing adjunct professors to fewer than 30 hours a week so that they will not have to pay the penalty tax for not providing them with health insurance.  See the Wall St. Journal of 19-20 January 2013 for more on this.  They most certainly do not want to actually provide them with health insurance since the ObamaCare insurance requirements are causing the cost of health insurance premiums to skyrocket.  The worst of the cost increases are just about to land hard on employers everywhere.

Of course colleges are not just planning to reduce the hours of adjunct professors.  They plan to reduce the hours of many on their support and administrative staffs also.  Just as restaurant chains and retail chains are reducing the number of hours of their employees to less than 30 hours a week, so are many colleges planning to make such reductions.  In the ObamaCollectivistNation, fewer and fewer people will have full-time jobs.  It was really the same in the Soviet Union, where 12 people commonly stood around and watched as one or two people did some work.  Of course, there they pretended they all had part-time jobs, but they were paid in accordance with the work they did not do.

A Mr. Balla, an adjunct professor at Stark College in North Canton, Ohio, said after receiving a letter informing him of his reduced hours:

I think it goes against the spirit of the law.  In education, we're working for the public good, we are public employees at a public institution; we should be the first ones to uphold the law, to set the example.

 He says he will not be able to afford ObamaCare insurance on his own.  Poor special person!  Perhaps he should just suck it up and find a job in the private sector that he looks down his nose at and learns how hard it is to earn a living while carrying all the entitlees  and "public" employees on your back and obeying the flurry of unreadable and unintelligible regulations and the many irrational mandates of the local, state, and federal governments.  It really irks me that these people claim to be serving the "public" when they are so clearly serving themselves as privileged rulers over the brutes they think populate the private sector.  This guy claims his right to the Cadillac ObamaCare insurance provided by the taxpayer even as millions of private sector workers have their employment hours reduced because of his lovely ObamaCare tyranny.  He claims his special privilege as a worker for the public good even as tax revenues from the many with fewer hours worked in the private sector must go down.  But, our saintly educator must get his privileged health insurance despite any such inconvenient reality.  The Federal Reserve will surely just print the additional needed money and give it to the colleges.

The colleges have long failed to serve us well.  They are bastions opposed to the sovereign individual rights of each of us.  They have long favored collectivism and opposed the American Principle of limited government with powers so restricted that it could not violate individual rights.  Their man Obama just reiterated his allegiance to collectivism and his real opposition to our individual rights in his Second Inaugural Address.

What is more, they do not even do a decent job of preparing their students for work in the private sector.  They are turning out droves of young people too privileged to actually be willing to work hard.  Their student product is ignorant of civics and U.S. history, of economics, of business reality, of the climate, of fossil fuels and their use, of writing skills, of logic and the construction of rational thought, and of science.  Most fallaciously believe they are qualified to choose the values by which others shall be forced to live their lives and able to choose politicians who will micromanage our incompetent lives in the private sector.  They are so full of themselves and so very hollow in reality.  Just like our Mr. Balla.

Well, their support for ObamaCare is about to result in their shooting themselves in the foot.  At least unless the efforts of such college groups as the American Association of Community Colleges to get the IRS to write the rules to exclude colleges from ObamaCare's requirements works.  The Obama regime has a tremendous propensity for writing administrative rules that exclude their biggest supporters from the rule of law.  We have already seen them write massive exceptions for unions and for companies from Nancy Pelosi's district.

Speaking of unions, more and more of college adjunct professors are already in unions.  About 37% of part-time non-tenured faculty are in unions already.  The colleges are fearing that putting these people on fewer hours will cause even more of them to join unions.  It is very funny that unions and their Collectivist Party are nearly universally supported on college campuses,  until unions approach their lower paid faculty and threaten to make the colleges pay them more money.  Colleges are rather the ultimate joke when it comes to hypocrisy.  How ironic that the ObamaCare that they cannot afford will push more of their lower paid faculty into unions that will demand higher pay they cannot afford.  Yet the justice come home to roost upon these bastions of irrationality is really quite sweet.

Slothful IRS Reduces Consequences of Exceeding Debt Limit

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has told us that the government has a few tricks it can use so that even though the government debt exceeds the debt limit, the government will not have to shut down until early August.  One major reason is not discussed.

