"On Friday, a Memphis federal jury acquitted FedEx pilot Vernice Kuglin of six counts of felony Tax Evasion and Willful Failure to File tax returns.
Ms. Kuglin’s attorneys, Tax Honesty Movement barristers Larry Becraft and Robert G. Bernhoft, told reporters that Kuglin was indicted seven months ago and had refused to plead the case out for a lesser sentence._ During her testimony Kuglin testified that since 1995, she had sent numerous letters to the IRS requesting that they inform her of what law required her to pay the Individual Income Tax. To this day, she has not received an answer.
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At 1:30 Friday afternoon, the jury returned not guilty verdicts on all counts.
After the jury had been excused the U.S. Attorney reportedly demanded that the Judge order the defendant to file her forms, pay her taxes and obey the law. The Judge reportedly replied “Sir, I don’t work for the IRS.”
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The case is: U.S. District Court, Western District of Tennessee (Memphis) # 03-CR-20111, USA v. Kuglin."
Thanks for the excellent news, Roger. This is just one example of thousands of written requests to the IRS for answers to simple questions, to which no satisfactory reply ensues. Topics include what law requires me to pay individual income tax, what law requires me to file, what law gives the IRS jurisdiction to operate outside the District of Columbia (hint: no answer), how can I be compelled to file when the 1040 booklet says this is voluntary, if this is mandatory why does the word ‘mandatory’ appear nowhere on my return or in the accompanying booklet, am I not waiving my 5th Amendment rights if I sign my return, etc.
Disclaimer: The above court case and the fact that the IRS cannot answer these questions do not mean it is safe to follow in the footsteps of the above-mentioned FedEx pilot Vernice Kuglin, her bravery notwithstanding. You can lose far more easily than win, and when you lose to the IRS (Infernal Robbery Squad?) you can lose everything.
Mob rules: Unless one possesses the courage and conviction to fight on the front lines of tax reform full-time for years, and to withstand whatever withering abuse the IRS will dish out, the simplest and safest bet is to safeguard your family and possessions. Just white-knuckle it and pay the protection fee, and keep the trenchcoats off the doorstep if you know what’s good for you. It’s all or none–no dabbling. Many have tried poking it with a stick, only to have the stick shoved in by the ‘Insert Rectal Stick’ gang.
This just in: Wealthy California independent gubernatorial candidate Arianna Huffington paid just $771 in federal income tax over the past two years (source: Fox News). She spends more than that on a DRESS. If you’re in the middle class and paid about ten times that much, take note that if there had been instead a national sales tax, she would have been made to pay her fair share of the tax burden. With no stupid forms to fill out.
Debate, sure- but then anything is open to “debate”. But no legal arguments. SCOTUS has ruled that the XVI is fine, and so have many lesser courts. I suppose it could be thrown out by a Constitutional Convention, but not by a bill, nor by the Courts.
I don’t know about that case, but the fact that the IRS did not respond to various Tax Protestor queries does not limit their authority- this has also been ruled upon ad nausem. Let me say this again- there have been NO, repeat NO recent effective legal challenges to the General Taxing authority of the IRS. In fact, dudes who bring them up are routinely sent to prison or fined. Of course- the IRS has several times failed to prove that the defendant was actually guilty of a Criminal tax offense. Just like some defendants are found “not guilty” of murder- does not mean that the Murder Statutes are in any way invalid. It simply means that the IRS did not meet the “burden of proof”- which is exactly what the Juror said.
I doubt if this case set any citable legal precedent that the IRS has to answer Tax Protestors silly arguements. We have done this over and over here on the SDMB. Even the glorious Cecil has weighed in- there is no legal challenge to the XVI. All those silly Tax Protestor arguements have been wieghed and found wanting time & again.
We have also endlessly debated a “flat tax”. Do a search sometimes, goddammit, dudes. In order for a “flat tax” to be “revenue neutral” it would have to be around 20%. Thus, the middle class would pay more, in most proposals the poor would pay about the same, and the rich would pay less.
Of course, you can talk about cutting back “needless” federal programs. However, since no 2 people agree on what is "needless’, what you gotta do is FIRST get THAT debate out of the way. Get a nice majority to agree what should be cut, then we’ll go on from there.:dubious:
Next time, before you go off on a rant, do some goddamn research here on the . You’ll see your rant has been debunked over & over.
I don’t know the specific details of Arianna’s finances, but it’s totally possible to be a millionaire and not have much of an income in a given year, either through capital gains losses or just because you’ve hidden it all under the mattress. And one can assume that in the process of amassing those millions, a considerable amount of income taxes were paid, probably as much as the typical middle-class citizen would pay in an average working career. So the “fair share” of the tax burden has already been paid.
What this paragraph boils down to is that you think people should be taxed just for having money.
