Tag Archives: taxes

“in the event of an investigation into a user”

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The IRS is bent on using facial recognition to allow (or block) an American taxpayer to have access to his own tax records that the IRS maintains on each of us. The program is called ID.me, and it

will require a face scan, with which it will then “verify” a person’s identity, store in a database, and use for future logins.

As the WSJ asks, What could go wrong? It then answers the question:

Tucked into the agency’s ID.me project document is a line explaining that the agency will also use the mobile phones that submit selfies as a “piece of identity evidence” and that “geolocation can be gleaned from [mobile network operators] in the event of an investigation into a user.”

This is People’s Republic of China-grade surveillance, this time by a weaponized IRS of each of us American citizens. This is the IRS whose weaponization was begun under the Progressive-Democrat, Barack Obama. This is the IRS whose weaponization is being expanded to republic-threatening levels by the Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden.

Update: The IRS now claims it’s not going to do the facial recognition bit. But it hasn’t made any similar claims regarding “geolocation” or any other piece of “identity evidence” that it might hold, or get hold of, and would willingly pass along to support any “investigation” into a user.

Sort of like tax data and forms that it already has a history of passing along to the press.

Taxing the Rich

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Washington State is at it.

Washington state multibillionaires would pay a wealth tax under a proposal that got a public hearing before the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
Senate Bill 5426 would impose a 1% tax on intangible financial property such as stocks, and bonds, futures contracts, and publicly traded options. The first $1 billion of assessed wealth would be exempt from the tax, which “equals one percent multiplied by a resident’s taxable worldwide wealth.”

Leave aside questions of the legitimacy of taxing an American citizen’s foreign-held wealth, intangible or otherwise. The bill’s sponsor, State Senator Sam Hunt (D, Olympia) has given the larger game away.

This is a great attempt to bring fairness to our tax structure which is pretty upside down with the lower income paying 17% of their income in taxes and the upper 1% paying 1% or less[.]

That is pretty upside down.

Another solution would be to lower the tax rates on those with the lower income. However, that would involve lowering tax rates rather than increasing them, and lowering tax rates is completely inconceivable to Progressive-Democrats.

Update: Some have interpreted my “lower the tax rates on those with the lower income to mean lowering income tax rates. Washington has no income tax, only sales taxes (State and local), business taxes, and property taxes. Sales and property taxes are highly regressive and hit the lower income folks the hardest, the former directly through taking a far higher per centage of their income and the latter through driving up the cost of housing, whether owning or renting.

Lowering business taxes (eliminating them, I say) would foster job growth, which would benefit the lower- and no-income folks the most.

A Good Idea?

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Progressive-Democrats are looking at “adjusting” Party’s proposed child tax credit in order to appease Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV).

Some Democrats have started exploring how to pare back their proposed expansion of the child tax credit in ways that are aimed at winning the critical support of Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), according to people familiar with the matter.
Among the possibilities: Reducing the size of the credit’s expansion and limiting which Americans are eligible for it, according to the people.

Tweaking to appease a single Senator. Never mind any effort at looking for bipartisan support.

If the child tax credit, in any form, were a good idea, the Progressive-Democrats would put it into a separate, stand-alone bill and put that up for debate and a vote.

It’s instructive that Party won’t do that. It’s instructive that Party can’t even conceive of such a move.

Monthly Child-Tax Credit Payments at an End

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The Wall Street Journal wrote about the end of the child tax credit payments and the impact on families’ financial cushion during last year’s Wuhan Virus-related dislocation. What Ensign and Rubin missed in their piece, though, is what those payments actually are, and their upcoming impact.

Those monthly child-tax credit payments were advances on 2021’s income tax refunds. In addition to the cash flow (not income) drop from the payments’ cessation, payback of those advances on or about mid-April (or later, should the IRS decide to delay the due date for tax returns, again) will be a cast iron bitch for those lower income families whom the Progressive-Democrats were pretending to help with the advances.

Just a Thought

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California is running a very large budget surplus—$31 billion worth—and the men and women of that State’s government really and truly don’t know what to do with it. Especially since the voter-approved Gann Limit doesn’t let the government run that big a surplus.

Here’s a thought.

Maybe pay a tax refund to the citizens of California, and sock the rest of the surplus away in a State rainy-day fund.

Nah. Waste of money. Those citizens would only waste it on their own needs and wants, rather than spending it properly. And who needs a rainy-day fund? California has droughts.