Court Protects IRS Tyranny

The names Catherine Engelbrecht and Reggie B. Walton may not exactly be household names, but both are part of a disturbing court ruling that can only be described as a reprehensible government protection racket in plain sight for all to see. Ms. Engelbrecht was the plaintiff and Reggie B. Walton the judge. A succinct summary is provided by Breitbart in the report, True the Vote’s Lawsuit against IRS Gets Tossed by Federal Judge.

“A federal judge in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia entered an order dismissing a lawsuit filed by True the Vote, a Houston, Texas-based non-profit organization focused on “voters’ rights and election integrity” against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The order alleged that the IRS had improperly delayed granting their application for 501(c)(3) status and targeted them as a conservative organization. The opinion, by Judge Reggie B. Walton, found that the IRS had taken sufficient “remedial steps to address the alleged behavior.”

From the ruling by Judge Walton, analysis:

“The defendants contend that the Court does not have subject-matter jurisdiction over counts one, two, and five of the plaintiff’s complaint because the IRS ultimately approved the plaintiff’s application for tax-exempt status, and thus counts one, two, and five—all of which seek “to correct [the] alleged targeting [of the IRS] and delay during its application process” for tax-exempt status—are now moot as there is no longer any case or controversy for the Court to resolve.”

How nice that the IRS can slip out of a sticky wicket by simply retroactively approving a 501(c)(3) application that they officiated with a touch of harassment and a sprinkle of intimidation. The reasoning used by Judge Walton to protect the IRS from a “voluntary cessation” exception follows:

“The rationale supporting the defendant’s voluntary cessation as an exception to mootness is that, while the defendant’s unilateral cessation of the challenged conduct may grant the plaintiff relief, the defendant is free to return to its old ways—thereby subjecting the plaintiff to the same harm but, at the same time, avoiding judicial review. Accordingly, a case can be mooted by virtue of the defendant’s cessation of its allegedly illegal conduct only if (1) there is no reasonable expectation that the conduct will recur and (2) interim relief or events have completely and irrevocably eradicated the effects of the alleged violation.”

Oh praise the sacred high priests of the Internal Revenue Service for “seeing the light” and repenting their ways. Such a reasonable trust in the good intentions of the IRS to not only follow the law but to administer their trade under the “good faith” doctrine that only a judge working for the same corrupt government as do the Lois Lerner brigade of bureaucrats, would profess.

An important USA Today article, from hardly an anti government publication, IRS list reveals concerns over Tea Party ‘propaganda’, furnishes the evidence.

“Newly uncovered IRS documents show the agency flagged political groups based on the content of their literature, raising concerns specifically about “anti-Obama rhetoric,” inflammatory language and “emotional” statements made by non-profits seeking tax-exempt status.

The internal 2011 documents, obtained by USA TODAY, list 162 groups by name, with comments by Internal Revenue Service lawyers in Washington raising issues about their political, lobbying and advocacy activities. In 21 cases, those activities were characterized as “propaganda.”

The list provides the most specific public accounting to date of which groups were targeted for extra scrutiny and why. The IRS has not publicly identified the groups, repeatedly citing a provision of the tax code prohibiting it from releasing tax return information.”

The supporting items Document: IRS ‘political advocacy cases’ list, while the pattern of selective favoritism is authenticated in the report, IRS approved liberal groups while Tea Party in limbo.

For a more cutting edge analysis from  Twitchy US politics on the insanity from the Loony Left, just absorb the rhetoric and ask, who the real totalitarians are in society and even worse in government. Outrage: Court acknowledges that IRS targeted True the Vote, dismisses lawsuit anyway explains.

“Voters’ rights group True the Vote , a nonprofit “founded to inspire and equip voters for involvement at every stage of our electoral process,” has had a hard time of it. As the 2012 election approached, Cher of all people referred to True the Vote as “a bunch of Tea Party Nazis” and “animals.” Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, who sits on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, informed True the Vote founder and president Catherine Engelbrecht that he would be launching an investigation into her organization.

Of course, all of this was happening while the IRS was targeting conservative groups and holding up applications for nonprofit status, often through several election cycles. And even though the U.S. Federal District Court didn’t deny this, True the Vote’s case against the IRS was dismissed today.”

