Progressives (Liberals)

Noam supported Bernie, but held his nose and voted Hillary. He damn sure wasn't going to vote Trump.

'Who is the world-renowned political dissident Noam Chomsky voting for? “In the primaries, I would prefer Bernie Sanders,” Chomsky says. “If Clinton is nominated and it comes to a choice between Clinton and Trump, in a swing state, a state where it’s going to matter which way you vote, I would vote against Trump, and by elementary arithmetic, that means you hold your nose and you vote Democrat. I don’t think there’s any other rational choice.”

https://www.democracynow.org/2016/5/16/chomsky_on_supporting_sanders_why_he

Let’s not forget that Bernie himself supported Hillary against Trump.

In today’s world, Trump won’t even need to send many Dems and affiliates to prison. Lock up one or two now and then, and summon never-ending prosecutions for the rest. That will kill their political careers for good, for the benefit of those politicos who chose to work with Trump...

It’s disgusting and immoral to hound poor and average Americans for their nickels and hide millions.

Who’s More Likely to Be Audited: A Person Making $20,000 — or $400,000?

If you claim the earned income tax credit, whose average recipient makes less than $20,000 a year, you’re more likely to face IRS scrutiny than someone making twenty times as much. How a benefit for the working poor was turned against them.

Budget cuts have crippled the IRS over the past eight years. Enforcement staff has dropped by a third. But while the number of audits has fallen across the board, the impact has been different for the rich and poor. For wealthy taxpayers, the story has been rosy: Not only has the audit rate been cut in half, but audits now tend to be less thorough.

It’s a different story for people who receive the EITC: The audit rate has fallen less steeply and the experience of being audited has become more punishing. Because of a 2015 law, EITC recipients are now more likely to have their refund held, something that can be calamitous for someone living month-to-month.

In 2017, EITC recipients were audited at twice the rate of taxpayers with income between $200,000 and $500,000. Only households with income above $1 million were examined at significantly higher rates.

Put another way, as the IRS has dwindled in size and capability, audits of the poor have accounted for more of what it does. Last year, the IRS audited 381,000 recipients of the EITC. That was 36 percent of all audits the IRS conducted [...] [And] low-income taxpayers are much less likely to have competent representation to dispute the IRS’ conclusions.

In 2015, the Republican Congress passed, and President Barack Obama signed, a bill that required the IRS to hold EITC refunds until Feb. 15 each year. The purpose was to give the IRS more time to match tax returns with the corresponding W-2s to avoid misstatements of income. But it also meant people who are audited are more likely to see their refund held [..].

“You expect this money during tax season and you don’t get it… It tears you down,” said Paul McCaw, a forklift operator in Rock Island, Illinois. He had refunds held for several years in a row because the IRS doubted that his niece’s three young children lived with him. For years, the family struggled. Bills piled up and eviction was a constant threat. Finally, this year, with the help of a legal aid attorney at Prairie State Legal Services, Macaw, 50, was able to convince the IRS to release the refunds.

“I was just beside myself,” he said of finally getting his refunds, adding, “I caught everything all up, and I also paid a month in advance.”

Taxpayers of all kinds cheat. And IRS studies have found that EITC recipients aren’t close to the worst offenders. For certain kinds of business income, for instance, people pay only about 37 percent of the tax they owe because they simply don’t report the income. Hundreds of billions of dollars in government revenue is lost. But people who have their own businesses are audited at about the same rate as EITC recipients.

The IRS’ disproportionate focus on stopping EITC “improper payments” is misguided, said Nina Olson, the national taxpayer advocate. “What’s the difference between an erroneous EITC dollar being sent out and a dollar attributed to unreported self-employment income not collected?” she asked. Unreported business income is “where the real money is,” she said.

[A]dvocates for taxpayers say the IRS makes the situation needlessly worse. Virtually all the EITC audits are conducted by correspondence, and the computer-generated letters are far from simple. A survey by the Taxpayer Advocate Service found that more than a quarter of EITC recipients who were audited didn’t even understand that they were under audit.

“When I first got audited, I couldn’t figure out what was going on,” said Denise Canady, 62, of West Memphis, Arkansas, who at the time was earning $8.50 an hour as a home health aide. The audit sent her on a scramble to get documents from her granddaughter’s doctor, pharmacy, hospital and school that would demonstrate that the toddler had lived at her address. “A lot of people don’t want to give you old records,” she said.

She eventually found her way to Legal Aid of Arkansas, where an attorney helped bolster her case, but, a year after her audit began, she is still awaiting the outcome.

“I pray and hope,” she said.

Where in The U.S. Are You Most Likely to Be Audited by the IRS?

Humphreys County, Mississippi, seems like an odd place for the IRS to go hunting for tax cheats. It’s a rural county in the Mississippi Delta known for its catfish farms, and more than a third of its mostly African American residents are below the poverty line. But according to a new study, it is the most heavily audited county in America.

