Tag Archives: irs

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Daily Broadside | We’re Witnessing the Use of Unchallenged Institutional Power

It’s Tuesday and I’m back from a little bit of R&R. My thanks to Bruce Gust who filled in for me while I was gone. This is the third year in a row that he’s done that pro bono, and I truly appreciate his contributions. I learned a few things from him about the role that our Founders’ faith played in the days leading up to the Revoltionary War and the role that it played in the early days of our nation. I think some of his meditations can be very helpful in considering how God has guided our country even in its earliest forms (maybe especially in its earliest forms). I’m especially impressed that he’s pulling many of the posts he shared into a book called American Devotional Series: Part One: The Revolutionary War. It’s a great concept and it was Bruce’s gift to give us a sneak peek at his work.

Of course, we’re a long, long way from those “earliest days” of our country. Sometimes it feels like we’re a long, long way from any semblance of faith. I think it’s fair to say that while there still exists a Christian presence in our culture, most of our societal institutions, whether they are political, educational, judicial, medical, technological, business related, scientific or economic, Christianity by and large does not have the cultural influence it once did.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

Big Business: Amazon locks a man out of his account and disrupts the function of his entire smart home system that uses Alexa to communicate with Amazon Echo gadgets.

Earlier this month, Amazon locked a man out of his account, disrupting his extensive smart home system. The suspension was driven by a delivery driver who claimed the man used a racial slur through his automated doorbell system. The only problem is that the man captured the entire interaction on his security system — the communication to the worker was an automated greeting of, “Excuse me, can I help you?”

You can read the linked article but I can save you the step by summarizing. The Amazon delivery driver falsely accused the Amazon customer of using a racial slur. Instead of giving both the driver and the customer the benefit of the doubt and thoroughly investigating, Amazon reacted as though the customer was guilty and punished him for it by essentially locking him out of their services.

Not only is that an inversion of our criminal code that protects the rights of the accused—who is presumed innocent until proven guilty—but it completely ignores a biblical principle that undergirds our system of justice.

Any story sounds true until someone tells the other side and sets the record straight. (Proverbs 18:17, LB)

Also, this is one reason I don’t use lots of “smart home” gadgets. Who wants to voluntarily give any unregulated, unelected, unaccountable organization control of their personal environmental systems? I don’t even like that the natural gas companies can read my meter from the comfort of their offices, much less make decisions at their discretion about whether I can continue to use the services I pay for.

What Amazon did borders on leveraging a social credit system in which they are the arbiters of “good” and “bad” social credit. Who gave them this power? They took it unto themselves.

Political: A suspicious raid on a gun seller in Montana by 20 armed IRS agents supported by members of the ATF.

Tom Van Hoose has owned Highwood Creed Outfitters in Great Falls, Montana for 13 years. As he pulled into work Wednesday morning, twenty heavily armed Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division agents swarmed his store. He tells TTAG that the IRS agents, in full battle rattle, had been mustered from as far away as Denver and Idaho to serve a warrant for his financial records.

He told us the IRS claims that he has under-reported and failed to report millions of dollars of income. Mr. Van Hoose denied that categorically and told us that anyone who knows anything about the gun business knows there’s not a lot of extra revenue in running a retail gun store and range.

Highwood Creek Outfitters was closed down Wednesday while the agents rifled through his records. The IRS CID troops took ten hours to copy the information on his computers and download his point of sale software information. But what Van Hoose says really concerns him is the fact that in addition to his accounting and sales records, the agents confiscated 13 years of 4473 forms and copied his firearm acquisition and disposition book.

Later in the article, the reporter writes,

Anyone who’s ever completed a 4473 form knows there’s no revenue or financial data there. That form is a record of a firearm purchase transaction used to facilitate a NICS background check and potentially trace a gun’s ownership down the road if it’s used in a crime. Gun dealers are required to keep those forms for at least 20 years.

The question then is, why would the IRS want customer transaction information? Van Hoose tells us the 4473 forms were not included on the list of financial records specifically listed on the warrant the IRS agents served him during the raid. Yet they took them anyway.

