Justice Dept. Brags about Violating the First Amendment

In the land of the free and the home of the brave, if you publish a book about avoiding taxes, you can be successfully prosecuted. The First Amendment applies only if your ideas aren’t too threatening.

The Justice Department has vigorously pursued tax fraud scheme promoters to stop their activity and to warn would-be promoters that promoting tax fraud schemes leads to a federal court injunction or to a long stay in jail. Because ongoing tax scams cause continuing harm to the U.S. Treasury and leave participants owing taxes, interest, and often penalties, the government does not wait until a criminal case has been developed to take action to stop the scam. Rather, the Justice Department brings civil injunction suits to stop both the promotion of tax scams and the preparation of false or fraudulent returns. In appropriate cases, the Justice Department brings criminal charges against the promoters, preparers and scam participants to punish them for their unlawful conduct. These injunctions have stopped promoters from selling tax-evasion schemes on the Internet, at seminars, or through other means.

Read more at PR-USA.net.

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Tax Resistance Is as American as Apple Pie

Label tax resisters “terrorists” and voila, they may denied due process.

Commenting on the suicide plane attack on an IRS office building in Austin, Texas, by tax resister Joe Stack, actor and tax protester Wesley Snipes shrugged his shoulders and said: “I think [tax revolt] was an issue even for the early colonists and the British, so what’s new?”

The Boston Tea Party. The Whiskey Rebellion. The Sagebrush Rebellion.

Since its very founding, the US has been awash in sometimes violent anti-tax movements, giving way to a strain, amid ever broader federal reach, of a particularly pervasive, and more individualistic, form of rebellion in the late 20th century: The tax-resistance, or tax-denial, phenomenon.

Read more at the Christian Science Monitor.

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The Underground Economy in the U.S. is Growing

There are many reasons for people to take their money off the grid, as this article points out. Not least of them is the measly yield one can expect on funds deposited with banks.

The underground or “black” economy is rapidly rising, and the fault is mainly due to government policies.

Here is the evidence. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) released a report last week concluding that 7.7 percent of U.S. households, containing at least 17 million adults, are unbanked (i.e. those who do not have bank accounts), and an “estimated 17.9 percent of U.S. households, roughly 21 million, are underbanked” (i.e., those who rely heavily on nonbank institutions, such as check cashing and money transmitting services). As an economy becomes richer and incomes rise, the normal expectation is that the proportion of the unbanked population falls and does not rise as is now happening in the United States.

Read more at The Washington Times.

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Struggling Municipalities Printing Their Own Money

Locally produced scrip was a feature of the Great Depression.

Last year, two Detroit tavern owners were sitting at the bar, sampling their beverages and bemoaning the local economy — no one in the city had cash, and when they did, they spent it in the suburbs. Then the pair hit on a solution: Print their own money.

It is, after all, perfectly legal for anyone to issue currency, as long as it doesn’t look too much like a U.S. dollar. Thus was born the Detroit cheer, a local scrip accepted by a handful of city businesses, including a pizzeria, an electrician and a doggy day care center.

Residents can also exchange it at a few area bars for greenbacks, but the cheer is vastly more colorful. It features a chiseled, naked Greco-Roman superhero (the Spirit of Detroit) towering Godzilla-like over the city skyline, cupping a tiny family in one hand and a sunburst representing God in the other. He’s a lot more fun than George Washington.

Read more at MSN Money.

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Tax Resister Given a Virtual Life Sentence

Ed Brown’s “crime,” fundamentally, was his desire to be left the hell alone by the Feds. His sentence is 37 years–effectively life imprisonment. No word on whether or not the “stockpiling” of explosives and weapons was itself illegal. And the judge speaks with certainty of what Brown “would have” done had he not been apprehended. This is what, in the movie “Minority Report,” was known as “pre-crime.” In short, Ed Brown has been shamelessly railroaded so as to be made an example of.

CONCORD – The 3 1/2-year saga of convicted tax evader turned anti-government militant Edward L. Brown likely ended yesterday when a judge sentenced him to 37 years in federal prison for stockpiling explosives and weapons at his former Plainfield compound during a nine-month standoff with federal agents.

U.S. District Court Judge George Z. Singal called Brown an “unrepentant” criminal who would have killed many U.S. marshals had they not successfully infiltrated his home and arrested him and his supporters in October 2007. The new sentence runs consecutive to the 63 months Brown already is serving for tax offenses.

Read more at the Manchester Union Leader.

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The Goldman Sachs Offshore Tax Dodge

Remember last year when the Internal Revenue Service went after assets of U.S. citizens held in Swiss bank accounts? Why isn’t the IRS going after accounts in the Cayman Islands held by the likes of Goldman Sachs? Oh, I almost forgot, the IRS is the collections branch of the New York Federal Reserve, of which Goldman Sachs is one of the most powerful members!

Gotta love the expression “changes in our geographic earnings mix,” which really means “moving money to offshore tax havens.”

“After being granted TARP bailout funds from good friend and former boss Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury, it turns out Goldman Sachs is paying a whopping 1% on $2.3BB in profits for 2009, down from a more respectable 39% in 2008.

“Although earnings were down and losses up in the end of 2008, Goldman sources reported that the astonishing tax windfall was more due to ‘changes in our geographic earnings mix.‘”

Read more at Open Salon.

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Federal Parasites Owe $3 Billion in 2008 Taxes

File this under the “do as I say, not as I do” category. Our Federal overlords are a privileged class, so why should they pay taxes? As Leona Helmsley once said, “Only the little people pay taxes.” She was referring to chumps like you and me.

“WASHINGTON – At a time when the White House is projecting the largest deficit in the nation’s history, Uncle Sam is trying to recover billions of dollars in unpaid taxes from its own employees.

“Federal workers owe more than $3 billion in income taxes they failed to pay in 2008. According to Internal Revenue Service documents, 276,300 federal employees and retirees owe $3,042,200,000.”

Read more at WTOP Radio.

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IRS Hires Hundreds of Parasites to Go after the Presumed Wealthy

The IRS calls it “international tax evasion.” Some of us call it “trying to keep the federally employed parasite class the hell away from the few assets that remain in the hands of private citizens.”

“WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A new Internal Revenue Service unit set up to catch rich tax cheats hiding their wealth in complex business entities is rapidly taking shape with the hiring of hundreds of employees.

“The IRS high wealth unit, part of a broader effort to combat international tax evasion, is focusing on “the entire web of business entities controlled by a high wealth individual,” IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman told a tax conference this week.”

Read the rest at Reuters.

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