If you missed Fred Thompson’s speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention today you can view it on YouTube or read the text at CNN.

My favorite bit concerned the Dem tax policies:

Now our opponents tell you not to worry about their tax increases.

They tell you they are not going to tax your family.

No, they’re just going to tax "businesses"! So unless you buy something from a "business", like groceries or clothes or gasoline … or unless you get a paycheck from a big or a small "business", don’t worry … it’s not going to affect you.

They say they are not going to take any water out of your side of the bucket, just the "other" side of the bucket! That’s their idea of tax reform.

Exactly.

Billionaire and presidential race spoiler Ross Perot is back. During the 1992 race Perot was famous for making economic charts and graphs part of his political process as he attempted to explain in clear terms the economic trends of taxation, government spending, GDP and national debt, and why he thought we were headed towards disaster.

Now Perot has launched a web site, Perot Charts, which is just stock full of charts and graphs highlighting America’s “economic crises” due to deficit spending.

In a statement Monday, Perot said the nation’s debt reached $9.4 trillion in April and is rising more than $1 billion a day.

"We are leaving our children and grandchildren with debt they cannot possibly pay," he said. "The economic crisis facing America today is far greater than anything since the Great Depression."

There’s also a blog with some additional materials. I rather like this chart:

It clearly shows that the top 10 percent of earners pay an astounding 69.7 percent of the taxes in this country. Add in “earned income tax credit” and what we have here is wealth redistribution (can you say “socialism” children?).

Now we hear that Obama wants to eliminate the $250K limit on Social Security taxes:

The presidential candidate told senior citizens in Ohio that it is unfair for middle-class earners to pay the Social Security tax "on every dime they make," while millionaires and billionaires pay it on only "a very small percentage of their income."

This would be the largest expansion of FDR’s “New Deal” since LBJ’s “Great Society”. Obama would be turning something that was originally intended to be a pensioning program for retirees into yet another liberal wealth redistribution scheme. It’s bad enough that the government takes my money and returns it years later with a fraction of the interest that I could earn in the private sector. Now he wants to take money and flat out give it to people who didn’t earn it.

To further complicate matters, Obama is proposing a “Doughnut Plan” in which income between $102K and $250K would still be immune to Social Security tax. Any doubt that once in place, the hole of this “doughnut” would gradually shrink until it completely disappears?

McCain, on the other hand, would not consider an increase “under any imaginable circumstance” (something Obama would never promise). Then again, he is mangling the presentation of his Social Security plan to the point of appearing to be flip-flopping on the word that frightens liberals so much: “privatization”.

Hey McCain, when you allow younger workers to choose the accounts they want to put their retirement savings into it is in fact partial privatization, so don’t be afraid of calling it that. Old people will understand as long as you guarantee their retirement income too. We have to get out of this hole. Lead us there, and maybe even libertarians like me will follow.

Many people are wondering when they’ll get their piece of the pie when the federal government engages in this year’s blatant wealth redistribution scheme. Here’s the answer, directly off of the IRS website.

First of all, note that this schedule is only for those whose invasive, fascist information gathering survey tax form has been received and processed by the government bureaucrats by 15 April. Second, if you want to know how much you’ll be getting, you can use the IRS’ online calculator — if you have your tax return handy and about ten minutes to spare. Third, those of you who do direct deposit will be served first (isn’t this unfair to poor people .

Beginning New Years Day, Texas will begin levying a $5/head tax on strip club patrons in order to redistribute money from normal, healthy males to organizations that help rape victims.

We have seen behaviors taxed before, such as high taxes on cigarettes to help pay for the state’s health care costs. Apparently, Texas legislators think that men (and women!) that go to strip clubs are more likely to commit rape than those that don’t. Why else would they link the two activities through taxation?

Next up, a tax on toy store sales to support victims of drunken drivers. After all, everyone knows that dads are driven to drink after a Christmas Eve night of trying to assemble toys from instructions written by a poorly educated Chinese peasant.

WSJ writes about the backlash against tithing. Megachurches’ seemingly wasteful spending, disbelief that giving a certain percentage will ensure salvation, and so on.

My problem with requiring a 10% donation of my income to a church is quite different. Back when the Old Testament was written, kings took part of your income to support themselves in the manner in which they wished to be accustomed. The people had to take care of themselves, and the church often served as the only source of social welfare available.

Today, the federal government takes a third (or more) of our income in order to give it to those "in need", and state and local governments take even more. Add it all up and over half your money goes to the government in order to pay for welfare, health care for the uninsured, child care for single mothers, palaces for oil tyrants foreign aid, and so on.

Doesn’t that take care of my obligation to my fellow man?

Besides, I decide where my charity donations go. My favorite two are the Salvation Army and Fisher House.

WaPo’s Robert Novak tells us that next year’s tax refunds will go out late. At issue is the alternative minimum tax (AMT) which could affect 23 million people.