I’m sure I don’t know if Mr. Van Hoose has done anything illegal, but it doesn’t sound like he thinks he has, and we’re well aware that gun laws and tax collection are obsessions with the federal government.

What a coinkydink.

Remember that this administration asked for—and got—funding for 87,000 more IRS agents and that many of them will be armed. What happened in Montanta is exactly what we have to fear from a fully armed IRS; raids on unsuspecting citizens to intimidate and harass them.

You think you’ve seen branches of the government weaponized? I bet we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

There used to be a social contract between we the people and our government. We gave them power and they used that power constitutionally and legally. That contract has been torn up and thrown away by the Marxists because they don’t fear the law anymore and, more to the point, they don’t fear God anymore.

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Daily Broadside | The Administrative State Will Be The Death of Us

I long ago came to the conclusion that the alphabet agencies populating the federal government are unconstitutional and should be defunded, decommissioned, razed and salted over — permanently abolished, never to be formed again. The federal government was supposed to be small with powers restricted to those enumerated in the U.S. Constitution.

Jefferson also felt that the central government should be “rigorously frugal and simple.” As president he reduced the size and scope of the federal government by ending internal taxes, reducing the size of the army and navy, and paying off the government’s debt. Limiting the federal government flowed from his strict interpretation of the Constitution.

Offices with the powers of the IRS, the EPA, the DOE, the HHS, the DOJ, FBI and on ad infinitum, were never envisioned by the founders.

Under that system of a separation of powers each branch of the Federal Government was expected to protect its own Constitutional powers such that no single branch accrued power it was not allocated by the Constitution. The Founders understood that individuals were free in direct proportion to each branch of the Federal Government staying strictly within its own bounds, and the most important lane was the legislative lane; a narrow road of strictly enumerated powers written by a Congress consisted of duly elected representatives; with the House of Representatives the body most regularly elected, and with special powers over the origination of revenue bills in the driver’s seat.

But today many legislative and budget powers have been ceded to Presidents and the executive branch through statutes delegating legislative responsibility to Federal regulatory agencies composed of unelected people; and statutes mandating automatic and increased spending on certain programs administered by the executive branch.

That bolded text is the crux of the issue: Congress has delegated its own authority to unelected bureaucracies which issue regulations and rules that have the practical effect of law. Constitutionally, however, only Congress has the power to make law — it’s the legislative branch of the government, for Pete’s sake! — and only the House has the ability to appropriate funds, the lifeblood of these agencies and extra-constitutional organizations.

Yet the pressures of keeping a seat in the House or the Senate means that outsourcing their responsibility to unelected bureaucrats is a convenient way of avoiding responsibility for the onerous administrative state that Americans suffer under.

At first Congress had the upper hand; Congress had been creating the bureaucracy to carry out its wishes. But the more Congress gave away its powers in the form of broad regulatory authority, the more bureaucrats effectively became the lawmakers. The rise of the new imperial Presidency, and it should be shocking but no surprise, as Congress has expanded the bureaucracy creating programs, delegating authority, neglecting budgeting; the executive has attained unprecedented levels of authority. Our executives can command the bureaucracy to implement new procedures and policies without the cooperation of Congress by abusing executive discretion, by exploiting the vagaries of poorly written laws, and now by willfully neglecting and disregarding the laws which indeed are clear.

In his testimony before the 2016 Task Force for Executive Overreach Judiciary Committee (in the same linked document), Dr. Matthew Spalding of Hillsdale College, wrote:

This transfer of lawmaking power away from Congress to an oligarchy of unelected experts who rule through executive decree and judicial edict over virtually every aspect of our daily lives, under the guise of merely implementing the technical details of law, constitutes nothing less than a revolution against our constitutional order. The significance of this revolution cannot be overstated. It threatens to undo the development of the rule of law and constitutional government, the most significant and influential accomplishment of the long history of human liberty.