Engelbrecht issued the following brief statement:

“The Court today correctly acknowledged that the IRS targeted True the Vote because of its perceived political beliefs. Such conduct is reprehensible and should never be acceptable in a free society. Despite this critical finding, we are stunned and disappointed in the court’s ruling which nevertheless dismisses our case. We will be evaluating our legal options and will announce our intent in that regard soon.”

Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots reaction to the DC Court Decision on IRS “Unconscionable”. “The Court’s decision not to sanction either the IRS or the individual agents because it and they had taken “remedial measures” is unconscionable.”

Supporting this conclusion are Top 9 Quotes on the IRS Targeting of Tea Party Groups.

1. “Not even a smidgen of corruption.” – President Barack Obama to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly February, 2014
2. “Decline to answer that question.” – Lois Lerner, pleading the Fifth Amendment before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, March 5, 2014
3. “The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions instead of indications of potential political campaign intervention.” – Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration Audit
4. “Instead of referring to the cases as advocacy cases, they actually used case names on this list. They [Determinations Unit in Cincinnati, Ohio] used names like ‘Tea Party’ or ‘Patriots’ and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title. That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate.” – Lois Lerner
5. “Even after admitting that it had targeted groups, and a TIGTA [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration] report detailed the abuses, the IRS did not let up. In August 2013, the IRS requested yet more documents and information. It asked us to provide, for example, all fundraising communications for the 60 days before the November 6, 2012 election, and all materials that we used in various “Get Out the Vote” activities. That request made no sense under the current standards for evaluating non-profit applications. The regulations proposed three months later, however, explain the requests, as they include specific provisions classifying any mention of a candidate’s name within 60 days of an election and get-out-the-vote efforts as taxable political activity.” – Jenny Beth Martin in testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, February 27, 2014
6. “The Internal Revenue Service says acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller was first informed in May 2012 that tea party groups were inappropriately targeted for scrutiny.” – Hot Air, May 13, 2013
7. “The IRS inspector general said this week that while some liberal groups were given extra scrutiny by the tax agency, they were not subjected to the same invasive queries as tea party groups – a finding that seems to confirm political bias was at play.” – The Washington Times, June 27, 2013
8. When the IRS revelations broke, Obama promised a full investigation. Yet Cleta Mitchell, an attorney for a number of tea party and conservative groups targeted by the IRS, testified, “None of my clients have received a single contact from the FBI, the DOJ [Department of Justice] or any other investigator regarding the IRS scandal.” – The Chicago Sun-Times, February 10, 2014
9. More than 400,000 documents have been turned over to Congress, only a fraction of which have been publicly released under the Freedom of Information Act. Republicans say they’re still missing key documents including the e-mails of former IRS Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner. – USA Today, February 26, 2014

But remember, President Obama assures us there’s “not a smidgen of corruption!”

No matter your political leanings, every American should be concerned when the courts condone abusive and arbitrary administration in any agency. Allowing the IRS to retroactively cover their rear, while turning a blind eye to systemic illicit practices, is just part of the game plan that permits the court to make up law, which favors government tyranny.

The True the Vote decision is insulting and only goes to prove that reforms through the election process are truly the moot option.

The Fourth Amendment, NSA And Metadata

The Bill of Rights is not an accumulation of mere words that have become expendable, when the government finds them inconvenient. The Fourth Amendment is especially an example of a promise of protecting natural rights, long ignored and often violated. While much of court precedents involve policing powers, these decisions have profound application to NSA metadata mining. With the first anniversary of the Edward Snowden disclosures, no government official or agency can continue to deny the existence of the total surveillance state.

The NSA’s “General Warrants”: How the Founding Fathers Fought an 18th Century Version of the President’s Illegal Domestic Spying, provides an indispensible example of the fundamental conflict that always exists, when magistrates envision their duty as the maintenance of government supremacy over the inherent autonomy of individuals.

“It is “familiar history,” the U.S. Supreme Court noted in Payton v. New York, that “indiscriminate searches and seizures conducted under the authority of ‘general warrants’ were the immediate evils that motivated the framing and adoption of the Fourth Amendment.” When James Madison drafted the Fourth Amendment, he relied heavily on the Massachusetts Constitution, which forbade warrants that did not specify the “persons or objects of search, arrest, or seizure.”

Since the post World War II era, the radical shift from the remnants of the former Republic, into a global authority, where the meaning of the law has no correlation to the intent of original constitutional conviction, is undeniable. What was enemy signals interception became complete domestic scrutiny and monitoring. Lost for all practical legal purposes was The Central Meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Tracey Maclin provides a historic account and judicial context on how the constitution was perverted.

