Face Time With the IRS
This is the title of a Wall Street Journal editorial that appeared on February 4, 2022.
The IRS has now admitted that the tax gap—the difference between what is owed and what is collected—is now over $1 trillion a year. Sure, criminals are responsible for some of that evasion, but the main cause is obvious—this is a protest by millions of Americans against the D.C. policies. This editorial is about an IRS plan to help reduce evasion.
The editorial points out:
- In November, the IRS announced an $86 million partnership with ID.me, a private contractor, to create an “improved identification and sign-in process” for its website.
- Taxpayers can currently access their IRS records with a username and password.
- Starting this summer, anyone who wants to check a child tax credit or look up a quarterly payment will have to provide a good deal of personal data, which could include multiple IDs and personal utility or insurance bills.
- ID.me will require a face scan, with which it will then “verify” a person’s identity, store it in a database, and use it for future logins.
- Most people will use their mobile phone to transmit the face scan.
- In the agency’s ID.me project document there 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.”
- Eight months ago, the IRS suffered the biggest privacy breach in its history, as ProPublica published years of tax records of wealthy Americans.
- The records were either leaked or hacked, with the obvious political goal of promoting higher tax rates for the rich.
- The agency hasn’t explained the data breach, and it simply can’t be trusted to safeguard biometric data.
- If you think tax audits are scary now, wait until the IRS can retroactively track your movements.
- The tax agency hasn’t been clear whether or how it intends to share its facial and tracking information with other federal or state entities, including law enforcement.
- IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig has correctly noted that the “IRS touches more Americans than any other entity, public or private.”
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL’S FLAWED PREMISE
Like many reporters and pundits that make their living advocating for one side or the other of an in issue in D.C., the writer of this editorial starts out with the wrong premise.
The first sentence states, The Internal Revenue Service will always be with us.
The editorial then lists many Members of Congress on both sides of the political spectrum that are appalled at this breach of the American people’s privacy rights.
Neither the Wall Street Journal editorial writers nor the other Members of Congress have considered the obvious solution—eliminate the IRS.
Like the robot that is trained to move from point A to point B running over and pushing aside everything in its way, the IRS is simply trying to carry out its mandate to enforce the income/payroll tax laws.
Its job is not to protect the taxpayer’s privacy. Its job is to collect income/payroll taxes.
It is so hypocritical for the sanctimonious politicians in D.C. to protest the excesses of an agency that they have created and from which they demand enforcement of the income/payroll tax laws.
The politicians’ indignant statements remind us of Claude Rains’ character, Captain Louis Renault, in the movie Casablanca. When he was closing down Rick’s Café and Humphrey Bogart demanded to know why, he said, I am shocked to find out that gambling is going on here. Immediately after this, an employee hands him his winnings from his own gambling.
The truth is that D.C. knows the IRS is right. As long as we maintain the income/payroll tax system, the only way to even start slowing down the increasing evasion is to make the IRS much more intrusive and become much more forceful and punitive. That’s the reason DC was pushing legislation requiring financial institutions to report an unprecedented level of detail about the activity in people’s bank accounts to the IRS.
THE REAL SOLUTION
The real solution to the evasion problem and privacy problems is to enact the FAIRtax. The FAIRtax eliminates the need for the IRS altogether, and studies have shown that the FAIRtax significantly reduces tax evasion.The FAIRtax will be collected by retail sellers of new products and retail services. It will be enforced by state sales tax organizations.
If you make a retail purchase, you pay the FAIRtax. It doesn’t matter how much money you have or how you made it. It doesn’t matter how much or how little activity there is in your bank account.
And, you’ll never have to file an individual income tax return again. Only retail businesses charged with collecting and remitting the FAIRtax will have to file returns and they will be much simpler returns that they are filing now to comply with the income/payroll tax requirements.
CONCLUSION
American humorist Will Rogers said, If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.This was good advice when Rogers offered it 100 years ago and it is good advice today. The country is in a hole—Americans are losing more and more of their freedoms because D.C. is trying to maintain a corrupt and failed income/payroll tax system.
All D.C. has to do is enact the FAIRtax. This will:
- Eliminate the need for the IRS
- Eliminate the need for individual tax returns
- Eliminate the advantage imported goods have over products manufactured in the U.S.
- Eliminate the migration of high-paying jobs overseas
- Eliminate the practice of selling tax benefits to special interest groups
- Increase the prosperity of all Americans
- Increase the fairness of the way U.S. taxes are collected
- Increase the freedom of U.S. citizens
- Increase the awareness of the taxpayers as to how much federal taxes they are paying and allow them to determine if they are receiving a fair exchange
- Provide Americans their whole paycheck.
- TAKE BACK CONTROL OF OUR LIVES!
If the people in D.C. really cared about our freedoms, they would enact the FAIRtax!
IT IS TIME FOR US TO TAKE BACK CONTROL AND DEMAND THAT CONGRESS PASS THE FAIRTAX!
WHAT CAN EACH OF US DO?
We can write letters and make calls to our elected representatives and attend Zoom town hall meetings demanding that if they really want to allow Americans to “TAKE BACK CONTROL”, the first step is to eliminate the income/payroll tax system and enact the FAIRTAX!
We all should remember Edmund Burke’s warning that applies to our efforts to TAKE BACK CONTROL, “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
If you want to prevent the IRS from being further weaponized to punish those of us who may object to the D.C. opinions and dictates of what is good for us, then help us PASS THE FAIRTAX!
The IRS will be gone and we will pay our taxes when we make purchases. WE and not D.C. Elites will decide how much federal tax we pay!
If you have friends who don’t know about the FAIRtax, send them to FAIRtax.org. Have them watch the white boards under “How It Works” and, if they agree, ask them to please join us.
Then contact your Members of Congress and the President and demand that Congress pass -the FAIRtax—the only fair tax.
Remember, if we don't continue to tell the truth and demand a change, then this quote from George Orwell's 1984 may foretell our children's future:
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
Is it hopeless? When confronted with a seemingly impossible problem, remember the statement attributed to the author George Bernard Shaw who wrote, You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”
Isn’t it time for us to ask, “Why not?”
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