This revolution has created an increasingly unbalanced structural relationship between an ever more powerful, aggressive and bureaucratic executive branch and a weakening legislative branch unwilling to exercise its atrophied constitutional muscles to check the executive or rein in a metastasizing bureaucracy. If the executive-bureaucratic rule now threatening to overwhelm American society becomes the undisputed norm — accepted not only among the academic and political elites, but also by the American people, as the defining characteristic of the modern state — it could well mark the end of our great experiment in self-government.

Against that background, Michael Walsh’s latest column takes on more urgency.

Bureaucratic parasitism has only accelerated since start of the Nixon administration … as demands for D.C. to “do something” about pretty much everything grew and grew. Having won the war in Europe with Soviet and British help, and defeated the Japanese Empire practically by themselves, Americans felt there was no task too big to tackle. On Nixon’s watch —Tricky Dick’s fatal flaw, like Donald Trump’s, was the fool’s errand of trying to get his enemies (who detested him) to like him—the regulatory agencies were summoned into being, dark golems bent on destroying the Constitution in the guise of trying to Save the Earth.

One of the first up was the Environmental Protection Agency, the demon spawn of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, which mandated (what an ugly word for a democracy to employ) “environmental impact” statements for future federal projects. Nixon put teeth in the law with the creation by executive order of the Environmental Protection Agency at the end of that same year. Then the unelected bureaucrats took over, and turned what had been sold as benign into a ravenous, uncontrollable, punitive beast. And now here we are:

The Biden administration is planning some of the most stringent auto pollution limits in the world, designed to ensure that all-electric cars make up as much as 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the country by 2032, according to two people familiar with the matter. That would represent a quantum leap for the United States — where just 5.8 percent of vehicles sold last year were all-electric — and would exceed President Biden’s earlier ambitions to have all-electric cars account for half of those sold in the country by 2030.

It would be the federal government’s most aggressive climate regulation and would propel the United States to the front of the global effort to slash the greenhouse gases generated by cars, a major driver of climate change.

Death by a thousand cuts as the administrative state piles rule upon rule on top of our backs. Today’s Washington D.C. is a sinister, grotesque Gordian knot not unlike a cancerous tumor that has wrapped itself around the brain stem of its victim. Not doing anything will allow it to eventually kill any semblance of representative government — something I believe we are fast approaching.

Yet the alternative is an aggressive, unsparing treatment that cuts it out before it can do any more damage, and one of those agencies — the DOJ — has already demonized anyone who dares raise an objection to the administrative state as a “domestic terrorist.”

This is why I’ve warned that we’re heading for a significant conflict that can only be described as a civil war. That’s the trajectory we’re on, which is underscored by the literal movement of Americans out of blue zones across the fruited plain.

What we found was striking: There has been a vast migration out of counties that voted for Joe Biden into those counties that voted to reelect Donald Trump.

Census data show a net internal migration of almost 2.6 million (2,562,937 to be exact) from blue counties to red since Biden was elected. (These figures don’t count immigrants or births or deaths, just those Americans moving from one location to another.)

More than 61% of the counties that voted for Biden in 2020 lost population, while 65% of Trump-supporting counties gained population.

Some highlights:

  • Of the 555 counties Biden won, 335 (or 61%) lost population due to internal migration, our analysis found. Of the 2,589 counties that Trump won, 1,675 (or 65%) gained population.
  • Two Biden-voting counties that lost the most from net migration were Los Angeles County, which was down 363,760, and Cook County, Illinois, down 200,718. While many of the blue counties that lost population were urbanized, the exodus was widespread and nationwide, including many far more sparsely populated liberal areas.
  • In contrast, the biggest loss in any red county was Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, down just 18,470.
  • In 13 states that had a net loss of population, red counties nevertheless showed gains. In California, which saw a massive net outflow of 871,127 people in just the past two years, counties that backed Trump had a net gain of 8,412. New Jersey suffered a loss of 107,749 over the past two years, but counties in the Garden State that voted for Trump gained 22,507. Michigan lost 43,188 overall, but its red counties had a net gain of 28,091.
  • On the other hand, blue counties lost population in states that saw overall gains. For example, Florida had a net gain of 622,476 over the past two years. But counties that backed Biden nevertheless lost 3,374. Georgia had a large gain of 128,089, but blue counties still had a net loss of 28,178. Tennessee saw an increase of 146,403 people, but counties that voted for Biden saw a decline of 37,306.