The underlying reason is a 38-year-old congressional tax blunder that has never been corrected. In 1969, Congress passed the alternative minimum tax (AMT) to collect from 155 tax-avoiding millionaires. But because the scheme was not indexed for inflation, this year alone it would hit 23 million extra people with higher taxes. The AMT will be "patched" to provide relief, as it has been in every Congress, but not in time this year. Refunds totaling more than $75 billion will arrive many weeks late not only for taxpayers earning $100,000 to $200,000 who are unintentionally affected by the AMT but also for lower-income persons because the IRS refund procedure will be disrupted by the delay.

But the real reason that tax refunds will be late is Charles Rangel (D-NY), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Rangel swore that instead of patching the AMT, the "mother of all tax reforms" would be passed which would eliminate the AMT and implement a massive tax on the "rich", thus taking a trillion dollars over the next ten years from working, successful people and giving it to those who, uh, aren’t.

Although Rangel’s tax bill was trimmed down even before it got out of the House (where it passed on a party line vote), everyone knew that it had no chance of gaining the necessary supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate to pass. But expecting a Democrat to abandon a foolish path without all the fluff and fanfare of a peacock spreading his tail to garner attention is naive and a little downright foolish.

Grave philosophical differences between Republicans and Democrats prevented passage. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed permitting Republicans to offer four floor amendments to the bill. Reid did not want to subject his Democrats to voting against tax cuts, including repeal of the estate tax. So the two party leaders mutually refused to grant the unanimous consent needed for the Senate to take up the bill, and the senators left Washington with another piece of work undone.

The AMT patch will, Novak tells us, almost certainly pass in December. The IRS has already said that it will take 10 weeks to make the necessary adjustments to computer programs once the details of the patch are known.

And that is the reason your tax refund will be late next year. When it is, feel free to write Congressman Rangel thank him, or maybe to ask for a personal loan to cover your commitments until the government can meet its commitment to you. But then again, by then you probably won’t remember who is responsible. After all, the NY Times and its MSM cohorts will have no doubt already spent weeks telling you that it is all Bush’s fault.

The “drunken sailor” tradition continues as Congress starts talking about raising taxes to fix the nation’s faltering bridges. There’s lots of options on the table but look for Congress to take the easy way out: increased gasoline taxes.

The Treasury Inspector General conducted a little audit exercise in which IRS employees (including managers and “a contractor”) were called by someone pretending to be computer support needing cooperation to fix a computer problem. In 60 percent of the calls the auditor was not only able to convince the employee to reveal their user name and password, but also to change their password to one that the faux help desk person suggested.

Not only did 61 of the 102 employees violate basic security protocols, only 8 of them followed procedure and reported the scam call.

The Treasury Inspector General observes:

The above conditions were particularly alarming because we had conducted similar social engineering test telephone calls in August 2001 and December 2004. Our 2001 and 2004 test calls yielded 71 percent and 35 percent noncompliance rates, respectively. In response to these two prior audits, the IRS took corrective actions to raise awareness of password protection requirements and social engineering attempts. However, the corrective actions have not been effective. Based on the results of this audit, we conclude employees either do not fully understand security requirements for password protection or do not place a sufficiently high priority on protecting taxpayer data in their day-to-day work. To better understand employee behavior, we asked the employees in our sample why they did not comply with IRS password security requirements. Some of the notable reasons given were that the employee thought the scenario sounded legitimate and believable, did not think changing his or her password was the same as disclosing the password, or had experienced past computer problems.

So this has been going on for years, attempts to correct the situation have failed, and our civil servants care little about protecting sensitive, personal and private information of the citizens they serve. I’m shocked. <end sarcasm>

Now that I’ve taken the obligatory cheap shot at government employees, I will admit that the IRS is filled with people who are trying their best in making sense of millions of contradictory words of tax code. Further, teaching your average computer user the importance of protecting password information is more difficult than it should be.

On the other hand, if you fire a few people every time they perform one of these audits I bet the numbers would be a lot better next time around. But no, try firing a government employee.

Hat tip to Mumbo Gumbo, who has a pretty good cartoon making fun of the whole situation.

So I’m going through the Turbo Tax wizard and it asks my occupation. I remember that shortly after being discharged from the Army and before beginning a new life as a law student, my brother put down “unemployed spy“. This bit of humor has stuck with me through the years.

This inspired me to write “IRS abolitionist” because (1) it’s none of their damn business how I make my money and (2) I am an anti-IRS activist.

Then I remembered that the IRS is a humorless organization with the power to seize my possessions and freeze my bank accounts without due process of law normally required of other agencies.

So I took it out and entered the innocuous “IT Manager“. Damn that little voice in my head that takes the fun out of life.

I’ve been thinking of my previous post in which I related that the Tax Foundation found that it is households that earn over $65,000 that support this country. The other 60% of American households receive more government aid than they pay in taxes.

Young couples fresh out of college, with years of paying off their college loans, will immediately start supporting the bottom 60%.

After a few years, that couple will have gotten themselves established. When they decide to have kids of their own and Mom should stay home to raise them, they will still be supporting the bottom 60%.

When they are struggling to send their kids to college, they will still be supporting the bottom 60%.

Further, how did we get to a point where twenty percent of our households earn less than $24,700? Great Ceaser’s ghost, just how many people do we have on welfare and food stamps?

What are we, France?