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Did Citizens United Critics Push the IRS to Misbehave?
John Samples
Last Friday, a spokeswoman for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) admitted the agency had targeted various Tea Party and related groups during the 2010 election cycle. Later in the week, an Inspector General’s report will offer an initial look at the facts of this matter. At least two congressional committees also plan investigations.
Many people recall that the Nixon administration used the IRS to harass political opponents. Surely the IG’s report and subsequent investigations will show whether the IRS has gotten back into the business of protecting an incumbent administration from its critics.
It is not too soon, however, to recall the the campaign finance reform lobby has been calling for a crackdown on political groups since the Citizens United decision. One possibility would be that the IRS gave in pressure from the reform lobby and went after the Tea Party groups.
Was there an intention to chill speech? The timing provokes doubts: the targeting began in the spring of 2010 just as the mid-term campaign season started and ended after the election when the harassment no longer has any rationale. The long delays of approving tax status certainly slowed down the wave coming toward Congress in 2010. 66 House members lost their seats in that election. Do any sitting members owe their offices to the IRS?
Even now, leading reform groups are calling for renewed crackdown on these groups. We are also told by more sober reformers that this whole matter shows the need for more disclosure and greater clarity in the rules. But the major argument against such disclosure has been that government officials will use the information to punish political opponents. Given what we know about this case, does it make sense to give the IRS more information about, and more power over groups that oppose the administration?
Some will note the irony here. Most of campaign finance law was enacted in 1974 just after the end of the Watergate scandal. The campaign finance reform lobby dates its life to that scandal which, as noted, included using the IRS for political ends. Now the reformers are defending the IRS and its apparent political harassment. Things do seem to have come full circle.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
American • U.S. citizens ditch passports in record numbers
U.S. citizens ditch passports in record numbers
May 8, 2013: 1:35 PM ET
If the recent quarter’s pace continues, 2013 will become a landmark year for saying goodbye to America, tax-wise.
By Lynnley Browning
Mahmood Karzai, no longer a U.S. citizen.
FORTUNE — Americans are ditching their U.S. passports in record numbers, a sign of growing frustration with a system that taxes U.S. citizens on their global wealth whether they live in Montana or Mongolia.
The latest bold-faced names to relinquish their U.S. citizenship include Mahmood Karzai, a brother of Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, according to federal data released Wednesday. Also on the list, published quarterly by the Internal Revenue Service, is Isabel Getty, the daughter of jet-setting socialite Pia Getty and Getty oil heir Christopher Getty.
In total, more than 670 U.S. passport holders gave up their citizenship — and with it, their U.S. tax bills — in the first three months of this year. That is the most in any quarter since the I.R.S. began publishing figures in 1998. And it is nearly three-quarters of the total number for all of 2012, a year in which the wealthy songwriter-socialite Denise Rich (christened "Lady Gatsby" by Yachting magazine) and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin joined more than 932 other Americans in tossing their passports.
If the recent quarter’s pace continues, 2013 will become a landmark year for saying goodbye to America, tax-wise.
MORE: Offshore account holders win a victory in government tax case
"It’s the cumulative effect of the I.R.S. ‘jihad’ against foreign bank accounts," said Phil Hodgen, an international tax lawyer in Pasadena, Calif. He said growing numbers of Middle Eastern investors were ordering their dual-citizen children to dump their U.S. passports if they wanted to inherit family-owned companies without onerous U.S. estate taxes.
While dumping citizenship may seem unpatriotic or smack of tax avoidance to some critics, tax lawyers blame the byzantine complexity of American tax regulations.
The rules "are confusing, complex, and so complicated that even Americans with good intentions can easily find themselves running afoul of the law," said Jeffrey Neiman, a former federal prosecutor who was involved in the government’s offshore banking probe and is now in private practice in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "This very well may explain why we are seeing a record number of Americans renouncing their United States citizenship."
The trend has swelled amid a widening crackdown by the U.S. Justice Department on offshore private banking services sold by Swiss and Swiss-style banks to wealthy Americans in recent years. Nearly a dozen foreign banks, include Israel’s Bank Leumi, HSBC, Credit Suisse (CS), Julius Baer and Swiss cantonal, or regional, banks are under criminal scrutiny; last year, Wegelin & Co, Switzerland’s oldest bank, was indicted and put out of business. More than four dozen wealthy Americans and their foreign bankers have been indicted or charged in recent years.