“The Court’s rational basis model essentially asks whether the police have acted irrationally while intruding upon the Fourth Amendment rights of individuals. The Court’s model rarely requires warrants authorizing searches, disfavors vigorous judicial oversight of police searches, and prefers deference to police procedures as the mode of constitutional decision-making.

Most importantly, a rational basis model severely diminishes our rights under the Fourth Amendment. As the private container cases demonstrate, a rational basis model does not subject police searches to vigorous judicial check. In many instances, the police are free to undertake unsupervised and suspicionless searches, even when less intrusive means are available to serve the state’s interests. In other contexts, warrantless searches are permitted when the only justification for such a search is police convenience.

In the end, the Court finds that all of these searches are reasonable because they rationally serve legitimate state interests. This degree of deference to police searches is at odds with the central purpose of the Fourth Amendment, which is distrust of discretionary police power. The Fourth Amendment was not inserted in the Bill of Rights so that judges could meekly defer to government intrusions of privacy; rather, the amendment was designed to control such intrusions.”

The NSA purports that national security not only encompasses data mining on all citizens, but also allows for effective total immunity from oversight and accountability. This mindset expands the ordinary boundaries of maintaining the peace into a tyrannical police state. The commitment to Open Government and Transparency is as believable as the fairy tale that anyone can become President.

Abdication of judicial responsibility is so blatant that the century old decision by Justice William R. Day, Weeks v. United States (1914), U.S. Supreme Court, has no substantive application when the NSA deems that its ECHELON monitoring systems require that a PRISM be kept on everyone person. Also, watch the video, 

“The point of the Fourth Amendment which often is not grasped by zealous officers is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate, instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime. Any assumption that evidence sufficient to support a magistrate’s disinterested determination to issue a search warrant will justify the officers in making a search without a warrant would reduce the Amendment to a nullity, and leave the people’s homes secure only in the discretion of police officers. Crime, even in the privacy of one’s own quarters, is, of course, of grave concern to society, and the law allows such crime to be reached on proper showing. The right of officers to thrust themselves into a home is also a grave concern, not only to the individual, but to a society which chooses to dwell in reasonable security and freedom from surveillance. When the right of privacy must reasonably yield to the right of search is, as a rule, to be decided by a judicial officer, not by a policeman or government enforcement agent.

There are exceptional circumstances in which, on balancing the need for effective law enforcement against the right of privacy, it may be contended that a magistrate’s warrant for search may be dispensed with. But this is not such a case. No reason is offered for not obtaining a search warrant except the inconvenience to the officers and some slight delay necessary to prepare papers and present the evidence to a magistrate. These are never very convincing reasons and, in these circumstances, certainly are not enough to bypass the constitutional requirement. No suspect was fleeing or likely to take flight. The search was of permanent premises, not of a movable vehicle. No evidence or contraband was threatened with removal or destruction, except perhaps the fumes which we suppose in time will disappear. But they were not capable at any time of being reduced to possession for presentation to court. The evidence of their existence before the search was adequate and the testimony of the officers to that effect would not perish from the delay of getting a warrant.

If the officers in this case were excused from the constitutional duty of presenting their evidence to a magistrate, it is difficult to think of a case in which it should be required.”

The cyber environment of digital existence does not void the need for probable cause. However, the NSA does not observe such constitutional needs when the personal computer is the depository of your private papers. Other than advancements in technological communications and archiving, the precedent of the “exclusionary rule”, established in this case, is the ubiquitous causality from NSA collection that vacuums up every byte of data, using the presumption that everyone is a criminal. Even if not charged for an offense at this time, the information awaits future prosecutorial discretion.

So, when in the case Klayman v. Obama, “On December 16, Richard J. Leon of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the metadata collection program violates the Fourth Amendment”, hopes were high that at least one federal judge had the courage to uphold the constitution. Metadata and the Fourth Amendment then cites that soon thereafter, the weight and magnate of the intelligence snooping force felt the usual letdown, when American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper was decided.

“On December 27, Judge William H. Pauley III came to the opposite conclusion. Contrary to Judge Leon’s belief that the metadata program has not been effective, Judge Pauley argued that the program could potentially have stopped the 9/11 attacks. However, the crux of his determination was that the Smith precedent applies and that no Fourth Amendment claim can be made out for Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding the metadata related to their phone calls.”

