“I interviewed a prominent tax attorney who had spent years at the IRS and she confirmed what others have reported. When the IRS determines that someone owes money, it sends out threatening letters, but then the targeted person has no actual recourse or due process. The IRS hotline only is capable of handling a tiny percentage of calls.
One typically must spend hours on hold to speak to someone at the IRS, only to receive incomplete and conflicting answers. The agency doesn’t have a modern online system that allows taxpayers to handle most of these matters efficiently. In the past, if the IRS issued a levy it would include the name of a revenue officer that a taxpayer could contact. Now the IRS uses bots—and it typically takes months to get an answer via mail.
Here’s a typical scenario. The IRS determines that you owe a large sum of money. You and your accountant can’t get through to an agent. The agency places a lien on your property, freezes your bank account, or garnishes your wages. The only way to resolve the issue is to hire an attorney and spend thousands of dollars to get your day in court.”
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“Only a tiny portion of the new spending goes for improvements in the agency’s customer-service system or for technology upgrades.”
“”Contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wrote in a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig Wednesday, “small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited.” Rettig had echoed the language of his boss in a letter of attempted reassurance to the Senate on August 4, albeit with more wiggle room (italicized):
“These resources are absolutely not about increasing audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans. As we’ve been planning, our investment of these enforcement resources is designed around the Department of the Treasury’s directive that audit rates will not rise relative to recent years for households making under $400,000.””
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“none of these assurances live in the text of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) itself. One Republican amendment “to prevent the use of additional Internal Revenue Service Funds from being used for audits of taxpayers with taxable incomes below $400,000″ was voted down on party lines. You’ll just have to take Democrats’ word for it.”
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“In a September 2021 letter, CBO Director Phillip L. Swagel estimated that boosting IRS funding by $80 billion would increase tax revenues by $200 billion (the number would later rise to $207 billion, before settling at $204 billion), adding that “the proposal…would return audit rates to the levels of about 10 years ago; the rate would rise for all taxpayers” (italics mine), though “higher-income taxpayers would face the largest increase.”
This remains the CBO prediction, which otherwise Democrats are happy to tout for the $204 billion revenue increase and $124 billion net reduction to the deficit ($204 billion minus the $80 billion cost).”
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“The “tax gap” that the IRS seeks to close includes large amounts from the under-$400,000 club.”
“Despite the bill’s name, independent analysts have found it will have virtually no impact on inflation. In reality, it is a pared-down version of what Biden originally pitched as the “Build Back Better” plan—it leaves aside much of the original bill’s spending, but it maintains a huge corporate tax increase, huge spending on green energy initiatives, and a plan to swell the ranks of IRS agents. What was originally a roughly $4 trillion proposal that would have relied heavily on borrowing ended up being something of a rarity in Washington: a bill that will raise more revenue than it spends.
And where will it get that revenue? Quite possibly from you. Households earning as little as $50,000 annually are more likely to see a tax increase than a tax break from the legislation.
In the final hours before the House vote, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) completed a breakdown of how the bill’s corporate tax increases would affect households at various income levels. The JTC, a nonpartisan number-crunching agency within Congress, found that households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 are more likely to see a tax increase than a tax decrease next year.
Higher-earning households are more likely to see tax increases, but households earning more than $1 million next year are actually far more likely than lower-earning households to get a tax break.
That fits with what The Tax Foundation, a tax policy think tank, found when it analyzed the bill. The Inflation Reduction Act will “would also reduce average after-tax incomes for taxpayers across every income quintile over the long run,” the Tax Foundation reported on Wednesday. Those tax increases will reduce long-term economic output by about 0.2 percent and could eliminate 29,000 jobs, the group found.”
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” Tax increases on corporations get passed along from the board room table to the kitchen table in a variety of ways: lower pay for workers, higher prices for consumers, and smaller investment returns for shareholders.”
“In the U.K., defamation plaintiffs have two major advantages that Trump envies. First, they do not have to prove that an allegedly defamatory statement was false. Second, they do not have to show that the defendant deliberately or recklessly misrepresented the facts—the “actual malice” standard that the U.S. Supreme Court has said the First Amendment requires in libel actions brought by public figures.
Instead, the target of a British defamation lawsuit has the burden of establishing that he is protected by one of several recognized defenses. If he settles on a “defense of truth,” he has to show it is more likely than not that “the imputation conveyed by the statement” was “substantially true.” That plaintiff-friendly rule has made the U.K. a magnet for libel actions by prominent people whose claims might get a less receptive hearing in other countries, including American cyclist Lance Armstrong, Swedish businessman Svante Kumlin, and Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky.”
“Florida’s medical board on Friday voted to begin the process of banning gender-affirming medical treatment for youths, a move that comes as Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has become increasingly vocal in his opposition to such therapies.”
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“The board also voted to start that process for requiring adults seeking such care to wait 24 hours before going forward with any medical procedures.”
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“The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association support gender-affirming care for adults and adolescents. But medical experts said gender-affirming care for children rarely, if ever, includes surgery. Instead, doctors are more likely to recommend counseling, social transitioning and hormone replacement therapy.
The proposed rule is the latest step taken by the DeSantis administration to tighten regulatory controls over gender-affirming care. Florida’s Medicaid regulator is also considering a rule that would block state-subsidized health care from paying for treatments of transgender people.”