SavvySugar

IRS Auditor

TNgirl — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:11:51 -0800

At the end of the tax year the IRS office sent an inspector to audit the books of a Synagogue.

While he was checking the books he turned to the Rabbi and said, 'I notice you buy a lot of candles. What do you do with the candle drippings?'

'Good question,' noted the Rabbi. 'We save them up and send them back to the candle makers, and every now and then they send us a free box of candles.'

'Oh,' replied the auditor, somewhat disappointed that his unusual question had a practical answer. But on he went, in his obnoxious way: 'What about all these bread wafer purchases? What do you do with the crumbs?'

'Ah, yes,' replied the Rabbi, realizing that the inspector was trying to trap him with an unanswerable question. 'We collect them and send them back to the manufacturer, and every now and then they send us a free box of bread-wafers.'

'I see,' replied the auditor, thinking hard about how he could fluster the know-it-all Rabbi. 'Well, Rabbi,' he went on, 'what do you do with all the leftover foreskins from the circumcisions you perform?'

'Here, too, we do not waste,' answered the Rabbi. 'What we do is save all the foreskins and send them to the tax office, and about once a year they send us a complete dick.'

Rep. King on IRS Attack

stephley — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:38:02 -0800

On Thursday, a man flew a plane into a Texas federal building in an apparent domestic terrorist attack. The suicide bomber, identified as Joseph Andrew Stack, was allegedly a right wing extremist who wrote on a website that violence “is the only answer” and expressed anger at the IRS, the federal government, and health care reform. Some on the fringe right have declared Stack a hero.

ThinkProgress caught up with Rep. Steve King (R-IA) at CPAC to talk about the attack in Texas. Asked if the right-wing anti-tax rhetoric might have motivated the attack, King implicitly agreed, noting that he had been a leading opponent of the IRS for some time. He noted that although the attack was “sad,” “by the same token,” it was justified because once the the right succeeds at abolishing the IRS, “it’s going to be a happy day for America.” He sidestepped the question of the legitimacy of the terrorists’ grievances, but sympathized by saying that “I’ve had a sense of ‘why is the IRS in my kitchen.’ Why do they have their thumb in the middle of my back”:

TP: Do you think this attack, this terrorist attack, was motivated at all by a lot of the anti-tax rhetoric that’s popular in America right now?

KING: I think if we’d abolished the IRS back when I first advocated it, he wouldn’t have a target for his airplane. And I’m still for abolishing the IRS, I’ve been for it for thirty years and I’m for a national sales tax. [...] It’s sad the incident in Texas happened, but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary and when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America.

TP: So some of his grievances were legitimate?

KING: I don’t know if his grievances were legitimate, I’ve read part of the material. I can tell you I’ve been audited by the IRS and I’ve had the sense of ‘why is the IRS in my kitchen.’ Why do they have their thumb in the middle of my back. … It is intrusive and we can do a better job without them entirely.

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/02/22/king-justifies-irs-terrorism/

Daughter says pilot in Texas IRS crash was a hero

liliblu — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:18:14 -0800

The Associated Press Monday, February 22, 2010; 9:25 AM

AUSTIN, Texas -- The daughter of a man who crashed his small plane into a building housing offices of the Internal Revenue Service called her father a hero for his anti-government views but said his actions, which killed an IRS employee, were "inappropriate."

Joe Stack's adult daughter, Samantha Bell, spoke to ABC's "Good Morning America" from her home in Norway. Asked during a phone interview broadcast Monday if she considered her father a hero, she said: "Yes. Because now maybe people will listen."
Authorities say Stack, 53, targeted the IRS office building in Austin on Thursday, killing employee Vernon Hunter and himself, after posting a ranting manifesto against the agency and the government. He apparently set fire to his home before flying his plane into the office building.
Hunter's son, Ken Hunter, said he's alarmed by comments that the pilot was a hero.
"How can you call someone a hero who after he burns down his house, he gets into his plane ... and flies it into a building to kill people?" Hunter told ABC." "My dad Vernon did two tours of duty in Vietnam. My dad's a hero."
Bell said she offered her deepest condolences to Hunter's family. She said her father's last actions were wrong.
"But if nobody comes out and speaks up on behalf of injustice, then nothing will ever be accomplished," she told ABC. "But I do not agree with his last action with what he did. But I do agree about the government,"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/22/AR2010022201433.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Report Shows Serious Rise in Extremist Right Wing Groups