More than 39,000 Americans have come forward in recent years to declare their secret accounts to the I.R.S. in exchange for reduced fines and penalties, but officials suspect that is a fraction of the total number of people either deliberately hiding or unwittingly not reporting their foreign accounts. I.R.S. data for 2012 shows just over two million tax returns filed in 2012 by overseas Americans, compared with an estimated six million Americans living or working abroad. Only a fraction of Americans with foreign bank accounts are also filing required disclosures known as Fbars, according to federal data.
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/ … ?iid=HP_LN
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Thu May 09, 2013 12:17 am
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Rand Paul is filibustering the confirmation of John Brennan right now. Wants clarification on drone strikes on US citizens.
“I will speak until I can no longer speak,” Paul said. “I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”
Click here for more and streaming video of his filibuster.
The post Rand Paul is filibustering the confirmation of John Brennan right now. Wants clarification on drone strikes on US citizens. appeared first on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org.
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Supreme Court Snubs Citizens Whose Social Security Will Be Confiscated If They Refuse Government Health Care
Ilya Shapiro
Some of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most significant decisions are those declining to hear a case. Two weeks ago, the Court made such a momentous non-ruling in refusing to hear a lawsuit, Hall v. Sebelius, challenging government policies that deny otherwise eligible retirees their Social Security benefits if they choose not to enroll in Medicare. (I previously wrote about the case, and Cato filed a brief supporting the retirees’ petition for Supreme Court review.)
Despite having paid thousands of dollars each in Social Security and Medicare taxes during their working lives—for which they never sought reimbursement—the five plaintiffs were told by officials at the Social Security Administration and Department of Health and Human Services that they had to forfeit all of their Social Security benefits if they wished to withdraw from (or not enroll in) Medicare. This determination resulted from internal policies that were put in place during the Clinton administration and strengthened by the Bush administration. The plaintiffs sought a judicial ruling that would prohibit SSA and HHS from enforcing these policies, which they believed conflicted with the Social Security and Medicare statutes. A sharply divided U.S Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit eventually upheld them. By its decision not to hear the case, the Supreme Court let that controversial ruling stand.
At this point, one might ask why someone would want to give up Medicare. The answer is that some people would prefer to keep their existing (private) health insurance, but that for various regulatory and economic reasons insurance companies are wary of insuring people already covered by Medicare. Talk about the prototypical case of government programs crowding out the private sector!
In any event, the troubling reality of the Supreme Court’s non-ruling is twofold: First, the government now has full authority to force citizens to participate in a financially troubled program (Medicare) that was originally intended to be—and operated for almost three decades as—a wholly voluntary program. If they refuse, SSA and HHS can deny them their Social Security benefits. If they seek to withdraw from Medicare, SSA and HHS can not only deny them future benefits, but force them to repay all benefits received from both programs. Second, the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to address the issue raised here allows federal agencies to bypass Congress with impunity when drafting and implementing their own rules.
The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Kent Masterson Brown, had this to say in a press release following the Supreme Court’s order:
Not only have the Courts allowed these agencies to grant themselves permission to seize a retiree’s Social Security benefits should they opt out of Medicare, but they have allowed those agencies to turn voluntary programs into compulsory ones, giving Seniors no choice whatsoever but to accept the ever more limited health care offered by Medicare. The plaintiffs cannot pay for their own health care—and save the Government and taxpayers money—without forfeiting all of their Social Security benefits. There is nothing in the Social Security statutes that says a retired individual who chooses not to apply for Medicare coverage will be stripped of his or her Social Security benefits.
Martha de Forest, executive director of a group that supported the lawsuit, the Fund for Personal Liberty, also had a response:
Why would the government tie two programs together when they have different payment mechanisms and different start dates? It is about control, nothing more. That is why the government forces retirees to participate in Medicare as a condition of receiving Social Security Retirement benefits.
At base, it’s axiomatic that administrative agencies have no powers not granted to them by Congress and that regulations must be anchored in their operative statute. The rules challenged here failed this standard. Combined with the fiscal irresponsibility of forcing citizens to accept costly benefits during hard economic times, the SSA and HHS rules are an arbitrary power grab. Agency overreach imperils the separation of powers and therefore liberty.