Once the majority of moves have been completed, the red and blue state boundaries will harden and then there won’t be anywhere else to run to. As the federal government favors blue states over red, red states will either file for divorce or have to fight to leave the union.

We’re in for a long slog.

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Daily Broadside | The First Power Move of the 118th Congress

Sorry to have missed posting on Tuesday. I’m balancing a number of after-hours involvements and sometimes I’ve had to deprioritize my blog — something I’m loathe to do, but when you’ve got competing priorities, sometimes you don’t have a choice.

Back to the rat’s nest that is our ruling class in Washington, D.C. The kerfluffle over Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become House speaker ended in him getting the gavel and seems to be paying dividends that most conservatives should welcome as signs of life.

The first order of business was revoking the $72 billion in funding for 87,000 new IRS agents.

House Republicans fulfilled a key campaign promise on Monday, passing legislation to rescind the bulk of an IRS funding boost signed into law last year, marking the first bill passed by the GOP-controlled House this Congress.

The bill, which is unlikely to see action in the Democratic-controlled Senate, passed in a party-line 221-210 vote on Monday evening.

[…]

The Republican bill, formally titled the “Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act,” is barely longer than one page. It directs any “unobligated balances of amounts appropriated or otherwise made available” to the IRS from the Inflation Reduction Act to be rescinded.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated Monday that the legislation would eliminate about $71 billion of the total $80 billion that was allocated for the IRS but would reduce tax revenue by about $186 billion, translating to a $114 billion increase in deficits over the next decade.

It rescinds the funding for the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act passed last year but it won’t pass the Senate, and Brandon wouldn’t sign it if it did.

So is this just virtue-signaling message votes meant to impress voters? “Hey, we tried …” That’s what we got when we handed the presidency, the House and the Senate to Republicans during Trump’s first term and they promised to repeal Obamacare.

On the other hand, they at least exercised their majority and passed the bill along party lines, so at least they know that it’s a priority for the average American. Maybe they should introduce legislation that would dissolve the IRS altogether. That would be super impressive.

Meanwhile, the Illinois House passed one of the most restrictive laws regarding so-called “assault weapons.”

Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he will sign into law Tuesday evening a comprehensive measure that would immediately ban the sale of military-style firearms, despite warnings from gun rights advocates who contend it is unconstitutional and vow a legal challenge.

“For a long time now, I and many other leaders in the Illinois General Assembly have prioritized getting the most dangerous weapons off our state’s streets. Today, honoring the commitment we made, we passed one of the strongest assault weapons bans in the nation, one I will be proud to sign,” the governor said after Democrats in the Illinois House led its final approval earlier Tuesday.

The 68-41 House vote came on the final scheduled day of action for the lame-duck 102nd General Assembly, a day after Senate Democrats passed the measure 34-20 with no Republican support.

Passing this bill became a priority after a shooting in Highland Park last July fourth that killed seven people and wounded about 30 others. It was sponsored by Rep. Bob Morgan, who was at the fourth of July parade.

The shooting was of course tragic, but this bill, besides being unconstitutional, will do exactly nothing to stop mass shootings. Instead, it will be used to document who has the so-called “military-style” guns so that they can easily confiscate them in their next round of Second Amendment abuses.

Upon becoming law, the measure would immediately ban the delivery, sale, import and purchase of so-called assault weapons. Current owners of such firearms would have until Jan. 1 to register gun serial numbers with the Illinois State Police. After that date, people who possess an unregistered firearm covered by the ban face a misdemeanor for a first offense and a felony for subsequent offenses.

Does anyone really believe that creating a registry of guns and who owns them is totally okay because the big, friendly government never abuses their power? And I can’t wait to see how many criminals declare their “assault weapons.”

Besides being unconstitutional, this law will be immediately challenged in court. That’s what the Democrats do—pass a clearly unconstitutional law, collect the information and any fines imposed under the law, and make the people sue for their rights.

It’s called lawfare.