Thanks, Mr. Miskatonic, those are interesting cases. I have another stupid tax protestor idea. Corporations are considered artificial persons under the law, correct? Corporations are allowed to deduct from their taxable income all or most of their justifiable business expenses, right? So how come, I as a natural person, can only deduct certain living expenses. As a natural person, living is my business, so I should be able to deduct expenses for rent, food, gas, entertainment, etc. Businesses get to deduct all these things if their are expended in the course of business. So what would stop me from filing a legal challenge, not to taxation itself, but to the present tax structure that discriminates against natural persons. Is it not a violation of the 14th amendment? OK, flame away and tell me why this is a stupid argument…
The key problem with money is when it’s allowed to accumulate over generations.
Britain fixed that with high death taxes.
If it were up to me, I’d say there should be a flat death tax of 100%.
In the case of married people, that would entail whatever part the deceased owned - in community property states 50%, and in other states whatever the individual owned.
For those of you praising Ms. Kuglin, you should be aware that she is still liable for the taxes she owes. Her acquittal just means she won’t go to jail because she lacked the requisite criminal intent to evade her tax obligations. She will still be writing checks to the IRS for a long, long time.
Why, exactly, is this a problem? Why is the government a better recipient of my life savings than my children are?
And your proposal for married couples will leave widows homeless. Most of a couples “wealth” is tied up in assets, especially a house. Forfeiting 50% of this wealth to the government will require liquidating the home of the surviving spouse.
Gonna stop now before I become Pit-like, but there is no way you can justify this policy.
Or you could go to a wealth tax - which is - if finagle’s guess about Ms. Huffington’s income is correct (and given the state of the stock market, I’m guessing he is right on - the really wealthy make most of their income in capital gains from stock - not a lot of that happening lately) is what would tax the wealthy regardless of their income.
Not that I’m a proponent of that. Just saying, that’s all.
And, in my experience, the well off in places with high sales tax (Canada, Europe) do their shopping out of the country in places with low sales tax. There is a reason people come to the Mall of America from all over - Minnesota doesn’t tax clothing. You are supposed to claim it on your own state/countries taxes and even up - but talk about a paperwork nightmare!
Exactly which law or legal precedent requires the IRS to tell you the answers to your ‘simple questions’? There isn’t any sort of general requirement that governmental bodies answer legal queries for laws to be effective, so the fact that the IRS doesn’t have lawyers on staff to answer your legal questions is completely and utterly irrelevant to whether or not tax laws actually exist. If you really want the answers to those questions, previous ‘tax protestor’ cases have gone over which laws (note the plural) require you to pay income tax, under what circumstances they require it, that require to file if you owe any taxes, and all of the other questions you haven’t shown that the IRS has to answer to you.
Quite simply, “The idea of Amendment 16 being ‘perfectly legit’” is not under any reasoned debate; complaining that the IRS doesn’t do something they don’t have to do is just absurd. While it’s clear that you don’t like income tax, you haven’t provided an actual argument that the IRS is not empowered to collect income tax, or that the 16th amendment isn’t legitimate. And note that the Kuglin case doesn’t help your case, since she’s going to be paying those taxes with interest, though she’s not going to jail for not paying in the past.
You also don’t answer the basic question that ‘tax protestors’ tend to ignore, to wit: presuming there is a big gaping hole in the tax laws that means that virtually no one in the US is obligated to pay taxes, why would Congress not just pass a ‘technical correction’ law closing the big gaping hole? Congress certainly has no problem passing reams of tax laws, so it seems rather odd that they’d rather risk someone showing the whole US the truth one day rather than slip one more tax law into the thousands (tens of thousands?) of pages of tax law that they’ve passed.
The “unless” is rather silly unless you can meet the traditional tax protestor challenge: please cite one single, solitary court case in which your theory of invalid income tax was upheld. Not a case in which a person was required to pay taxes but didn’t serve jail time, but a case in which a court upheld one of these tax protestor theories.
New & Improved, Easy-to-Read Disclaimer: Pay your taxes.
The question of why it should be considered acceptable and even desirable to question or protest anything and everything else about any level of government, exceptone particular method of taxation enforced by a certain federal government-affiliated agency, may be one for a separate thread, possibly in a separate forum.
If we examine whether anyone who asks us to send them money is ever expected to answer our reasonable questions about why we should pay it, we find that the list is long indeed. It includes merchants, utility companies, doctors, lawyers, cellular service providers, creditors of every description, my brother, law enforcement agencies, traffic courts, property tax assessors, charities, churches, vendors, literally everyone. Moreover, other government agencies answer questions every day about their operations, including the military. IMO the IRS has earned no exemption.
Fighting for tax reform, disagreeing about a particular method of collection, or even questioning the method’s legality, should not be accepted as a definition of ‘tax protestation’. Rather, a ‘tax protestor’ (a term which has somehow supplanted ‘traitor’ as worst American epithet) IMO is a nitwit who just doesn’t want to pay taxes and offers no alternative way to fund the government.
The NRST (National Retail Sales Tax) described in H.R. 2001 is one alternative to the current system of taxing people because they have money. Here’s another:
Citizens do benefit from a number of services only a government can realistically provide.
The government clearly needs money to operate.