Now that the Supreme Court has failed to counter this unauthorized expansion of federal power, it’s time for Congress to do so by legislation—as Quin Hillyer suggests in his commentary on the case. Richard Epstein has further thoughts on how Hall v. Sebelius illustrates the untrammeled growth of the administrative state.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Don McGahn and Ray LaRaja on Citizens United
John Samples
Don McGahn is a member and former chair of the Federal Election Commission. Don has many years experience practicing election law, and he has thought a lot about both the law and politics of his subject. The other day, after the Cato conference on Citizens United, Don sat down with Cato’s Caleb Brown to discuss that famous decision and its aftermath. McGahn’s thoughts are worth your time:
At the same conference, University of Massachusetts political scientist Ray LaRaja discussed his research on the impact of Citizens United on elections, spending, and the political parties. For my money Ray is among the best of the young scholars working on campaign finance.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Romney Sidesteps Questions on Locking Up Citizens
By Tim Lynch
That’s the story in today’s Washington Times.
Here’s an excerpt:
Mitt Romney sidestepped questions Wednesday about whether he would have signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that authorizes the indefinite detention of terror suspects, including American citizens, saying he didn’t have enough information on the law.
Responding to a question at a town hall style meeting at a large manufacturer here, the Republican presidential nominee said he will take a look “at that particular piece of legislation” and said that when it comes to the issue of indefinite detention he would try to strike a balance between protecting personal liberties and protecting the nation from terrorist attacks.
Romney Sidesteps Questions on Locking Up Citizens is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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American • US citizens: Pay attention to this
US citizens: Pay attention to this
Simon Black on AUGUST 3, 2012
August 3, 2012
Bergen, Norway
I was sitting across from an impossibly blonde account executive this afternoon when I heard three words I never thought I’d hear at a foreign bank.
“Are you Greek,” she asked me with a bit of a smile…
me: “Uh, no. I have a US passport, among others…”
she: “OK good, as long as you’re not Greek.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Let me explain.
As you may know, US citizens have long been the world’s banking pariah thanks to a piece of remarkably stupid legislation called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).
FATCA was passed a few years ago as part of a greater US government effort to create jobs. And boy was it successful– thousands of new jobs were created as a result of the legislation. Unfortunately, most of the new jobs are for tax collectors.
In short, FATCA requires EVERY BANK IN THE WORLD to sign an information-sharing agreement with the IRS. No matter what. Even the tiniest bank in Bhutan that has never seen a foreigner walk through its doors has to jump in bed with the IRS.
What’s more, if banks don’t comply (or even know about the law), the US government will severely penalize them with a 30% withholding tax on most funds routed through the US.
This stunning arrogance is a key reason why US citizens have been turned away from so many foreign banks over the past few years; banks simply didn’t want to deal with Uncle Sam. From Panama to Singapore to Switzerland, US citizens have been shut out of many banks.
But after years of this trend building, I’m starting to see signs of it breaking. FATCA initially sent shockwaves through the worldwide banking industry, and after years of lobbying their own governments, a compromise appears to have been reached.
The new model is that governments are inking information-sharing agreements directly with each other. In other words, foreign banks will send information to their governments, and the governments will share information with other governments.
This approach gets banks off the hook from having to deal with Uncle Sam, yet it still fulfills the original spirit of FATCA: destroy financial privacy. Mission Accomplished.
The good news is that a lot more foreign banks are receptive to having US customers. Which brings me back to my experience today in Norway.
The banker didn’t care that I have a US passport. US customers are OK once again, it’s now Greek customers who are the banking pariah du jour.
You may recall from our previous discussions that the Greek government has taken the liberty of confiscating funds directly from people’s bank accounts at will. If they decide (in their sole discretion) that you might be a tax cheat, they take your money. No questions asked.
Naturally, many Greeks are now desperately trying to move their funds abroad. Unfortunately for them, some banks just don’t want to be caught in the middle of this feud.
The result? Many banks are starting to turn away Greek customers or mandate large initial deposit requirements in excess of 500,000 euros.
It’s a classic example of what happens when people wait too long. Some folks took action early and are sleeping well. Others saw the writing on the wall and did nothing. They waited until the tax authorities were en route to even begin thinking about ways to protect their savings.
History shows that bankrupt governments routinely resort to plundering their citizens’ wealth to keep the party going.
