Paying taxes is just about as much fun as a root canal. As such, apparently more and more people are just deciding not to do it. As the Wall Street Journal points out today, the IRS saw a 40% surge in returns that owe tax penalties between 2010 and 2015.
For reasons that aren’t clear, a growing number of people who pay taxes quarterly are getting their payments wrong and incurring penalties as a result. These taxpayers often owe estimated taxes because they have income that’s not subject to the same withholding as wages earned by employees.
According to Internal Revenue Service data, the number of filers penalized for underpaying estimated taxes rose nearly 40% between 2010 and 2015—to 10 million from 7.2 million.
In 2015, the total number of filers owing penalties may have exceeded the number filing estimated taxes, although final results aren’t out yet. This is possible because some who paid quarterly taxes may have made mistakes, and others who didn’t pay them should have.
“The data suggest that millions of people don’t understand they need to pay quarterly taxes, or at least increase their withholding to avoid penalties,” says Eric Smith, an IRS spokesman.
Estimated tax payments are Congress’s way of keeping non-wage earners from having an advantage over wage earners. More than 80% of taxpayers have wages that are typically subject to withholding, and most people pay most of their income tax this way. Thus the law requires people with other types of income to make quarterly payments based on amounts received during each period.
Taxpayers with a mixture of wage and non-wage income must either pay tax quarterly or raise their withholding to cover the non-wage income. If total payments don’t meet certain thresholds, then the taxpayer owes a penalty on the underpayment based on interest rates charged by the IRS. Currently the rate is 4%.
Of course, there"s any number of reasons why people may be underpaying their tax bills. Some people, you know...those who count themselves among the 95 million "discouraged" workers who have left the work force completely, have been forced to take on random contract work to make ends meet and simply don"t understand that they have to make quarterly estimated tax payments.
That said, others understand the tax system perfectly well and are all too happy to take a 4% loan from the federal government courtesy of the Janet Yellen"s accommodative interest rate policies.
Tax preparers suspect several factors are at work. For most of the period penalties grew, the interest rate was 3%—the lowest in decades, making the pain of paying them lower as well.
“Some people don’t mind paying the toll, especially if their income bunches in the last quarter, and they just owe it for a few months,” says Don Williamson, noting the decision also could explain why average penalties have declined. Mr. Williamson is a certified public accountant who heads the Kogod Tax Policy Center at American University and has a private practice.
To that end, and while unclear if it"s true, Floyd Mayweather’s tax attorney, Jeffrey Morse, recently said that he was simply taking advantage of Yellen"s low rates by "deferring" his $22 million tax bill from 2015. Of course, we suspect this could be just a clever way to avoid fessing up to blowing through nearly $1 billion in career prize winnings...because that would just be embarrassing.
"If he is investing money and getting a rate of return that far exceeds what he has to pay the IRS in interest, then any smart business person is going to take advantage of that deferral."
Then again, maybe it"s all much more simple and people aren"t paying their taxes because they need the money to fund that $500 monthly BMW lease payment they could never afford but finance companies were all too willing to underwrite...just a thought.
After getting arrested Monday night at Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia while attempting to flee the country on a flight to Qatar, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz" IT staffer, according to Conservative Review, has decided to hire a lawyer with longstanding connections to the Clinton family for legal help.
Chris Gowen, a founding partner at Gowen, Rhoades, Winograd and Silva, apparently did a little bit of everything for the Clintons over the course of multiple years including working in the Clinton White House, helping President Bill Clinton write his book, "My Life", and serving on Hillary"s 2008 presidential campaign. Per Gowen"s bio:
Mr. Gowen left the Public Defender’s office to work for former President William Jefferson Clinton and then-Senator Hillary Clinton. Chris was a fact checker for President Clinton’s memoir, My Life. He also served as a traveling aid for President Clinton’s national and international trips. Chris finished his tenure with the Clintons by directing the advance operations for then-Senator Hillary Clinton during her 2008 presidential campaign.
Another biography, published on the American University website, says Gowen worked with several other controversial Clinton projects, including The Clinton Global Initiative, The Clinton Foundation, and The Clinton Health Access Initiative.
Shortly after Awan’s arrest, Gowen immediately jumped into the fray and hit the ground running with allegations that Awan was a victim of Islamophobia. He labeled Awan’s arrest as part of “a right-wing media-driven prosecution by a United States Attorney’s Office that wants to prosecute people for working while Muslim"...it"s almost as if the words are coming straight from Hillary"s mouth.
