Cont: The Biden Presidency (3)

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There is room in the DC Media Bubble for exactly one Presidential Scandal. No more, no less. If there is no real Presidential scandal happening...
 
bruto said:
I'm not convinced of this, but it's hard to tell because it's hard to imagine how a command economy can exist without an authoritarian government.
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Historically the countries who adapted it generally were authoritarian, but that is not a necessary component. It just requires a mandate for economic planning by the people. Most governments today do it to a certain extent, and in times of war or state of emergency they may go full on command economy. So long as democracy is maintained and the people support it, such activity is not authoritarian.

On the micro scale, most businesses run a 'command economy', since each business decides how much of what products it will make and what to charge for them. If most businesses become state owned then the country's economy becomes a 'command economy'.

The alternative to planning is chaos. Capitalism purports to thrive on this. In truth though a large amount of planning is going on all the time, it just isn't coordinated. Many capitalist countries actively discourage coordinated planning on the basis that it stifles competition - as if having all businesses as close as possible to failing is a good thing.
 
Boebert almost giddy about her "tools" to cancel Biden and burn coal. I don't know what these tools are.

https://thehill.com/business/budget...lays-out-spending-cut-demands-for-debt-limit/

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) alluded to the rules change concessions that many of the members extracted from McCarthy from the drawn-out Speaker election earlier this year.

“We fought to have the tools to do what we are doing today, and it’s time that we stop bragging about our tools, admiring our tools, and actually get to nicks them — actually use the tools that we fought so hard for House Republicans to have in this Congress,” Boebert said.

The White House released a $6.8 trillion budget proposal on Thursday that includes tax hikes on the wealthy as a means for reducing the budget deficit. It immediately drew sharp pushback from Republicans.

“His budget makes his priorities clear. His administration is at war with the American people’s freedom and prosperity,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas). “We need to shrink Washington and grow America. His budget would do the opposite.”
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I think she said nix, not nicks.
 
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“We need to shrink Washington” is every Republican’s creed, religion, and middle name*.



*Except of course when they want to expand Washington like Bruce Banner in a bad mood if it means reducing freedoms, imposing religious authority on others, and sticking it to anyone who recognizes them for the un-American, anti-Americans they are.
 
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Aridas said:
Well... Trump Judges doing insane things because politics are being reviewed by Trump Judges who really like doing insane things because politics. What could go wrong?
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We should probably have a thread on banking. The Silicon valley bank thing and all. I'll let the mods do that or you can start the thread. I'm not a money guy. I just understand money as the means to exchange work for goods etc.
 
Bob001 said:
The state of the IRS:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/06/inflation-reduction-act-irs/

It's truly perplexing -- yet not surprising -- that "law 'n' order" Repubs are so opposed to enforcing the tax code.
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I'm sure somewhere there is more relevant post in regards to the IRS hires, but I just spent an hour on hold to ask an agent about a question about how to handle information on a form I've never gotten before, and I wasn't sure how to interpret it.

So after going through all the options on the call in, and then telling an operator the nature of my question so she could direct my call to the appropriate department, the IRS person told me I needed to call instead the number for the personal tax question, and then proceeded to give me the number that I just called.

When I told her that this was the number I called, she told me I just needed to select the right option to get my call directed to the right place, but she couldn't tell me what options I should have done.

Now the first time through on the options menu, I wasn't sure that the indicated options were right so when I got the end and there was a "for all other questions, choose 4" option, and when I selected that, it said, "I'm sorry, we no longer provide telephone support for the option you have chosen. Please refer to the information on the website."

Which is a big problem because if I actually knew enough about the problem to be able to look it up on the website, I wouldn't have to call them.

Anyone who doesn't think the IRS needs more resources and more workers is ****** in the head.
 
My sister didn't get a refund she was entitled to for over a year because the IRS kept insisting she'd cashed the check...which she never received. After many phone calls getting her nowhere, she called our Congressional Rep Suzanne Bonamici. Her office looked into it and found the IRS had no copy/record of the check being cashed by anyone. My sister finally got her refund.

But we all 'know' those thousands of extra IRS hires were really a "shadow army" whose objective was to "shakedown middle-income taxpayers and small businesses". :rolleyes:
 
Stacyhs said:
My sister didn't get a refund she was entitled to for over a year because the IRS kept insisting she'd cashed the check...which she never received. After many phone calls getting her nowhere, she called our Congressional Rep Suzanne Bonamici. Her office looked into it and found the IRS had no copy/record of the check being cashed by anyone. My sister finally got her refund.

But we all 'know' those thousands of extra IRS hires were really a "shadow army" whose objective was to "shakedown middle-income taxpayers and small businesses". :rolleyes:
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But see, it's all about outsourcing it.

Yeah, your sister had to go to her congressperson. For me, they want me to pay a tax accountant to get my question answered. It's the American way!
 
pgwenthold said:
Anyone who doesn't think the IRS needs more resources and more workers is ****** in the head.
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Here's another anecdote: My father enjoyed playing around with stocks and such. I don't, so the account(s) I inherited made my tax returns far more complex, and I made a mistake on those returns for several years running. The IRS finally spotted my mistake and told me to pay up, which I did. I also paid a tax professional to file amended returns for previous years in which I had made the same mistake. The Treasury cashed the checks I enclosed with those amended returns.

But those amended returns confused the IRS. To start off, the IRS made a mistake similar to the one I had made and told me I owed still more money. I sent a letter to the IRS explaining their mistake. This was near the start of the pandemic, and it seems IRS agents were working from home and didn't have online access to my returns. The first IRS agent to respond to my letter asked me to send a duplicate of the relevant tax return. Then the case got handed to a second IRS agent, who asked me to send another duplicate of that return. When a third IRS agent asked me to send a third duplicate, I gave up and ignored the request. After considerable time had passed, the IRS agreed with my analysis of their mistake.

But that wasn't the end of the story. It seems there's a law that prevents the IRS from accepting money paid to correct returns that are too old, so the IRS sent me a couple of checks refunding the money I had paid with my earliest amended returns. It also seems the IRS began to pay special attention to each new year's tax filing. As a result, for a couple of years now, the IRS has sent me an additional refund check because their examination of my return showed that I failed to take advantage of some tax break to which I was entitled.

I doubt whether trying to find ways to give me a bigger refund is a wise use of scarce IRS resources, but I'm not going to argue with them. On the other hand, I have been simplifying my inherited accounts to make my interactions with the IRS less complicated.
 
W.D.Clinger said:
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But that wasn't the end of the story. It seems there's a law that prevents the IRS from accepting money paid to correct returns that are too old, so the IRS sent me a couple of checks refunding the money I had paid with my earliest amended returns. It also seems the IRS began to pay special attention to each new year's tax filing. As a result, for a couple of years now, the IRS has sent me an additional refund check because their examination of my return showed that I failed to take advantage of some tax break to which I was entitled.
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This is actually an example of a broader issue. For the vast majority of taxpayers, income is already reported to the IRS through W-2s, 1099s and other forms, and almost 90% take the standard deduction. They already know everything you're telling them. It would be easy for the IRS -- properly funded and staffed -- to prepare tax returns for every taxpayer based on the information it has, and let the taxpayer either accept it or revise it as needed. But the multi-billion-dollar tax prep companies have lobbied against it aggressively, so we all have to go through this basically pointless exercise every year.
 
And Biden has a new crisis to deal with, thanks to that drone being shot down over internatinal waters. There has got to be some kind of response, and it can's just be "tsk tsk" to Russia. Even more sanctions on the way, I supsect.
 
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