Bottom line, if your government is insolvent, your savings are at risk. And opening a foreign bank account is one of the most important things you can do for your savings. Greeks are starting to figure this out the hard way.
http://www.sovereignman.com/expat/us-ci … this-8301/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Fri Aug 03, 2012 1:11 pm
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American • US CITIZENS NOW ONE STEP CLOSER TO BECOMING PERMANENT TAX S
US CITIZENS NOW ONE STEP CLOSER TO BECOMING PERMANENT TAX SLAVES
by SIMON BLACK
May 22, 2012
Los Angeles, USA
This week, the universally stupid brainchild of US Senators Chuck Schumer and Bob Casey known as the Ex-PATRIOT Act inched a bit closer towards becoming law.
‘Ex-PATRIOT’ is an absurd acronym that stands for “Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy”. I call it the Tax Slave Act… and it proposes three key provisions:
1) Individuals who are deemed, in the sole discretion of the US government, to have renounced US citizenship in order to avoid US taxes, will be permanently barred from re-entering the United States.
2) Such individuals will also be required to pay a 30% capital gains tax to the United States government on ALL future investment gains derived from the US. Currently, non-citizens who do not reside in the US pay no US capital gains tax.
3) These proposals are RETROACTIVE, and, if passed, would apply to anyone who renounced his/her citizenship within the last 10-years.
During a Sunday interview with ABC News, House Speaker John Boehner threw his support behind the bill… certainly a big step towards its eventual passage.
Let’s pause briefly for a little history lesson–
Dart Container Corporation was founded in 1960 by William F. Dart, the man who first perfected the design of styrofoam. Dart Container is today a multi-billion dollar family-owned company with thousands of employees and operations around the world.
In the early 1990s, brothers Kenneth and Robert Dart, heirs to the family fortune, renounced their US citizenship and became citizens of Belize and Ireland, and set up residency in the Cayman Islands.
Around the same time, several other wealthy Americans renounced citizenship, including Carnival Cruise Lines founder Ted Arison (who obtained Israeli citizenship), Campbell Soup heir John Dorrance (Irish citizenship), and fund manager Mark Mobius (German citizenship).
President Clinton was furious, and in 1996, he pushed Congress to pass a series of financial penalties for people who renounce citizenship. At the time, a ‘renunciant’ had to continue filing US tax returns for 10-years after renouncing.
Effectively, though, this penalty was a tax on worldwide income, not an exit tax on assets.
Fast forward to the mid-2000s, a time when the asset bubble was at its peak; the stock market was at its all-time high and real estate prices kept going up.
The Bush regime passed a series of changes to expatriation rules, dropping the income tax filing requirements in lieu of charging a one-time exit tax on assets.
In this way, the government was able to derive a much larger payment up front based on total assets rather than chasing around a former citizen for a piece of annual income.
In the years since the exit tax on assets was established, two things have happened:
1) The number of Americans renouncing US citizenship has risen steadily, from 235 people in 2008 to 1,780 last year (according to Schumer’s office).
2) The asset bubble has burst, and assets are worth much less than just a few years ago. As such, the government isn’t collecting as much revenue from the exit tax.
My sense is that the government has been watching the number of expatriates rise over the years, and simultaneously watching the value of the exit tax fall… and they’ve been looking for an excuse to make sweeping (i.e. retroactive) changes.
Eduardo Saverin is the perfect excuse. The Facebook co-founder’s recent renunciation of US citizenship has become a rallying cry for politicians to go back in time and steal money from former citizens retroactively…plus establish a larger base for future tax revenues.
This is a truly despicable thing to do considering that these former citizens followed the appropriate rules at the time, paid the tax, and moved on with their lives. Now Uncle Sam wants to go back in time to unilaterally change the deal, and expect everyone to abide even though they’re not even citizens anymore. The arrogance is overwhelming.
More importantly, this bill is also a major deterrent for people who are thinking about renouncing US citizenship today.
The passage of this law will undoubtedly cause many people who were considering expatriation to abandon the idea altogether as the thought of being permanently barred from entry is too much to bear.
It’s truly extraordinary that the Land of the Free has deteriorated to the point that the government must now resort to threats, coercion, and intimidation in order to keep its most productive citizens inside.
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Tue May 22, 2012 11:06 am
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Police State • Holder: U.S. can lawfully target American citizens
By Peter Finn and Sari Horwitz, Monday, March 5, 2:31 PM
The U.S. government has the right to order the killing of American citizens overseas if they are senior al-Qaeda leaders who pose an imminent terrorist threat and cannot reasonably be captured, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Monday.