Note the bizarre endorsement of this absurdly twisted legal logic that conveniently destroys the intentional importance of preserving essential privacy that corrupt courts want to make conditional.

“Among the requirements for a successful Fourth Amendment claim is establishing that a reasonable expectation of privacy was violated. On this point, the most relevant precedent to the metadata cases is 1979’s Smith v. Maryland, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding the telephone numbers they call, for that information is freely provided to telephone companies and it is generally known that telephone companies keep this information in their records.”

Abolishing the expectation of privacy is not subject to the redefining of what are reasonable restrictions that the government places upon its agencies. The reason why the NSA is so dangerous stems from the total lack of observing that the spying on ordinary citizens is a profound repudiation of basic and inalienable rights of each individual.

Such systematic and surreptitious gathering also has No Fourth Amendment right in metadata embedded in posted photo, so say the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Before long, this parade of government inspection and retention will subject even the hermit and the deliberate recluse to a profile third degree. It is a never-ending process until snatching your individual identity is the ultimate outcome.

The snoops view you as an enemy of the state, unless you can prove differently, whereas the reality is that The Strange World of NSA Mind Control is the true foe of the liberty of people and a free nation.

Privacy Rights: Is Anything Left?

The answer to this question is being pondered across America in light to the two seeming mutually contradictory US Federal Court decisions handed down this month from Courts in Washington DC and New York.

The legal issue of what rights are left to American citizens that can prevent governmental intrusions into their privacy and also governmental invasions using heavy handed searches and seizures following the launching of the Bush administrations ‘war of terrorism’ has gained new impetus following disclosures by former National Security Agency analyst turned whistle blower, Edward Snowden. Without Snowden’s patriotic leaks, no legal challenge could have been brought to the NSA practices.

Now that two US Federal District Courts, with identical powers under the US Constitution have seemingly reached opposite results on the same legal issue involving the right of the NSA to conduct ‘metadata’ searches and store the information of scores of millions of unknowing Americans the issue is likely going to have to be decided by the US Supreme Court. As predicted, appeals were immediately filed from the Trial Courts decision in both cases.

Initially, civil libertarians were encouraged earlier this month when in light of the Snowden revelations of massive US government spying on Americans and millions of foreigners, Federal Description: Judge Richard Leon of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on 12/16/13 that the bulk collection by the National Security Agency of cell phone data (everyone you called, when you called them and where you were when you called them) of Americans violates the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and is “Orwellian”.

Judge Leon explained that we now use our smartphones for a wide variety of personal activities in which we have the expectation of privacy, and probably we have more expectation of privacy from our phones now than we did from a pay phone in the 1980s. He made the point that cell phones today includes a citizens, location when one makes a call and becomes a GPS made the call, functioning essentially as a GPS. He wrote, “It’s one thing to say that people expect phone companies to occasionally provide information to law enforcement; it is quite another to suggest that our citizens expect all phone companies to operate what is effectively a joint intelligence-gathering operation with the Government.”

Judge Leon focused on whether the NSA massive surveillance violated the 4th Amendment which provides: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

He writes:

“The threshold issue that I must address, then, is whether plaintiffs have a reasonable expectation of privacy that is violated when the Government indiscriminately collects their telephony metadata along with the metadata of hundreds of millions of other citizens without any particularized suspicion of wrongdoing, retains all of that metadata for five years, and then queries, analyzes and investigates that data without prior judicial approval of the investigative targets. If they do – and a Fourth Amendment search has thus occurred– then the next step of the analysis will be to determine whether such a search is ‘reasonable.’

Judge Leon found that the NSA when it demands citizens telephone metadata is conducting a search, and that it is most likely an unreasonable search of our personal effects according to the Fourth Amendment, since there is no specific suspicion of wrongdoing by any individual whose records are demanded. He immediately granted the Plaintiffs request for an injunction that blocks the collection of phone data for the plaintiffs and orders the government to destroy any of their records that have been gathered. As is common Federal Court practice, the judge stayed action on his ruling pending a government appeal, recognizing in his 68-page opinion the “significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues.”

No sooner had the Judge Leon decision been published and was encouraging civil libertarians to argue that the US Constitution still protects some citizen rights against government abuse than US Federal District Judge William H. Pauley III in New York ruled that a National Security Agency program that collects enormous troves of phone records is legal, making the latest contribution to an extraordinary debate among courts and a presidential review group about how to balance security and privacy in the era of big data. In just 11 days, the two judges and the presidential panel reached the opposite of consensus on every significant question before them, including the intelligence value of the program, the privacy interests at stake and how the Constitution figures in the analysis. The latest decision could not have been more different from one issued by Judge Richard J. Leon in Washington, who ruled that the program was “almost Orwellian” and probably unconstitutional.