stephley — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:33:37 -0800

A disturbing trend, similar to the last time a Democrat occupied the White House shows a steep rise in militia groups masquerading as ‘patriot’ grassroots groups The number of extremist groups in the United States exploded in 2009 as militias and other groups promulgated antigovernment conspiracy theories creating an explosion of populist anger across the country has infiltrated the mainstream, according to a report issued today by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Antigovernment "Patriot" groups - militias and other extremist organizations that see the federal government as their enemy - came roaring back to life over the past year after more than a decade out of the limelight.

The SPLC documented a 244 percent increase in the number of active Patriot groups in 2009. Their numbers grew from 149 groups in 2008 to 512 groups in 2009, an astonishing addition of 363 new groups in a single year. Militias - the paramilitary arm of the Patriot movement - were a major part of the increase, growing from 42 militias in 2008 to 127 in 2009.

The report is the cover story in the Spring 2010 issue of the SPLC's quarterly investigative journal Intelligence Report.

The group asserts that patriot groups have been fueled by anger over the changing demographics of the country, the soaring public debt, the troubled economy and an array of initiatives by President Obama that have been branded "socialist" or even "fascist" by his political opponents.

"This extraordinary growth is a cause for grave concern," said Intelligence Report editor Mark Potok. "The people associated with the Patriot movement during its 1990s heyday produced an enormous amount of violence, most dramatically the Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead."

The recent Austin IRS building attack is leaving those who serve only the public interest feeling terrorized and unsafe. Politicians like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) have fueled anti-government rage with suggestions that public workers who organize are a threat to national security. The Patriot movement has made significant inroads into the conservative political scene, according to the new report. "The 'tea parties' and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism," the report says.

Unlike the 1990s, the Patriot movement's central ideas are being promoted by people with large audiences, such as FOX News' Glenn Beck and U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. Beck, for instance, reinvigorated a key Patriot conspiracy theory - the charge that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is secretly running concentration camps - before finally "debunking" it.

The growth of Patriot groups comes at a time when the number of racist hate groups stayed at record levels - rising from 926 in 2008 to 932 in 2009, according to the report. The increase caps a decade in which the number of hate groups surged by 55 percent. The expansion would have been much greater in 2009 if not for the demise of the American National Socialist Workers Party, a key neo-Nazi network whose founder was arrested in October 2008.

There also has been a surge in "nativist extremist" groups - vigilante organizations that go beyond advocating strict immigration policy and actually confront or harass suspected immigrants. These groups grew from 173 groups in 2008 to 309 in 2009, a rise of nearly 80 percent.

These three strands of the radical right - the hate groups, the nativist extremist groups, and the Patriot organizations - are the most volatile elements on the American political landscape. Taken together, their numbers increased by more than 40 percent, rising from 1,248 groups in 2008 to 1,753 last year.

There are already signs of radical right violence reminiscent of the 1990s. Right-wing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers since Obama's inauguration. Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the president. Most recently, as recounted in the new issue of the Intelligence Report, a number of individuals with antigovernment, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases.

The hate groups listed in this report include neo-Nazis, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, Klansmen and black separatists. Other hate groups target gays or immigrants, and some specialize in producing racist music or propaganda denying the Holocaust. A list and interactive, state-by-state map of active hate groups can be viewed here: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-iss...

http://www.examiner.com/x-5697-Grassroots-Politics-Examiner~y2010m3d2-Al...

Conservatives target their own fringe

stephley — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 07:25:09 -0800

After months of struggling to harness the energy of newly engaged tea party activists, the conservative establishment - with critical midterm congressional elections on the horizon - is taking aim for the first time at the movement’s extremist elements.