“Any decision to use lethal force against a United States citizen — even one intent on murdering Americans and who has become an operational leader of al-Qaeda in a foreign land — is among the gravest that government leaders can face,” Holder said in a speech at Northwestern University’s law school in Chicago. “The American people can be — and deserve to be — assured that actions taken in their defense are consistent with their values and their laws.”
Holder’s discussion of lethal force against U.S. citizens did not mention any individual by name, but his address was clearly animated by the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a senior figure in al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate. Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico, played an operational role in several plots, including the failed attempt to bring down a commercial airliner over Detroit in 2009, according to administration officials. In September, he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen.
Since the operation, the Obama administration has faced calls to explain the legal framework behind its decision to target Awlaki and release at least portions of a still-classified memorandum by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that contains its evidence, reasoning and conclusions.
Holder’s speech represents the administration’s most elaborate public explanation to date on targeted killings. And it followed a prolonged internal debate about how to balance the need to inform the public about one of the most extraordinary decisions a government can take, without explicitly acknowledging the ongoing classified drone program or the covert operation against Awlaki.
Holder emphasized that he would discuss the issue only in the abstract and would not “discuss or confirm any particular program or operation,” according to an advance text of his speech.
There are currently no known U.S. citizens on target lists maintained by the CIA or the military’s Joint Special Operations Command.
The attorney general’s remarks did not satisfy some of the administration’s critics, who argued that the government has assumed dangerous new powers.
“While the speech is a gesture towards additional transparency, it is ultimately a defense of the government’s chillingly broad claimed authority to conduct targeted killings of civilians, including American citizens, far from any battlefield without judicial review or public scrutiny,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “Anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare an American citizen an enemy of the state and order his extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power.”
Holder argued that a careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to “due process” and that the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment protection against depriving a citizen of his or her life without due process of law does not mandate a “judicial process.”
cont
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat … story.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Mon Mar 05, 2012 7:55 pm
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Technology and the Internet • 100 million EU citizens have never surfed the Web
Never mind the Euro crisis, 100 million EU citizens have never surfed the Web
CLAIRE DAVENPORT
Brussels— Reuters
Published Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2011
Almost a quarter of the European Union’s 500 million people have never used the Internet and there is a widening division between the web-savvy north of Europe and the poorer south and east, figures released on Wednesday showed.
More than half the population of Romania and just under half of those in Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus and Portugal do not have Internet access at home, according to the figures from Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency.
As well as highlighting geographic disparities across one of the world’s most-developed regions, the figures underline the lack of opportunity people in poorer communities have to take part in advances such as the Internet that have delivered lower cost goods and service to millions of people.
“For many people today it seems difficult to live without the Internet,” Eurostat said.
“However, a decreasing, but still non-negligible, part of the EU population has never used it,” it added, reporting that 24 per cent of 16-74 year olds across the 27 countries in the European Union have never accessed the Internet.
Although overall Internet access has risen in the past five years, the range is still wide, with just 45 per cent of the population connected in Bulgaria compared with 94 per cent in the Netherlands.
Others in the top tier include Luxembourg, Sweden and Denmark, all with access rates of 90 per cent or above.
At the bottom end of the scale, 54 per cent of those in Romania have never used the Internet, whether via home access, at an Internet cafe or over a smart phone.
Those countries with the lowest usage rates also tend to be those with the least number of fixed-line broadband connections and those that make least use of e-commerce – buying goods and services online.
Online business is most advanced in Britain, Denmark and Sweden where it contributed between 5.8 per cent and 7.2 per cent of total gross domestic product in 2009, according to the Boston Consulting Group.
Britain, the EU’s third largest economy after Germany and France, has become the dominant force in online commerce and government services, with more than 80 per cent of 16-74 year olds making Internet purchases in the past year.
The lowest rates were again recorded in Romania and Bulgaria, with just 13 per cent of those surveyed.
Perhaps one of the survey’s more surprising results was that Spain, a modern economy at the heart of Europe, has a relatively modest rate of Internet access and e-commerce use: just 64 per cent of households are connected and only 39 per cent of people shop online, the figures showed.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/tec … le2271051/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Wed Dec 14, 2011 1:51 pm
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