As we noted last night, Imran Awan has been charged with bank fraud but it is unclear whether that charge is just a placeholder for other charges that are yet to come. While details are scarce, media reports have alleged that Awan and his brothers potentially ran a procurement scheme in which they bought equipment, then overcharged various House members that employed their IT firm. Meanwhile, some congressional technology aides have alleged that the Awan’s were blackmailing representatives based on the contents of their emails and files, due to the fact that these representatives have displayed unwavering and intense loyalty towards the former aides.
As background, Imran was first employed in 2004 by former Democrat Rep. Robert Wexler (FL) as an “information technology director”, before he began working in Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s office in 2005.
The family was paid extremely well, with Imran Awan being paid nearly $2 million working as an IT support staffer for House Democrats since 2004. Abid Awan and his wife, Hina Alvi, were each paid more than $1 million working for House Democrats. In total, since 2003, the family has collected nearly $5 million.
In total, Imran"s firm was employed by 31 Democrats in Congress, some of whom held extremely sensitive positions on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
— Nick Short ???????? (@PoliticalShort) May 22, 2017
Of course, one of the most intriguing parts of the Awan narrative is precisely why former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (DWS) decided to keep him on her taxpayer-funded payroll right up until his arrest yesterday and whether that decision had anything to do with the whole DNC / Hillary email scandals that erupted last summer.
Along those lines, RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel posed the following questions to DWS earlier this morning...
Debbie Wasserman Shultz needs to answer mounting questions about her staffer’s questionable and illegal actions… pic.twitter.com/2SRZIGiBAa
...and appeared on Fox Business to discuss DWS" curious decisions with regards to Awan (forward to the 4:00 minute mark in the video below for the relevant discussion).
“[Wasserman Schultz] kept him on her staff. He was a taxpayer-funded government employee until yesterday when she finally fired him. We need to figure out why he’s under criminal investigation and we’re not hearing that across the country right now."
"We have to get to the bottom of this, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz has obstructed at every level on something that affects potentially our national security. We are not hearing the Democrats talk about it at all. Where’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz?”
A preliminary hearing for Mr. Awan is scheduled for August 21.
Just consider the accusations that have been leveled at the president:
He has betrayed the Constitution, which he swore to uphold.
He has committed treason by befriending Russia and other enemies of America.
He has subjugated America’s interests to Moscow.
He has been caught in fantastic lies to the American people, including personal ones, like his previous marriage and divorce.
President Donald Trump?
No, President John F. Kennedy.
What lots of Americans don’t realize, because it was kept secret from them for so long, is that what Trump has been enduring from the national-security establishment, the mainstream press, and the American right-wing for his outreach to, or “collusion with,” Russia pales in comparison to what Kennedy had to endure for committing the heinous “crime” of reaching out to Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union in a spirit of peace and friendship.
They hated him for it. They abused him. They insulted him. They belittled him. They called him naïve. They said he was a traitor.
All of the nasties listed above, plus more, were contained in an advertisement and a flier that appeared in Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963, the day that Kennedy was assassinated. They can be read here and here.
Ever since then, some people have tried to make it seem like the advertisement and flier expressed only the feelings of extreme right-wingers in Dallas. That’s nonsense. They expressed the deeply held convictions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the conservative movement, and many people within the mainstream media and Washington establishment.
In June 1963, Kennedy threw down the gauntlet in a speech he delivered at American University, now entitled the “Peace Speech.” It was one of the most remarkable speeches ever delivered by an American president. It was broadcast all across the communist Soviet Union, the first time that had ever been done.
In the speech, Kennedy announced that he was bringing an end to the Cold War and the mindset of hostility toward Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union that the U.S. national-security establishment had inculcated in the minds of the American people ever since the end of World War II.
It was a radical notion and, as Kennedy well understood, a very dangerous one insofar as he was concerned. The Cold War against America’s World War II partner and ally had been used to convert the United States from a limited-government republic to a national-security state, one consisting of a vast, permanent military establishment, the CIA, and the NSA, along with their broad array of totalitarian-like powers, such as assassination, regime change, coups, invasions, torture, surveillance, and the like. Everyone was convinced that the Cold War — and the so-called threat from the international communist conspiracy that was supposedly based in Russia — would last forever, which would naturally mean permanent and ever-increasing largess for what Kennedy’s predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower, had called the “military-industrial complex.”