The move has been cast by some conservatives as a modern version of the marginalization of the far-right, anti-communist John Birch Society during the reorganization of the conservative movement spearheaded by William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1960s and 1970s.

“A similar effort will be required today of conservative political and intellectual leaders,” former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote in his column in The Washington Post. “It will not be easy. Sometimes it takes courage to stand before a large crowd and proclaim that two plus two equals four.”

But for Gerson and other conservatives, this is not just an intellectual exercise. They have a very specific political goal: to deprive Democrats and their allies of a potentially potent weapon to use against the GOP in November.

“I don’t believe we should be giving [extremists] a platform or empowering them to do anything based off their conspiracy theories,” said Ned Ryun, president of American Majority, “because they give the left ammunition to try to define the tea party movement as crazy and fringy.”

The attempt “to clean up our own house,” as Erick Erickson, founder of the influential conservative blog RedState, puts it, is necessary “because traditional press outlets have decided to spotlight these fringe elements that get attracted to the movement, and focus on them as if they’re a large part of this tea party movement. And I don’t think they are.”

Until recently, organizers and activists mostly seemed content to ignore, or in some cases tolerate, extremists in their ranks, confident they’d be drowned out by the hundreds of thousands of activists who took to congressional town halls and marches around the country to protest big-spending initiatives pushed by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress.

But inflammatory rhetoric such as former congressman Tom Tancredo’s racially tinged speech at this month’s tea party convention, reports of the involvement of right-wing militia groups and the continued propagation of conspiracy theories about Obama have sometimes cast the movement in an unfavorable light.

Erickson has advised new tea party organizers on how to avoid affiliations with extremists and this month banned birthers - conservatives who believe that Obama was not born in the United States and is, therefore, ineligible to be president - from his blog. (He has long blacklisted truthers, those who believe that the U.S. government was complicit in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks - a conspiracy theory with devotees across the political spectrum.)

“At some point, you have to use the word ‘crazy,’” said Erickson.

Ryun’s American Majority, a group that trains tea party activists and others around the country, has done much the same thing. Its website has moved to close its sessions to activists who identify themselves with the birther, truther or militia movements or the John Birch Society.

Ryun conceded that extremists are involved in the tea party movement. But he said, “It’s just such a small percentage, and it should not be portrayed as representative of the broader movement.”

The fringe fighters’ methods range from censuring signs at rallies or banishing unruly participants completely to challenging the media’s focus on the fringe and highlighting the movement’s diversity and tolerance.

They have gone out of their way, for example, to promote activists and movement-backed candidates of color, including tea party stars Marco Rubio and Allen West, running for U.S. Senate and House, respectively, in Florida, and Texas Senate candidate Michael Williams - all Republicans.

Ryan has another strategy. He has commissioned a poll that he thinks will show that tea partiers share with independent voters a commitment to reducing taxation and government spending and prove that the tea party movement is “very much mainstream.”

But the tea party movement’s decentralized structure, vaguely defined goals and anti-establishment tone make it an attractive place to channel angry feelings. Mainstream media organizations such as The New York Times, which recently ran a 4,500 word story on the infiltration of the movement by a militia-linked group called Oath Keepers, have recently focused on these aspects of the movement.

Independent of their actual numbers, it’s in both political parties’ interests to inflate the influence of the other side’s fringe, said Tom De Luca, a Fordham University political science professor who studies political movements and wrote the 2005 book “Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics.”

“That creates this dynamic that seems to exaggerate the influence of the extremes,” De Luca said.

Much as conservatives have sought to link Democrats to environmental extremism or socialism, he said, it’s an obvious countermove for the left to try to link Republicans with the more extreme elements that have gained traction around - and sometimes within - the tea partiers.

So it was that liberals have demanded to know where Republicans stood on Obama’s citizenship, or that last week found left and right debating which side had more in common with Andrew Joseph Stack III, the software developer who crashed his plane into the IRS offices in Austin, Texas.