The IRS is running late this year on refunding excess taxes paid.  Part of the reason for this is that Congress and Obama did not manage to work out an agreement and sign it into law to prevent a drastic raise in taxes until 17 December of 2010.  In addition to changes that affected future payroll withholdings, some changes required retroactive changes to 2010 tax forms, which delayed the start of filing for many people.  Among these,

• Taxpayers were allowed to continue choosing to either deduct state income taxes or the state sales tax.  This affected the 50 million filers who itemize deductions.
• A change was made in who was affected by the Alternative Minimum Tax or AMT, which also affected those who itemize deductions.
• Teachers who claim the $250 deduction for money spent on classroom supplies which had been scheduled to expire.
• Qualified college expenses could allow a deduction of up to $4,000 which had been scheduled to expire.

Consequently, the IRS was going to be jammed more than usual due to these late changes.  There is, however, another problem the IRS has on top of this one.

The first Democrat-controlled Congress of four years ago decided that the IRS should provide loans to first-time home buyers at no interest.  A million home buyers took advantage of this program, so that IRS computers are taking in monthly mortgage payments in addition to handling the usual business payroll tax deposits and trying to get the many refunds out to taxpayers.  The IRS is running seriously behind.  This is the normal problem of poor central planning that we have come to understand is central to big government.

But, government has also earned our cynicism.  Could it be that this is also a good excuse for getting refunds, which averaged $2,324 in 2007, back to taxpayers late?  During the period between now and August, the longer it takes for the IRS to refund excess tax payments, the easier it will be to avoid the consequences of having exceeded the debt limit.  The delays on many tax refunds are expected to be 4 months.  Four months from 18 April will be 18 August.  This is very convenient for our overspending government.  Is it possible the IRS and its tax-dodging leader, the Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, are taking advantage to the fullest of such excuses?  This would help to allow the administration to continue its free-spending ways unabated until August.

The IRS Ganders and Gooses

We Americans each have one great treasure in common.  We each have an equal, sovereign individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  We also have two extremely important documents in our shared American history.  The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.  The Declaration of Independence declares that we each have an equal, sovereign individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It is simply recognizing that right, not granting it.  It also notes that government is legitimate only to the extent that it serves the sole purpose of protecting and preserving the individual rights of the People.  It declares any government that tramples those rights to be a tyranny which men must overthrow.  Our second great shared American document, the Constitution, provides for a very limited federal government whose purpose was limited to preserving the individual rights of the People by providing for their defense and very limited and carefully enumerated other powers for their general welfare.  Our present government has largely ignored these governing documents.

Among many other problems, it fundamentally does not believe that we have the individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It taxes us to a much greater extent than that needed to provide for our defense, which is only 19% of the 2010 federal budget.  Such other of its legitimate functions do not even constitute a sufficient part of the pie chart of government outlays to be separated out from the 38% covering all other activities and shown in the pie chart below:

The incredible expansion of government has led to a necessary problem that we are no longer seen as individuals with equal rights.  To have equal rights, the scope of government must be very small.  As that scope grows, the government becomes the decider on who gets the benefits of the exercise of each of those powers.  If the primary function of government is to provide for the national defense, we all benefit equally with increased security for our lives.  But when the governmental powers include crop subsidies, ethanol mandates, carbon dioxide emissions policies, export loan guarantees, home mortgage guarantees, student loans for college, medical care regulations, alternative energy subsidies, electrical grid improvements, income taxes, death taxes, dividend and interest taxes, capital gains taxes, sales taxes, education tax credits, mortgage interest deductions, sulfur dioxide emissions regulations, railroad regulations, power plant regulations, airline regulations, banking regulations, insurance regulations, and an almost infinite number of other exercised powers picking beneficiaries and losers, we are not recognized as equal.  With this expansive vision of government we cannot be treated equally.  It is impossible.  Yet, the socialists commonly claim that they want government to exercise a new power in order to make us more equal.  The opposite must be the effect, at least with regard to our rights, if not always with regard to our income.

So, we have a society of gooses and ganders.  Some of us are ganders and most of us are gooses.  The ganders goose the gooses.  This was the way of life throughout human history until the American Founders tried to set up the government of the United States of America with a more enlightened vision.  In the early days of the republic, we fell short of the vision due to slavery and perhaps too great a role for religion.  In the past century, we have lost sight of this vision due to the obscuring vision of the Progressives who see the People as being in conflict with one another for material goods and services, which they value more than their sovereign, equal individual rights.  We too often have a materialistic viewpoint heavily laden with envy and jealousy supplanting a spiritual recognition of the equal right of every American to choose his own values and then to manage his own life in accordance with his chosen values.  The socialist vision is of two children fighting over a couple of toys with a parent, the ruler, to moderate the fight, while the American vision was of adults taking on the joys and responsibilities of living their own lives in a harmonious society of voluntary associations.