Suddenly, Kennedy was upending the Cold War apple cart by threatening to establish a relationship of friendship and peaceful coexistence with Russia, the rest of the Soviet Union, and Cuba.
Kennedy knew full well that his actions were considered by some to be a grave threat to “national security.” After all, don’t forget that it was Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz’s outreach to the Soviets in a spirit of friendship that got him ousted from power by the CIA and presumably targeted for assassination as part of that regime-change operation. It was Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s outreach to the Soviets in a spirit of friendship that made him the target of Pentagon and CIA regime-change operations, including through invasion, assassination, and sanctions. It was Congo leader’s Patrice Lamumba’s outreach to the Soviets in a spirit of friendship that got him targeted for assassination by the CIA. It would be Chilean President Salvador Allende’s outreach to the Soviets in a spirit of friendship that got him targeted in a CIA-instigated coup in Chile that resulted in Allende’s death.
Kennedy wasn’t dumb. He knew what he was up against. He had heard Eisenhower warn the American people in his Farewell Address about the dangers to their freedom and democratic way of life posed by the military establishment. After Kennedy had read the novel Seven Days in May, which posited the danger of a military coup in America, he asked friends in Hollywood to make it into a movie to serve as a warning to the American people. In the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Pentagon and the CIA were exerting extreme pressure on Kennedy to bomb and invade Cuba, his brother Bobby told a Soviet official with whom he was negotiating that the president was under a severe threat of being ousted in a coup. And, of course, Kennedy was fully mindful of what had happened to Arbenz, Lamumba, and Castro for doing what Kennedy was now doing — reaching out to the Soviets in a spirit of friendship.
In the eyes of the national-security establishment, one simply did not reach out to Russia, Cuba, or any other “enemy” of America. Doing so, in their eyes, made Kennedy an appeaser, betrayer, traitor, and a threat to “national security.”
Kennedy didn’t stop with his Peace Speech. He also began negotiating a treaty with the Soviets to end above-ground nuclear testing, an action that incurred even more anger and ire within the Pentagon and the CIA. Yes, that’s right — they said that “national security” depended on the U.S. government’s continuing to do what they object to North Korea doing today — conducting nuclear tests, both above ground and below ground.
Kennedy mobilized public opinion to overcome fierce opposition in the military, CIA, Congress, and the Washington establishment to secure passage of his Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
He then ordered a partial withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, and told close aides that he would order a complete pull-out after winning the 1964 election. In the eyes of the U.S. national-security establishment, leaving Vietnam subject to a communist takeover would pose a grave threat to national security here in the United States.
Worst of all, from the standpoint of the national-security establishment, Kennedy began secret personal negotiations with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Cuban leader Fidel Castro to bring an end to America’s Cold War against them. That was considered to be a grave threat to “national security” as well as a grave threat to all the military and intelligence largess that depended on the Cold War.
By this time, Kennedy’s war with the national-security establishment was in full swing. He had already vowed to tear the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds after its perfidious conduct in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. By this time, he had also lost all confidence in the military after it proposed an all-out surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, much as Japan had done at Pearl Harbor, after the infamous plan known as Operation Northwoods, which proposed terrorist attacks and plane hijackings carried out by U.S. agents posing as Cuban communists, so as to provide a pretext for invading Cuba, and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the military establishment accused him of appeasement and treason for agreeing not to ever invade Cuba again.
What Kennedy didn’t know was that his “secret” negotiations with the Soviet and Cuban communists weren’t so secret after all. As it turns out, it was a virtual certainty that the CIA (or NSA) was listening in on telephone conversations of Cuban officials at the UN in New York City, much as the CIA and NSA still do today, during which they would have learned what the president was secretly doing behind their backs.
Kennedy’s feelings toward the people who were calling him a traitor for befriending Moscow and other “enemies” of America? In response to the things that were said in that advertisement and flier about him being a traitor for befriending Russia, he told his wife Jackie on the morning he was assassinated: “We are heading into nut country today.” Of course, as he well knew, the nuts weren’t located only in Dallas. They were also situated throughout the U.S. national-security establishment.