Judges Leon and Pauley have starkly differing understandings on how legal that program is. Judge Pauley, whose courtroom is just blocks from where the World Trade Center towers stood, endorsed arguments made in recent months by senior government officials — including the former F.B.I. director Robert S. Mueller III — that the program might have caught the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers had it been in place before the attacks. Wrote Judge Pauley: “While robust discussions are underway across the nation, in Congress and at the White House, the question for this court is whether the government’s bulk telephony metadata program is lawful,” Judge Pauley wrote on Friday. “This court finds it is.”

Judge Pauley decided to ignore several compelling US Constitutional issues and applications of its provisions to the NSA case. He chose to avoid 4th Amendment prohibitions on unreasonable government searches of private papers and effects. As Professor Juan Cole recently reminded us, the 14th Amendment was the basis for a recent Supreme Court ruling forbidding law enforcement from using GPS tracking without a warrant. The courts decided that following someone around 24/7 as a “search” because such intensive monitoring of a person’s movements goes beyond just glimpsing the individual in public. NSA collection of metadata from cell phones track individuals just as a GPS devices do.

Other applicable US Constitutional provisions ignored by Judge Pauley include the 1789 Federalist promoted 9th Amendment, which a majority of the Founding Fathers wanted as guarantees that “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The 9th Amendment is clearly designed to block the government from constraining people’s private behavior. As Cole points out, not only are they protected from specific violations of their rights (attempts to curb speech, the press, religious belief or peaceable assembly) but they are also protected as a free people from government intrusions.

There are additional provisions in the constitution and in the history of court rulings that prescribe privacy for individuals from government intrusion. In fact, although “privacy” is not mentioned in the US constitution, the Supreme Court found in Connecticut v. Griswold that American citizens had a constitutional right to use birth control and that the state could not arbitrarily come into the bedroom and prohibit it. Some of the justices referred to the 9th Amendment, which says “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” That is, the government can’t just wake up in the morning and decide to constrain people’s private behavior. Not only are they protected from specific violations of their rights (attempts to curb speech, the press, religious belief or peaceable assembly) but they are protected in general as a free people from government intrusions.

Judge Pauley also ignored the relevant application of the 14th Amendment. In Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 497 (1965) a landmark case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protected a right of privacy, justices referenced the due process clause of the 14th amendment, which commands that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The late great Justice William O. Douglas argued that the Bill of Right’s specific guarantees have “penumbras,” created by “emanations from these guarantees and that these penumbras help give the Bill of Rights life relevance to today’s struggle to protect our civil rights. It was Douglas’ interpretation of the US Constitution that, the “spirit” of the First Amendment (free speech), Fourth Amendment (freedom from searches and seizures), Fifth Amendment (freedom from self-incrimination), and Ninth Amendment (other rights), as applied against the states by the Fourteenth Amendment, creates a general right to privacy that cannot be unduly infringed.” In his view there exists as part of the US Constitution a penumbra of privacy.

Judge Pauley ignored these and other Constitutional applications in order to uphold the NSA informational gathering project in spite of the fact that the NSA, every minute for the past 7 years and until today, is abridging the privileges and immunities of a free citizenry. They are depriving us of liberty without due process of law, for the reason that they have failed to obtain a judicial warrant based on grounds of specific evidence of wrong-doing.

Judge Leon, in Washington, took the opposite view, saying the government had failed to make the case that the program is needed to protect the nation. “The government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the N.S.A.’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature,” he wrote.

Where these conflicting US Constitutional decisions leave the American public concerned with civil liberties and the disappearance of privacy is in a profound quandary with respect to the issues raised by Edward Snowden. Snowden described in his Christmas address, carried by British Channel 4 and widely aired on the internet the legitimate concern of all people who values individual liberty and privacy: A child born today might “never know what it means to have a private moment to them, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought.” People walk around with a tracking device in their pockets, he noted, and as we now know, the NSA is collecting the metadata of those phones, which includes location information.

With words likely to become part of Law School curriculum, Mr. Snowden said that “this disappearance of privacy is important because privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.”