The IRS has long had the reputation of a piranha, for its role in tax collection.  This is an American federal government agency that according to a list compiled by Richard W. Rahn, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, does the following:

• Unnecessarily strikes fear into the hearts of tens of millions of your fellow citizens, causing such anguish and despair that some are driven to suicide each year.
• Requires citizens to know 10 million words of rules and regulations because the failure to do so may result in draconian fines and even jail, while at the same time no one in the agency has a full understanding of all the rules and regulations it requires others to know.
• Routinely ignores the constitutional protections against self-incrimination and the right to the presumption of innocence.
• Seizes the assets of citizens without obtaining court judgments.
• Penalizes marriage.
• Discriminates against many of the nation's most productive citizens.
• Destroys incentives to work, save and invest, and undermines job creation.
• Routinely protects agency personnel who have engaged in citizen intimidation, misrepresentation or worse.

But, it also decides in other ways, which of us are ganders and which are gooses to be goosed.  Consider the case of the gander Tim Geithner, now Secretary of the Treasury, which manages the IRS.  In 2006, he was audited by the IRS, and they examined his tax records for 2003 and 2004.  They found that he had not paid his Social Security and Medicare taxes which were not paid by his employer at the time, the IMF.  They withheld his income taxes, but for some reason they did not pay the Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes.  The IMF did send out frequent reminders that their employees needed to be sure to pay these taxes themselves.  The IRS audit found that Tim Geithner needed to pay $17,230 in back taxes and interest.  What?  No tax penalty?  What's this?  If you or I paid taxes owed late, we would be hit with tax penalties that would make the interest look puny in comparison!  But not Tim Geithner.  No, he is a goose.

While he was vetted for the nomination by Obama to become the Treasury Secretary, it was discovered by the vetters that he had also not paid his Social Security and Medicare taxes for the years 2001 and 2002.  He and his tax expert had decided he did not need to pay them even after the results of the 2006 audit, because the statute of limitations meant he had gotten away with not paying them.  But, to ease his conformation by Congress, he then paid $25,970 of taxes and interest, but no penalty.

The vetters also found he had charged expenses for overnight camps for a child as dependent care tax deductions, though these are not allowed.  He had taken an early withdrawal from a retirement plan, a small business deduction, a charitable deduction, and a utility cost deduction on post 2004 returns which were not allowed.  He had also had an immigrant housekeeper whose papers expired while working for him.  So, he owed $4,334 of additional taxes and $1,232 of interest.  Still, he paid no tax penalties!

We have all seen the many TV ads for the services of companies specializing in getting your past unpaid taxes paid for a small fraction of the amount owed.  They often boast of the many employees they have who used to work for the IRS.  Apparently, they call up an old buddy still with the IRS and say, "Hey, Wesley, this is your old buddy Mouch!  I've got a client who needs a bit of help with paying $20,000 of overdue taxes.  They are finding it a bit hard to pay so much money.  I want to ask you to give me a little favor and agree not to charge them a penalty, or any interest, and just take $0.35 on the dollar of the overdue amount."  "Yeah, thanks old buddy."  "Yes, the money here is good.  When you retire or want to leave the government, I'll hold a position here for you."

Yes, despite the equal protection provision of the Constitution, some of us are more equal than others.  Many of us are gooses and some of us are ganders.  For most of us, the IRS is the beak of the gander and it is a cruel gooser.  I hope you paid all of your taxes, because those tax penalties will kill you.  It does not matter that year after year the IRS owed you money and they never, ever paid you interest on the money they held and used for maybe 9 months on average or more interest-free.  The IRS is the gander, and you are the goose.

Besides, the great socialist leader Obama tells us it is our patriotic duty to pay him our taxes so he can buy the votes of those who like his social welfare entitlement programs and those who like his subsidies for his friends.  He chortles at the Tea Party American protesters who gathered across the country on 15 April and implies they are unpatriotic.  And so the tyrant tramples on our individual rights and calls himself and his largely fascist and Marxist socialist followers American Patriots!

Interesting fact:  By definition, a gander is also a stupid and foolish fellow!  What an inverted society we have where the stupid and foolish fellows rule their intellectual betters.

