Taxing Questions

For some of us, April 15th was just the first day of our four-month tax extension. Having recently suffered a very drastic reduction in income, and never being much of a saver, I simply couldn't pay my taxes last week, so I decided to postpone the inevitable. Maybe by August I'll have figured out a way to live permanently abroad or something.

Anyhow, on the occasion of the first week of the procrastinators' tax season, I wanted to return readers' attention to this disgusting IRS policy of pointlessly harrassing the very, very poor. "Tax refunds sought by hundreds of thousands of poor Americans [with incomes of less than $13,000 a year] have been frozen and their returns [incorrectly] labeled fraudulent," even though the less than $300 million collected from these hundreds of thousands of mega-poor is completely insignificant compared to the billions of uncollected taxes from a small number of mega-rich tax-evading individuals, or the "$100 billion problem with unreported incomes from small businesses that deal only in cash, many of which do not even file tax returns."

Could the Bush regime's philosophy be encapsulated any more clearly? Setting aside more fundamental questions about tax policy, this pointedly selective enforcement just seems deeply and profoundly unfair, no matter what one believes about who should be taxed.

What this amounts to is a drastic de facto tax break for the mega-rich and a drastic de facto tax hike for the mega-poor. Enforced rules are the only ones that affect the bottom line.


Tags: news and politics, taxes, economics, IRS