The left seized on a comment by hard-line conservative Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), reportedly expressing his empathy for the pilot’s anti-tax views. Rush Limbaugh retorted that Stack “sounds like he's blaming Bush and Reagan," asserting that he sounded “almost word for word [like] Nancy Pelosi. Almost word for word [like] Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama.”

De Luca predicted that another “Bill Buckley moment” will occur only when the political damage done by extremists outweighs the boost the tea party movement has provided to conservatives generally and the Republican Party specifically.

“My guess is their basic stance will be to try to juggle as long as they can,” he said.

That approach - and its drawbacks - were on display at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering of Washington’s conservative establishment. It featured the John Birch Society as a co-sponsor. And while conference organizers nixed a panel on Obama’s citizenship, a birther contingent still made its presence felt, as did the Oath Keepers, who co-sponsored the conference.

After filming a brief segment at the conference, liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, a leading tea party antagonist, concluded on her show that “the conservative movement right now is really not afraid to let its freak flag fly. … They‘re happy to show off the ‘we want another revolutionary war,’ ‘we think the black president is arrogant,’ ‘we think the apocalypse is nice’ side of themselves.”

Liberal commentators similarly highlighted the extremism on display at this month’s National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tenn., which included a speech by WorldNetDaily Editor Joseph Farah questioning Obama’s citizenship and one by Tancredo asserting Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."

A blogger on the liberal site Daily Kos asserted Tancredo’s speech revealed the “REAL reason” tea partiers are upset: “A black man is President and their White Privelege [sic] is fading.”

Tancredo’s speech was not widely condemned by conservative intellectuals or media, but immediately after Farah delivered his, he was confronted in a hallway outside the convention hall by conservative media entrepreneur and fellow convention speaker Andrew Breitbart, who said it was a disservice to the tea party movement to infer its activists are “all obsessed with the birth certificate, when it’s not a winning issue.”

Others cited the jeering of an anti-gay activist at CPAC who condemned organizers for inviting gay Republican group GOProud to participate. Conservative author and TownHall columnist Ashley Herzog said it was proof that “CPAC, and the conservative movement in general, isn’t a haven for haters after all,” and urged the left to view a video of the incident, which she said is evidence of “a lack of bigotry [that] must be painfully puzzling to liberals.”

Conservatives similarly pushed back against a New York Times blog post that accused a CPAC speaker of ripping Obama “in racial tones," partly by affecting a "Chris Rock voice" to mock the president.

They noted that the speaker - like comedian Rock - is from Brooklyn and speaks with a regional accent, and demanded an apology.

And in a clever Web video that went viral this week, the Dallas Tea Party called out MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who had mocked the mostly white makeup of the Nashville convention of what he called the "Tea Klux Klan," comparing its racially diverse leadership to MSNBC’s mostly white host lineup.

Judson Phillips, the Nashville tea party activist who organized this month’s convention, said it’s incumbent on local tea party leaders across the country “to control the message and to prevent the tea party movement from being hijacked.”

In the run-up to a July tea party convention he’s planning in Las Vegas, Phillips said, he’s planning to ask speakers “to stick to our message, which is unity headed into the fall.”

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=0D1D0BCC-18FE-70B2-A8AAAE2A1...

Widow of Austin plane crash victim sues pilot's widow

MartiniLush — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:53:18 -0800

The widow of an Internal Revenue Service employee killed when a disgruntled taxpayer flew his plane into a seven-story building in Austin, Texas, last week is suing the pilot's wife, according to court documents.

Valerie Hunter, the wife of Vernon Hunter, is accusing Sheryl Stack, wife of Andrew Joseph "Joe" Stack III, of negligence, alleging she knew or should have known that her husband was a threat to others and, thus, could have prevented the attack, according to the lawsuit filed Monday in Travis County District Court.

"Stack was threatened enough by Joseph Stack that she took her daughter and stayed at a hotel the night before the plane crash. [She] owed a duty to exercise reasonable care to avoid a foreseeable risk of injury to others including [Vernon Hunter]," the suit says.

The lawsuit also seeks to bar the release of Vernon Hunter's autopsy report, saying that, if made public, it would cause Hunter's family to suffer "severe and irreparable emotional distress."