EPA: Do As I Say, Not As I Do

The EPA is about to issue new standards on lead contamination in commercial buildings.  Recent testing in its Ariel Rios headquarters building showed that dust samples in the building were often much higher in toxic lead content than those allowed in commercial buildings by the new regulations about to be applied.  In one case, a dust sample was 92,500 % higher (925 times higher) than the new standard would allow.  This dust sample was taken from the floor of the new state-of-the-art control center for responding to outbreaks of toxic substances.

The EPA says air samples were not as bad and its employees are safe.  The GSA owns and operates the building and is in charge of cleaning up the contamination.  Claims were made that the contamination was because a Secret Service shooting range is nearby.

This was reported by the Daily Caller and briefly on Fox News.

Can you imagine the fines that the EPA will put on any company with a commercial building with lead limits above the new requirements?  Can you imagine the orders that any company remove its employees and shut down its building if lead levels above the new limits are found?  Can you imagine the many lawsuits that will be aimed at any such company by employees concerned about their future health based upon the new limits to soon be put in place by the EPA?  Yet, the EPA has not sent its people home, because it says they are safe.  But, if they are safe at the EPA with lead levels well above their new limits, then doesn't this imply they will in many cases be safe in commercial buildings with lead contamination levels above the new limits?  Ah, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

Doesn't this remind us of the IRS and Treasury secretary Tim Geithner who will not do his tax returns according to IRS rules.  Geithner paid his back taxes from 2001 up through the time of his nomination to become Treasury Secretary, under which the IRS is managed.  But, he only paid the taxes and interest.  He did not pay any penalties, which are the usual killer.  Penalties for late payments are usually many times greater than the interest for the late payment.  Apparently, Geithner and the EPA are ganders and the rest of us are treated like gooses.

Lisa Jackson, the EPA administrator, will probably earn a large bonus this year.  The citation justifying the bonus will probably say it is because of her excellent work in putting the new, tougher lead restrictions in place and for banning CO2 gas as a pollutant.  Do as I say, not as I do.  I want to see Lisa Jackson walking about with a rebreather attached to her back so she does not emit any CO2 pollutants!  I want to see her that committed to acting as a role model for the things she says she believes in before she forces us to comply to her demands.

ObamaCare and the IRS Thugs

I have been trying to find out what the role of the IRS is in ObamaCare.  It seems that the Democrats, at least those who voted on the bill, have not read it, so they cannot tell us.  Perhaps this is by design.  They do not seem to want us to know what the role of the much feared and much despised IRS will be.

IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman testified to Congress that IRS agents are not going to be auditing taxpayers to verify that they have acceptable health insurance.  He claimed the IRS would not be looking at our health records.  But, he was unclear about the IRS role in collecting the penalties for those who failed the individual mandate requirement for acceptable insurance.  This seems like the classic politicians run-around.

The CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that 46% of Americans who will pay the individual mandate penalty will have incomes under 300% of the poverty line.  Presently, that is $32,500 for an individual and $66,150 for a family of four.  It will be interesting to see what will happen to people's attitudes about ObamaCare and Obama when they have the IRS bullying them.

One idea of how this will work is this:  The individual will attest that he has acceptable health insurance on his tax return.  The IRS will receive something like a 1099 Form from every insurance company offering health insurance.  The IRS will match the insurance company forms to individual tax returns and chase down those who do not have an acceptable match.  In 2014, the penalty for not having a match is 1% of income.  In 2015, the penalty is 2% of income.  In 2016, the penalty is 2.5% or $2,085 per person, whichever is greater.  Note that this process does not involve an audit in the usual sense, so IRS Commissioner Shulman gave Congress and the People the run-around.  His job is just to match and collect a penalty if there is no match.  Since we have to provide him with our bank account information also, it makes it very easy for him to simply transfer the penalty directly from our bank accounts as he sees fit.

Those of us who believe whether we have health insurance or not is none of the government's damn business are going to become very intimate with the IRS.  I joke!!  No one could ever possibly be intimate with the despicable IRS.  Well, I guess sadists do exist.  Hmmm.... yes, of course, many of them work for the IRS.  Unfortunately, we will be their victims and the IRS has been chosen to eat us for lunch.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, unless you are with the IRS.  Yes, some people are more equal than others in the new, changed Obama Nation.  I liked America better.