The govt. is in a much better position to know how much it needs than is the citizen.
The citizens should therefore simply have their federal income tax withholding be not the percentage it is now, but rather 100%.
The govt. then refunds to the taxpayer the amount which its calculations determine to be the after-tax remainder necessary and sufficient for the citizen to have each week. IRS computers and staff, being inerrantly accurate, create no unnecessary lag time between workweek and refund time, and checks are always right on the money.
Socioeconomic class divisions are blurred as the yawning gap between the haves and have-nots is sutured. A spirit of national unity sets in.
The govt. gets all the money it needs, when it needs it.
The citizen gets all he or she really needs, without ever having to fill out tax forms, understand the tax code, question the IRS, compute deductions, lobby or bribe pols for tax breaks, mail a return, go through an audit or envy a fellow citizen.
The question of why you’re rambling on with irrelevant material like the paragraph above may be one for this thread. No one is asserting that it us unacceptable to question or protest anything about the IRS and/or income tax, we’re asserting that your arguments are simply broken. Your arguments are standard arguments used by the people known as ‘tax protestors’ whether you wish to acknowledge that or not, and they’ve either been debunked or fall apart under the least examination, and that’s the context in which the term ‘tax protestor’ has been used. I’d love to get rid of the income tax, but that’s completely and utterly relevant to the question of whether the IRS collecting income tax is legal.
Your second paragraph is another batch of irrelevant rambling; all it shows is that you would like the IRS to answer certain questions, not that the IRS is required to answer those questions in order for their actions to be legal. Saying that you’d like the IRS to do something and that they’re illegal if they don’t do what you want is not substantive debate. As I said before and you tried to ignore, the answers to your questions can be found in a plethora of court cases where those questions were answered in a way that the defendant didn’t really like.
I also note that you still haven’t provided an example of a single court anywhere in the United States accepting your arguments, and that you have yet to explain why Congress would not have passed a fix for these alleged gaping holes in the tax code amongst the reams of tax law they pass every year.
Final Post in Thread–Final Disclaimer: Pay Your Taxes
Relevant or irrelevant…one wonders whether you are certain of the difference.
While it’s easy and convenient to label almost anything as “irrelevant rambling”, cognitively processing the paragraph in question should be a prerequisite. Let’s review: Everyone else asking me for money answers to why I should pay it; the IRS has earned no exemption. That means they should too. It can’t be made any simpler. Some people feel better believing no reasoned debate on this topic is occurring, but others are not content with the ostrich method. They are asking the tough questions and requiring satisfactory replies. You accept the absence of reply to this or that question posed by you as proof that none exists. Citizens can thus use your same logic when no answer is given to simple questions like, “What specific rule in the tax code makes it ‘mandatory’ for me to file and pay an income tax? Is there any?” No answer…verrrrrry fishy. What have they got to hide?
Here’s another one: The IRS asks lots of questions of the individual citizens, and expects solid answers–pronto, or else. No one has successfully answered why the citizens should not enjoy the same courtesy in return.
We read that you would “love to get rid of the income tax”, Vitamin B2, but no alternative replacement is suggested. That’s thin ice.
As a final note…Sorry for stepping on the toes of any here who work for the IRS. You’re just doing your job. I’m no tax attorney, just a regular law-abiding, taxpaying citizen. Reverence for the IRS notwithstanding, millions prefer being able to question their government and pay less tax instead of more. Those who instead prefer silently paying more, and are thus resentful rather than grateful for any tax cut, should follow their conscience and send in every extra dollar available. Thank you.
Really? You mean you get those sort of answers from the dudes who collect your State sales taxes? State property taxes? State Income taxes?:dubious:
The answer is and always has been: “because Admendment XVI and then Congress in passing Title 26 says you should”. Rest assured, Title 26 does say you have to pay Income taxes on Taxable Income. Of course, since some dudes don’t have Taxable Income, the Code can’t just say “everyone who lives in- or is a citizen of- the USA must pay Income Taxes”- nor are laws written like that. If you don’t think it does- read that very well written link above, provided by Dewey.
The IRS used to actually respond to those kinds of queries- until they found out they weren’t questions at all- just silly legal challenges. A well reasoned answer just got more queries, and so forth. No one ever respsonded to the query with “Oh, well, since you explained it so nicely, here’s my check”. And truely- Tax Protestors don’t want answers. Congress then told the IRS they don’t have to bother responding.
Remember, dopers- it ain’t “the IRS”. It’s Congress. Congress passes the Tax laws, gives the IRS it’s budget, and tells the IRS how to collect, and how stringent to be. The IRS simply does what Congress and the Administration tells them to do. (Not to say there aren’t a few “rogue” IRS Agents, of course)
“Should”? Sure, it would be nice if they responded with a nice little form letter:
But of course, whether they respond is irrelevant to the matter of whether you must pay income taxes, and you’ll find that the same is true of any other debts. If you owe money on your credit card, and the bank doesn’t respond when you ask “What law makes it mandatory for me to pay this?”, tough luck… you still owe them money.