Hunter was killed February 18 when, authorities say, Stack flew his Piper Cherokee PA-28 into a northwest Austin building that housed nearly 200 IRS employees.

Authorities say Stack set fire to his $230,000 home in Austin before embarking on his fatal flight.

Police have said Sheryl Stack spent the previous night in an Austin-area hotel but did not say why. Police said they had received no calls of domestic violence from the house. The only calls to police were made a couple of years ago and concerned barking dogs, officials said said.

A 3,000-word message on a Web site registered to Stack railed against the government, particularly the IRS.

"I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different," the online message said. "I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well."

Sheryl Stack issued a statement after the attack expressing "sincere sympathy to the victims and their families."

Source

Tax Status Of Lawmakers' Religious Refuge Disputed

Roarman — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:26:46 -0800

The three-story, brick townhouse at 133 C Street S.E. sits a half-block from the Cannon House Office Building, roughly three blocks from the Capitol - the home-away-from-home for a regular contingent of fundamentalist Christian members of Congress, who can pray in the living room and walk to work.

The C Street Center, which owns the 1880-vintage townhouse, claims status as a church. And as with other religious organizations, the IRS takes the center's word that it is a church. As a result, the center doesn't have to file public tax returns, as most non-profit organizations must do.

The arrangement fits the C Street Center's practically invisible public presence. But now a group of 13 ministers has asked the IRS to revoke that church status.

Their complaint, delivered to the IRS Tuesday, says, "An organization whose chief activity is providing room and board to members of Congress is not a church." It cites a list of 15 factors that the agency considers in granting church status.

"Is there public worship?" said the leader of the ministers group, Pastor Eric Williams, of the North Congregational United Church of Christ, in Columbus, Ohio. "Is it open to the public? Are there trained leaders who serve the church? C Street really has none of those marks that make it a church."

And if it is not a church, Williams says other questions come up, as to whether the C Street Center's fundraising and other activities meet the requirements for 501(c)(3) charities.

NPR couldn't call the center for an interview, because it doesn't reveal its phone number - or numbers for lawyers or other contacts - on property records, other public documents or, seemingly, any other documents.

The townhouse would likely go unnoticed, except that its denizens keep popping up in embarrassing news stories.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford lived there when he was a Republican member of the House. Last June, he got caught going to visit his mistress in Buenos Aires. Sanford held a tearful press conference, where he said he'd turned back to C Street for help.

"I was part of a group called C Street when I was in Washington," he said. "It was a - believe it or not - a Christian Bible study, some folks that asked members of Congress hard questions that I think were very, very important. And I've been working with them."

Then, three weeks later, Leisha Pickering filed an alienation-of-affections lawsuit against the mistress of her husband, Mississippi Republican Chip Pickering. Mrs. Pickering alleged that the pair carried on a home-wrecking affair while he was in Congress, and living at the C Street house.

And then, in November, two Republican senators drew still more publicity to C Street.

Nevada Senator John Ensign owned up to an affair with a staffer. And Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said he had been a go-between as Ensign and the woman's husband fought over a financial settlement. Coburn defended his actions in an interview on the ABC program This Week, saying, "Look, my whole goal in this thing was to bring two families to closure of a very painful episode."

While the vast majority of lawmakers who stay at C Street are Republicans, regardless of party, they are all followers of an intimate, high-powered - and some say closed - Christian network.

And they belong to House and Senate prayer groups at the Capitol. Those groups are organized by the Fellowship Foundation, a $19 million entity that builds alliances of leaders "led by God," as it said on a 2005 federal tax return. The Fellowship Foundation also organizes the annual National Prayer Breakfast, where every president since Dwight Eisenhower has spoken.

As recently as 2006, the Fellowship Foundation's tax return listed the C Street Center as a "related organization." But in an interview Tuesday, foundation president Richard Carver said he's been to 133 C Street only once, and that was six years ago.