Internet And Sale Taxes Dialectic

Before you panic that your online purchases will be tagged with the added cost of state sales tax, rely on the complexity of reporting sales to all the jurisdictions as your prime safeguard from forking over a percentage on every purchase. The Senate bill,Summary: S.336 provides a succinct description of the requirements. For a comprehensive resource on all you want to know about Marketplace Fairness Act Information, check out the details. House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte in the article, Online sales tax bill may be dead on arrival in House, identifies concern that the practical difficulties remain with implementation. “I do not believe legislation like the Marketplace Equity Act is sufficiently simplified yet. While it attempts to make tax collection simpler, it still has a long way to go.”

An illustration of this worry is evident in the maze of collection for Internet Sales Tax: A 50-State Guide to State Laws.

“If you are selling goods or products online, you need to be aware of Internet sales tax rules. The issue of whether to require online retailers to collect sales tax in states where they have no physical presence has been a matter of significant debate in many states and at the federal level. Some states have enacted legislation that will require large online sellers to collect sales tax. These laws, sometimes referred to as “Amazon laws,” have been enacted in a number of states and are being considered in many others.”

Up to now, the penalty for circumventing the collection and reporting process seems to be so burdensome that effective enforcement was impractical. The article, Internet Sales Tax: Here Come the Auditors, describes the intended abidance measures in the proposed Marketplace Fairness Act.

“There are more than 9,600 state and local taxing jurisdictions in the U.S., and small businesses would be required to send the appropriate number of tax dollars-state and local-to every one where they sell.And if the business owner makes a mistake? Or if the state thinks that the business owner makes a mistake? The bill provides for “a single audit of a remote seller for all State and local taxing jurisdictions within that State.”

This provision is intended to streamline the process, but it still means every business could face 46 separate audits (from the 45 states that collect sales taxes plus the District of Columbia).”

Now if you are one of those tax objectors that go to great length to evade paying state sales tax, you may applaud the latest effort in Congressional conflict to nix compliance with existing statutes. Hitherto, not everyone shares this disdain. The argument for equity and fairness is made in the essay; Online sales tax bill could crash in House.

“Groups like the National Governors Association have said that states could badly use the roughly $23 billion in lost revenue they’re currently missing out on, and the National Retail Federation and the Retail Industry Leaders Association say the proposal would simply roll back the unfair advantage that online shopping outlets have on brick-and-mortar stores.

The bill, supporters stress, would have no affect on federal revenues, and would simply allow for the collection of sales taxes that consumers already owe but rarely pay.”

This reliance on playing the fairness card to extract more revenue by closing the collection and accounting loophole assumes that the consumer is duty bound to just keep paying the burden for ever-expanded government budgets. Completely absent from the debate is whether the existing sale tax rates are excessive to begin with. This dialectic trap has government tax collectors avoiding any reevaluations of the formula for revenue enhancements.

The logical alternative for implementing an internet sale state tax is to reduce the existing individual state sales taxes, on brick-and-mortar businesses, to maintain a revenue neutral offset. States have the ability to impose their own sale tax rates. However, the notion that internet sales receipts need to be taxed to increase the coffers of state treasuries, does nothing to reduce the rate of increases in public budgets, much less reducing expenditures in real dollars.

The potential for such a reasonable approach to fiscal sanity is entirely out of whack, with the nature of political parasites. Tax collection has little fiscal relationship with raising funds to run government. Taxation is primarily about behavior control.

Internet savvy consumers seek competitive products and services online. Their method of unconventional payment presents another issue for the sponsors of this proposed legislation. One example is described in the analysis, What an Internet Sales Tax Could Mean for Your Bitcoin Stash.

“This means that under the Marketplace Fairness Act, some online transactions could conceivably escape the Internet sales tax if bitcoins are the medium of exchange. Here’s how. Retailers like Amazon charge sales tax for certain jurisdictions already, based on your shipping address.Bitcoins, however, aren’t associated with any address at all-that’s the whole point. If you pay for a book in bitcoins but have it shipped to your house, calculating the tax would be easy. But we regularly buy all sorts of digital goods now that don’t get shipped anywhere-music and software, to name two examples.None of this is to suggest that bitcoin-based transactions are or should be exempt from online sales taxes-just that collecting them presents a new challenge. On the one hand, this could play out badly for Bitcoin if the ambiguity discourages retailers from adopting the tender. On the other hand, it also creates the possibility of a loophole. “Oops,” the businesses will tell the states. “We can’t collect this tax for you because the customer paid in bitcoins and we don’t know where he or she lives.”

