I'm pretty sure the IRS doesn't penalize people for paying more than they owe.In my experience, they send back the excess.
pay $1,000.00 federal tax $85.30 state tax $33.21 property tax $60.90That's right bitches. I have an 8.5% effective federal tax rate, in spite of being in the top quartile of US household incomes. And that is my correct property tax figure, no joke. Fuck you, Proposition 13.
employee medicare $14.26 social security $44.81 disability $6.75I maintain that these are not actually taxes but instead mandatory savings and insurance.
home/auto insrns $19.21 medical/dental/vision $9.91 term life $2.78Now, wait you're saying, these aren't taxes. Well, I can't very well not pay them, can I? I am legally required to have both home and auto insurance, I'm pretty sure I want medical insurance (and yes my company has good benefits so I don't pay much - I am very much atypical in this regard)
401k $46.32Again, you say, this is not a tax! Well, first off I know it's waaaay too low. I need to save more and have increased my 2010 deductions. But I can't very well NOT save for retirement, can I? And if it wasn't for all those other taxes above I'd probably have to save a lot more. Whether you think I'm more likely to lose my 401K or my social security is pretty much an arbitrary bet based on whether you hate the government or the stock market more.
ZenMasterThis: I'm pretty sure the IRS doesn't penalize people for paying more than they owe. So why don't you?In my experience, if you send the IRS too much money, they send it back.
Around [a piddling!] $96 million is budgeted annually by Congress for the "Postal Service Fund." These funds are used to compensate USPS for postage-free mailing for all legally blind persons and for mail-in election ballots….I have only unkind things to say about your uninformed and dishonest arguments in this thread, so I'll let it go at that.
…the law does not require that the Postal Service make a profit -- only break even. Still, the US Postal Service has averaged a profit of over $1 billion per year in each of the last five years.
Thomas is a tax protester, and one of his arguments is that he did not need to file tax returns because the sixteenth amendment is not part of the constitution. It was not properly ratified, Thomas insists, repeating the argument of W. Benson & M. Beckman, The Law That Never Was (1985). Benson and Beckman review the documents concerning the states' ratification of the sixteenth amendment and conclude that only four states ratified the sixteenth amendment; they insist that the official promulgation of that amendment by Secretary of State Knox in 1913 is therefore void.United States v. Thomas, 788 F.2d 1250, 1253–54 (7th Cir. 1986).
Benson and Beckman did not discover anything; they rediscovered something that Secretary Knox considered in 1913. Thirty-eight states ratified the sixteenth amendment, and thirty-seven sent formal instruments of ratification to the Secretary of State. (Minnesota notified the Secretary orally, and additional states ratified later; we consider only those Secretary Knox considered.) Only four instruments repeat the language of the sixteenth amendment exactly as Congress approved it. The others contain errors of diction, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. The text Congress transmitted to the states was: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” Many of the instruments neglected to capitalize “States,” and some capitalized other words instead. The instrument from Illinois had “remuneration” in place of “enumeration”; the instrument from Missouri substituted “levy” for “lay”; the instrument from Washington had “income” not “incomes”; others made similar blunders.
Thomas insists that because the states did not approve exactly the same text, the amendment did not go into effect. Secretary Knox considered this argument. The Solicitor of the Department of State drew up a list of the errors in the instruments and-taking into account both the triviality of the deviations and the treatment of earlier amendments that had experienced more substantial problems-advised the Secretary that he was authorized to declare the amendment adopted. The Secretary did so.
Although Thomas urges us to take the view of several state courts that only agreement on the literal text may make a legal document effective, the Supreme Court follows the “enrolled bill rule.” If a legislative document is authenticated in regular form by the appropriate officials, the court treats that document as properly adopted. Field v. Clark, 143 U.S. 649, 12 S.Ct. 495, 36 L.Ed. 294 (1892). The principle is equally applicable to constitutional amendments. See Leser v. Garnett, 258 U.S. 130, 42 S.Ct. 217, 66 L.Ed. 505 (1922), which treats as conclusive the declaration of the Secretary of State that the nineteenth amendment had been adopted. In United States v. Foster, 789 F.2d 457, 462-63 & n. 6 (7th Cir. 1986), we relied on Leser, as well as on the inconsequential nature of the objections in the face of the 73-year acceptance of the effectiveness of the sixteenth amendment, to reject a claim similar to Thomas's. See also Coleman v. Miller, 307 U.S. 433, 59 S.Ct. 972, 83 L.Ed. 1385 (1939) (questions about ratification of amendments may be nonjusticiable). Secretary Knox declared that enough states had ratified the sixteenth amendment. The Secretary's decision is not transparently defective. We need not decide when, if ever, such a decision may be reviewed in order to know that Secretary Knox's decision is now beyond review.
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posted by DU at 5:44 PM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]