In a baffling twist of logic, the intense IRS focus on Humphreys County is actually because so many of its taxpayers are poor. More than half of the county’s taxpayers claim the earned income tax credit, a program designed to help boost low-income workers out of poverty. As we reported last year, the IRS audits EITC recipients at higher rates than all but the richest Americans, a response to pressure from congressional Republicans to root out incorrect payments of the credit.

The study estimates that Humphreys, with a median annual household income of just $26,000, is audited at a rate 51 percent higher than Loudoun County, Virginia, which boasts a median income of $130,000, the highest in the country.

The map reveals wide variations in the audit rate from place to place, but also how certain groups of Americans are disproportionately affected by the IRS’ policies. The five counties with the highest audit rates are all predominantly African American, rural counties in the Deep South. The audit rate is also very high in South Texas’ largely Hispanic counties and in counties with Native American reservations, such as in South Dakota. Primarily poor, white counties, such as those in eastern Kentucky in Appalachia, also have elevated audit rates.

The states with the lowest audit rates tend to be home to middle income, largely white populations: places like New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Generally, the IRS audits taxpayers with household income between $50,000 and $100,000 the least.

EITC audits can be punishing for taxpayers, since they routinely start with a refund being held, and can drag on for well over a year. The IRS does sponsor a program to provide free legal help to low-income taxpayers, but in Mississippi, the state with the highest audit rate in the country (according to Bloomquist’s estimates, the IRS audits about 11,000 returns there each year), there is only one attorney for the program.

“I cover all 82 counties,” said Ben Wilkerson, of North Mississippi Rural Legal Services. Out of necessity, he largely deals with his clients over the phone, counseling them on how to collect documentation to confirm their earnings or that a child lived with them for over six months of the year. “We get a lot of calls from pretty much everywhere,” he said.

Olivier5 wrote:

In today’s world, Trump won’t even need to send many Dems and affiliates to prison. Lock up one or two now and then, and summon never-ending prosecutions for the rest. That will kill their political careers for good, for the benefit of those politicos who chose to work with Trump...

Never-ending prosecution sounds great. But whenever we can secure a conviction and actually send these leftists to prison we should do so.

Two days after Attorney General Bill Barr issued his characterizations of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, Donald Trump was eager to exaggerate the findings. “The Mueller report was great,” the president told reporters two weeks ago, referring to a document he has not read. “It could not have been better.”

It was part of an aggressive White House public-relations offensive, intended to convince the public that the special counsel had fully exonerated Trump and his team, while destroying the credibility of anyone who dared take the Russia scandal seriously.

That confidence has started to evaporate.

...the president himself appears to have cut short his victory lap to take aim at the special counsel’s investigation again. Against a backdrop in which members of Team Mueller let reporters know that the attorney general’s assessment isn’t altogether fair, Trump tweeted, “Bob Mueller’s team of 13 Trump Haters & Angry Democrats are illegally leaking information to the press.”

For one thing, that’s not a denial about the accuracy of the reports. For another, it’s odd for the president to whine about leaks from Team Mueller about its report after Trump publicly endorsed that report’s release to the public.

What’s more, there’s nothing “illegal” about investigators making clear that the attorney general may be pulling a fast one on the public and the press.

The day before Trump published that missive, the president wrote a series of related complaints about the investigation. A Republican close to the White House told Politico, in reference to Trump, “He wouldn’t be bringing this up still if everything was hunky dory.”

...Indeed, there has never in American history been a president for whom it was more important that the public learn the full details of their finances. But now that Democrats in Congress have made a formal demand to the IRS for six years of Trump's returns as allowed by a law passed in 1924, Trump and his allies are saying to the public: You were dumb enough to believe me when I said I'd show you the returns? That's your own fault.

Here’s an exchange between acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Bill Hemmer on “Fox News Sunday”:

Quote:

HEMMER: To be clear, you believe Democrats will never see the president's tax returns?

MULVANEY: Oh, no, never. Nor should they.

Keep in mind, that that’s an issue that was already litigated during the election. Voters knew the president could have given his tax returns, they knew that he didn’t and they elected him anyway, which is, of course, what drives the Democrats crazy.

Before we go any farther, let’s remind ourselves that if Trump’s tax returns showed nothing more than that he is a shrewd and wealthy businessman, he’d have posted them on billboards all over Manhattan. The fact that he is so determined to keep them secret is evidence that they contain information that when fully investigated will be scandalous at a minimum, and perhaps even criminal.

Democrats on the take: New DCCC Chair is a best friend of health insurers

It really does matter which Democrat is elected to succeed Trump.

oralloy wrote:

Never-ending prosecution sounds great. But whenever we can secure a conviction and actually send these leftists to prison we should do so.

Give Trump a second term and your wishes may come true.