If public consumers and taxpayers accept sale tax as a legitimate structure of payment to their respected state governments, the inclusion of internet sales seems to be a reasonable inclusion. All the same, the federal government has limited jurisdiction into the collection practices of individual states. Allowing careerist politicians and bureaucrats, free reign to add layers of complexity and punitive penalties that tracks personal purchasing patterns is another nail in the coffin of personal privacy. Overall, S.336 is a bad bill.

37 Statistics Which Show How Four Years Of Obama Have Wrecked The U.S. Economy

The mainstream media covered the inauguration of Barack Obama with breathless anticipation on Monday, but should we really be celebrating another four years of Obama?  The truth is that the first four years of Obama were an absolute train wreck for the U.S. economy.  Over the past four years, the percentage of working age Americans with a job has fallen, median household income has declined by more than $4000, poverty in the U.S. has absolutely exploded and our national debt has ballooned to ridiculous proportions.  Of course all of the blame for the nightmarish performance of the economy should not go to Obama alone.  Certainly much of what we are experiencing today is the direct result of decades of very foolish decisions by Congress and previous presidential administrations.  And of course the Federal Reserve has more influence over the economy than anyone else does.  But Barack Obama steadfastly refuses to criticize anything that the Federal Reserve has done and he even nominated Ben Bernanke for another term as Fed Chairman despite his horrific track record of failure, so at a minimum Barack Obama must be considered to be complicit in the Fed’s very foolish policies.  Despite what the Obama administration tells us, the U.S. economy has been in decline for a very long time, and that decline has accelerated in many ways over the past four years.  Just consider the statistics that I have compiled below.  The following are 37 statistics which show how four years of Obama have wrecked the U.S. economy…

1. During Obama’s first term, the number of Americans on food stamps increased by an average of about 11,000 per day.

2. At the beginning of the Obama era, 32 million Americans were on food stamps.  Today, more than 47 million Americans are on food stamps.

3. According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”

4. The number of Americans receiving money directly from the federal government each month has grown from 94 million in the year 2000 tomore than 128 million today.

5. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income” at this point.

6. The unemployment rate in the United States is exactly where it was (7.8 percent) when Barack Obama first entered the White House in January 2009.

7. When Barack Obama first entered the White House, 60.6 percent of all working age Americans had a job.  Today, only 58.6 percent of all working age Americans have a job.

8. During the first four years of Obama, the number of Americans “not in the labor force” soared by an astounding 8,332,000.  That far exceeds any previous four year total.

9. During Obama’s first term, the number of Americans collecting federal disability insurance rose by more than 18 percent.

10. The Obama years have been absolutely devastating for small businesses in America.  According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans breaks down by presidential administration…

Bush Sr.: 11.3

Clinton: 11.2

Bush Jr.: 10.8

Obama: 7.8

11. Median household income in America has fallen for four consecutive years.  Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.

12. The economy is not producing nearly enough jobs for the hordes of young people now entering the workforce.  Approximately 53 percentof all U.S. college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed in 2011.

13. According to a report from the National Employment Law Project, 58 percent of the jobs that have been created since the end of the recession have been low paying jobs.

14. Back in 2007, about 28 percent of all working families were considered to be among “the working poor”.  Today, that number is up to 32 percent even though our politicians tell us that the economy is supposedly recovering.

15. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, only 24.6 percent of all of the jobs in the United States are “good jobs” at this point.

16. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before.

17. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the United States is losinghalf a million jobs to China every single year.

18. The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.

19. According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted for 31.8 percentof all global economic activity in 2001.  That number declined steadily over the course of the next decade and was only at 21.6 percent in 2011.

20. The United States actually has plenty of oil and we should not have to import oil from the Middle East.  We need to drill for more oil, but Obama has been very hesitant to do that.  Under Bill Clinton, the number of drilling permits approved rose by 58 percent.  Under George W. Bush, the number of drilling permits approved rose by 116 percent.  Under Barack Obama, the number of drilling permits approved actuallydecreased by 36 percent.

21. When Barack Obama took office, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $1.84.  Today, the average price of a gallon of gasoline is$3.26.

22. Under Barack Obama, the United States has lost more than 300,000 education jobs.

23. For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless.  That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.

24. Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 now have a poverty rate of 37 percent.