He drew a bright line between the Fellowship and C Street. "There are members of Congress there who may very well be part of the prayer groups in the House and the Senate," he said. But "the Fellowship Foundation has never owned the C Street facility. The C Street facility has its own board of directors, which sets its own policy. And we have no operational control over what happens at C Street, to the best of my knowledge."

Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124031022

Tax Rates for Top 400 Earners Fall as Income Soars,

stephley — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:45:23 -0800

The incomes of the top 400 American households soared to a new record high in dollars and as a share of all income in 2007, while the income tax rates they paid fell to a record low, newly disclosed tax data show.

In 2007 the top 400 taxpayers had an average income of $344.8 million, up 31 percent from their average $263.3 million income in 2006, according to figures in a report that the IRS posted to its Web site without announcement that were discovered February 16.

The figures came at the peak of the last economic cycle and show that widely published reports in major newspapers asserting that the richest Americans are losing relative ground and "becoming poorer" are not supported by the official income data.

The long-term data show that under current tax and economic rules, the incomes of the top earners rise when the economy expands and contract during recessions, only to rise again. Their effective income tax rate fell to 16.62 percent, down more than half a percentage point from 17.17 percent in 2006, the new data show. That rate is lower than the typical effective income tax rate paid by Americans with incomes in the low six figures, which is what each taxpayer in the top group earned in the first three hours of 2007.

Taxpayers on the 95th to 99th steps on the income ladder paid an effective income tax rate of 17.52 percent, according to calculations by the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit research group that favors less taxation and lower rates. Taxpayers in this category earned between $255,000 and $451,000 in 2007, compared with an average daily income of almost $945,000 for the top 400, who paid lower effective tax rates on average.

Payroll taxes did not add a significant burden to the top 400, not changing the rounding of rates by even one decimal. With payroll taxes taken into account, the effective tax rate of the top 400 would be 17.2 percent in 2006 and 16.6 percent in 2007, my analysis shows -- the same as not counting payroll taxes. As a point of comparison, about two-thirds of Americans pay more in Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment taxes than in federal income taxes.

The top 400's share of all income grew from 1.31 cents out of every dollar earned by all Americans to 1.59 cents.

Adjusted for inflation to 2009 dollars, the top 400 enjoyed a 27 percent increase in their income, or nine times the rate of increase for the bottom 90 percent, based on an earlier analysis of tax data published by Profs. Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, economists at the University of California at Berkeley who have been studying global income trends.

Since 1992, the bottom 90 percent of Americans have seen their incomes rise by 13 percent in 2009 dollars, compared with an increase of 399 percent for the top 400.

The annual top 400 report was first made public by the Clinton administration, but the George W. Bush administration shut down access to the report. Its release was resumed a year ago when President Obama took office. The Statistics of Income Division at the IRS created the top 400 reports at the urging of Joel Slemrod, a business professor at the University of Michigan.

The top 400 reports understate actual top incomes because of deferral rules. For example, managers of offshore hedge funds who deferred their gains may not be counted in the top 400 reports, which are based on the figure on the last line of the front page of Form 1040.

At least three hedge fund managers made $3 billion in 2007. It is not known how much, if any, of their income they deferred.

Most of the income going to the top 400 tax returns is from capital. Salaries and wages accounted for only 6.5 percent of the top 400's income in 2007, down from 7.4 percent in 2006 and 26.2 percent in 1992. The average salary rose from 2006 to 2007, however, just at a slower rate than overall income growth.

The biggest source of income was capital gains, which are taxed at a maximum rate of 15 percent. Gains accounted for 66.3 percent of 2007 income for the top 400, up from 62.8 percent in 2006 and 36.1 percent in 1992.

Only 7 of the top 400 have shown up in the report every year, the IRS data showed. Of the 6,400 returns covered by the 16 years of the report, the IRS said that 2,515, or almost 40 percent, appeared one time.

The report shows that the number of the top 400 who paid an effective tax rate of 0 percent to 10 percent declined slightly, to 25 in 2007 from 31 in 2006. In 1992 only 6 of the top 400 paid an effective income tax rate of less than 10 percent.