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Daily Broadside | Congress Gives Itself 21 Percent More Money During Worst Inflation in 40 Years

Daily Verse | Ruth 3:9b
“I am your servant Ruth,” she said. “Spread the corner of your garment over me, since you are a kinsman-redeemer.”

Thursday’s Reading: 1 Samuel 1-3

Thursday and I’m back from burying my mother-in-law and seeing my own mother for a couple of days. Don’t take the time you have with them for granted. Average life expectancy in the U.S. is 76 years for men and 81 years for women. If your mom is 80 years old and you see her once or twice a year—you may have only 2 or 3 visits left.

Thanks to those of you who prayed for me and my family while we were gone.

We’re just exiting a pandemic that has wrought untold suffering and destruction on our society by the unscientific imposition of mask and vaccine mandates, the forced erasures of local businesses, and the unprecedented power grabs of our rulers who lord it over us rather than fear us. Our economy, which less than 18 months ago was absolute fire, is in shambles, shredded by Joseph Robinette Biden and his illegitimate junta through anti-American policies such as anti-fracking and anti-Keystone Pipeline, leaving us at the mercy of evil state actors like Russia and Iran and Venezuela. Gas prices, of which I had personal experience over the last 9 days, are stratospheric and show no signs of returning to reasonable levels. This, after we had finally achieved energy independence under Trump’s pro-America policies. There’s a war in Ukraine, creating the greatest flood of refugees since World War II and threatening to tip all of us into World War III.

And what do our betters in Washington, D.C. do in the midst of the greatest inflationary economy in 40 years and the greatest cultural chaos in a generation? They vote themselves a 21 percent raise.

As Americans face an economic crisis, historic inflation and surging gas prices, Congress released a $1.5 trillion omnibus bill on Wednesday allocating $5.9 billion of fiscal 2022 Legislative Branch funding to boosting the allowance and salaries of their staff.

The legislation would grant $774.4 million for the Members Representational Allowance, which funds the House budgets for lawmakers, including staffer salaries and $1.7 billion for House operations.

“This $134.4 million, or 21 percent, boost over the previous fiscal year marks the largest increase in the MRA appropriation since it was authorized in 1996, according to a bill summary by the House Appropriations Committee,” Roll Call reports.

The bill does not technically provide a raise for members of Congress, who earn an annual salary of $174,000. But House staffers, who members use to run errands, and family members of Congressional lawmakers who are often put on payroll, will see a pay increase.

True, the members of congress don’t get a 21% pay raise, but see what they did there? While you and I get our annual 2 percent pay raise (if we’re lucky and have “met expectations”), the thieving people’s representatives take more of your money in order to give it to the lackeys and family members they hire to do the work that we hired them to do so that they have more time to lounge in their tony Washington apartments and homes while dealing themselves sweetheart stock trades to pad their financial portfolios.

The greatest lie in D.C. is the word “revenue” as in “Internal Revenue Service.” Revenue is “the total amount of income generated by the sale of goods or services related to the company’s primary operations.” Do I have to remind you that Washington, D.C.—the government of the United States of America—doesn’t produce anything tangible to “sell” to the American people? Oh, sure, they provide some “shovel-ready” jobs and produce interstate highways, space shuttles, and military weapons. But what they “sell” are promises and ideas that they conveniently outsource to three-letter bureaucracies that have to be funded by taxing those of us who actually provide services that other people want.

The House on Wednesday passed a $1.5 trillion, 2,727-page bill to fund the government this year, and at least the Members don’t have to worry about inflation. They’ve got the government covered.

The DC Leviathan is like Audrey II in The Little Shop of Horrors.

Once people realize they can demand that more money be spent for things they want, but don’t necessarily need, the government steps up and says, “Feed me, Seymour!” The government collects ands spends so much money that it can’t all be accounted for and anyone who’s been around a while knows that a good percentage of it winds up lining the pockets of greedy and immoral men and women (don’t want to be a misogynist).

Can anyone tell me what the government has done for us lately? In what ways have they given you more freedom and let you keep more of the money you earn?

Anyone?

Bueller?

This will only stop when the people stand up and say, “enough!”