25. More than three times as many new homes were sold in the United States in 2005 as were sold in 2012.

26. Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.

27. Health insurance costs have risen by 29 percent since Barack Obama became president.

28. Today, 77 percent of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.

29. It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.

30. The total amount of money that the federal government gives directly to the American people has grown by 32 percent since Barack Obama became president.

31. The Obama administration has been spending money on some of the most insane things imaginable.  For example, in 2011 the Obama administration spent $592,527 on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.

32. U.S. taxpayers spend more than 20 times as much on the Obamas as British taxpayers spend on the royal family.

33. The U.S. government has run a budget deficit of well over a trillion dollars every single year under Barack Obama.

34. When Barack Obama was first elected, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio was under 70 percent.  Today, it is up to 103 percent.

35. During Obama’s first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.

36. As I wrote about yesterday, when you break it down the amount of new debt accumulated by the U.S. government during Obama’s first term comes to approximately $50,521 for every single household in the United States.  Are you ready to contribute your share?

37. If you started paying off just the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.

But despite all of these numbers, the mainstream media and the left just continue to shower Barack Obama with worship and praise.  Newsweek recently heralded Obama’s second term as “The Second Coming“, and at Obama’s pre-inauguration church service Reverand Ronald Braxton openly compared Obama to Moses…

At Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, Braxton reportedly crafted his speech around Obama’s personal political slogan: “Forward!”

Obama, said Braxton, was just like Moses facing the Red Sea: “forward is the only option … The people couldn’t turn around. The only thing that they could do was to go forward.” Obama, said Braxton, would have to overcome all obstacles – like opposition from Republicans, presumably, or the bounds of the Constitution. Braxton continued, “Mr. President, stand on the rock,” citing to Moses standing on Mount Horeb as his people camped outside the land of Israel.

But it wasn’t enough to compare Obama with the founder of Judaism and the prophet of the Bible. Braxton added that Obama’s opponents were like the Biblical enemies of Moses, and that Obama would have to enter the battle because “sometimes enemies insist on doing it the hard way.”

So what do you think the next four years of Obama will bring?

Source: The Economic Collapse

The Irony of 47.7 Million Americans Subsisting On Food Stamps

As of November of 2012, a mind-numbing 47.7 million Americans subsist on taxpayer-funded food stamps.  One in seven Americans cannot feed himself or herself with a job or work of any kind.  What constitutes the irony to this national tragedy?  Answer: our U.S. Congress imports 100,000 legal immigrants into the USA with green cards every 30 days.

No matter how much poverty and unemployment blacks, whites and Hispanic Americans suffer– the leaders of this country continually pound more humans into the mix without pause.  At the same time, food banks go belly up with bare shelves. Over 13 million American children live in destitute poverty and cannot secure three square meals per day.

While Congress supports our enormous military spending into the trillions of dollars and two 10 year long wars that devour (ed) money—it fails to create jobs and feed our poorest.  It fails the fundamental rights of our own citizens to work and eat.

The gross statistics created by our U.S. Congress:  (Source:hubpages.com)

#1 According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”

#2 In October 2008, 30.8 million Americans were on food stamps. By August 2012 that number had risen to 47.1 million Americans.

#3 Right now, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.

#4 It is projected that half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once before they turn 18 years of age.

#5 According to new numbers that were just released by the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of Americans living in poverty increased to a new all-time record high of 49.7 million last year.

#6 The number of Americans living in poverty has increased by about 6 million over the past four years.

#7Today, about one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level.

#8According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate for children living in the United States is about 22 percent.

#9 Overall, approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.

#10 In the United States today, close to 100 million Americans are considered to be either “poor” or “near poor”.

#11 One university study estimates that child poverty costs the U.S. economy 500 billion dollars each year.

#12 Households that are led by a single mother have a 31.6 percent poverty rate.

#13 In 2010, 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States were on food stamps.

Once you research the numbers, you cannot help but look to your own U.S. Senators and House reps and see failure, duplicity and corruption.  No excuses!  How could men and women who are supposed to represent American citizens continually leave American citizens in the grips of poverty, joblessness and homelessness?

Some kind of moral, ethical and spiritual wrong grows in the nation’s capitol all the way up to the president.  American citizens become its victims.

Do you think there is any chance of it changing and becoming better as that same U.S. Congress adds over 3.1 million immigrants every year on our way to adding 100 million immigrants within the next 38 years?