Another 127 paid 10 percent to 15 percent in 2007, up from 113 in 2006.

Only 33 of the top 400 paid an effective tax rate of 30 percent to 35 percent, which is the maximum federal tax rate.
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*David Cay Johnston is a former tax reporter for The New York Times. He teaches at Syracuse University College of Law and is the author of two books about taxes, Free Lunch and Perfectly Legal . His current column on taxes appears in Tax Notes and Tax Notes Today.

http://www.tax.com/taxcom/features.nsf/Articles/0DEC0EAA7E4D7A2B852576CD...

Dear IRS,

samantha999 — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:51:33 -0700

By LEONARD GREENE

Last updated: 9:06 am
March 10, 2009
Posted: 2:14 am
March 10, 2009

A Texas retiree has become a cause celebre for a satirical letter he wrote his hometown paper, saying he can't pay his taxes - and asking the IRS to treat him like famous tax cheats.

"Dear IRS," Ed Barnett wrote the Wichita Falls (Texas) Times Record News in February. "I am sorry to inform you that I will not be able to pay taxes owed April 15, but all is not lost."

Barnett, 67, listed 37 other taxes he's paid, including an obscure waterfowl stamp tax. And he asked the feds to forgive him, as they did such famous tax evaders as US Reps. Charles Rangel and Barney Frank, Sen. Chris Dodd, ex-Sen. Tom Daschle and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Actual 'Letter to the Editor' of Wichita Falls, Texas Times Record News:

Dear IRS, I am sorry to inform you that I will not be able to pay taxes owed April 15, but all is not lost. I have paid these taxes: accounts receivable tax, building permit tax, CDL tax, cigarette tax, corporate income tax, dog license tax, federal income tax, unemployment tax, gasoline tax, hunting license tax, fishing licence tax, waterfowl stamp tax, inheritance tax, inventory tax, liquor tax, luxury tax, medicare tax, city, school and county property tax (up 33 percent last 4 years), real estate tax, social security tax, road usage tax, toll road tax, state and city sales tax, recreational vehicle tax, state franchise tax, state unemployment tax, telephone federal excise tax, telephone federal state and local surcharge tax, telephone minimum usage surcharge tax, telephone state and local tax, utility tax, vehicle licence registration tax, capital gains tax, lease severance tax, oil and gas assessment tax, Colorado property tax, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and New Mexico sales tax, and many more that I can't recall but I have run out of space and money. When you do not receive my check April 15, just know that it is an honest mistake. Please treat me the same way you treated Congressmen Charles Rangle, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank and ex-Congressman Tom Dashelle and, of course, your boss Timothy Geithner. No penalties and no interest. P.S. I will make at least a partial payment as soon as I get my stimulus check.

Dear IRS

Grandpa — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:17:33 -0700

Dear IRS,

I am sorry to inform you that I will not be able to pay taxes owed April 15, but all is not lost.

I have paid these taxes: accounts receivable tax, building permit tax, CDL tax, cigarette tax, corporate income tax, dog licence tax, federal income tax, unemployment tax, gasoline tax, hunting licence tax, fishing licence tax, waterfowl stamp tax, inheritance tax, inventory tax, liquor tax, luxury tax, medicare tax, city, school and county property tax (up 33 percent last 4 years), real estate tax, social security tax, road usage tax, toll road tax, state and city sales tax, recreational vehicle tax, state franchise tax, state unemployment tax, telephone federal excise tax, telephone federal state and local surcharge tax, telephone minimum usage surcharge tax, telephone state and local tax, utility tax, vehicle licence registration tax, capitol gains tax, lease severance tax, oil and gas assessment tax, Colorado property tax, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and New Mexico sales tax, and many more that I can't recall but I have run out of space and money.

When you do not receive my check April 15, just know that it is an honest mistake. Please treat me the same way you treated Congressmen Charles Rangle, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank and ex-Congressman Tom Dashelle and, of course, your boss Timothy Geithner. No penalties and no interest.

P.S. I will make at least a partial payment as soon as I get my stimulus check.