Good Law Should be Understood and Enforceable by Government

It used to be often remarked that good law must be readily understood by the People.  Perhaps an understated further principle of good law is that it should be readily understood and be practically enforced by the government.  There are other principles of good law, but most of those are covered by our Constitution, so we can summarize them by simply saying Constitutional Law.

At many levels today we have problems with the law being understood by government.  At the very most basic level, it cannot be said that Congress understands the bills it votes on to become law.  First, our Congressmen do not read the bills before they vote on them.  When they do read the bills, they do not understand their implications and effects upon The People in most cases.  In many cases, they rely on government agencies or the courts to give the vague laws meaning.  Finally, many enforcement agencies do not understand the laws either.

The Monday, 26 October 2009 Washington Times has an editorial with an enlightening illustration of how little the government understands the laws or is able to apply them.  In particular, it deals with the tax credit for first time homebuyers of 2008 and 2009.  This case illustrates problems that tax filers had as well, but more egregiously it shows how well the IRS understands the law.

It has been found that the IRS gave the tax credit to 580 taxpayers younger than 18 who could not sign the contracts legally to buy a home.  Some were as young as 4 years old.  The IRS granted $4 million of such tax credits.

The IRS paid out $139 million to almost 20,000 returns to people who had not bought a house, but said they planned to do so in the future.  Then there was the $480 million in tax credits given to those who have previously owned homes as indicated on prior returns by prior mortgage interest deductions, prior deductions for closing points or the residential energy credit.

Because the tax credit was increased from 2008 to 2009 from $7500 to $8000, many people declared only for the $7500 amount in 2009 and lost $500 because the IRS did not want to correct their returns.

This is just one overly complex tax law among many.  Then there are those hopelessly complex laws on pricing in the market.  There are the many overly complex regulations and accounting practices.  All intrusive government means government which deluges citizens and bureaucrats both with too many and too complex laws for them to understand or apply. 

Why did banks take TARP money?

Many healthy banks have reported that they were forced to take TARP money even though they did not need it. Today, Judge Andrew Napolitano, said on FOX News that the chief executive of a $250 billion asset bank told him that his bank was threatened with 5 consecutive years of tax audits by the IRS if the bank did not take the TARP money (bank bailout money) that it did not want to take. The Secretary of the Treasury, who did not pay his own taxes, is apparently very comfortable in using the power of the IRS to make others miserable to further the cause of fascist socialism. If the government would use this fascist tactic, it would undoubtedly be likely to use other tactics equally reprehensible to force banks to take TARP money they did not need and did not want. The banks are heavily regulated, which undoubtedly gives the Federal government a huge degree of power over them.

This may explain why the very free market oriented BB&T Bank, whose Chairman John Allison requires high-level bank executives to read Atlas Shrugged and donates money to colleges which introduce Ayn Rand's works into the curriculum, disappointed many of us by taking TARP money. Earlier reports that bankers were forced into a room in Washington and told that they would not be allowed to leave until they accepted the TARP money were apparently not exaggerations. As we now know, those banks who were force-fed TARP money are now under either the direct control of the Federal government or being threatened with it if their policies do not comply with the Federal government wishes. The latter state is little different from the former. If you must do something because someone is holding a gun to your head, then you clearly have no real control and you are nothing but a slave.

Many bankers do not wish to be slaves. Many banks are offering to pay back the government the money given them with interest. The government is refusing to allow the larger banks to do this, though they have taken some payoffs from the smaller banks given money. Why are they refusing to allow banks to pay off their loans? Why did they force them to take the money in the first place? The answer is clear. This money loan was a pretext to gain control of the banks and the Federal government does not want to relinquish that control. Fascism is both tempting and addictive to the kind of politicians who seek to control our government. Government is then used as the tool to gain control not just of banks and auto companies, but of each and every one of us individuals. Of course, they offer various social program bribes to individuals under the same principle as the TARP loans as a means to gain control of us individually.

Governments in the United States have long been trekking down the road to fascist socialism, but the pace of the forced march has picked up markedly since Obama has been united with the Democrat-controlled Congress. We individual Americans have been like frogs placed in a very deep pot on the stove and the heat has been turned up gradually until recently. This has kept us sluggish and pacified. We are now being put to the boil. When the boiling is done, we are all to be one intermixed, indifferentiable mush. The socialist ideal of equality in total poverty will have been accomplished. Unless we strive most mightily to jump out of this deep pot of water immediately.