Modern Slavery through the IRS

If you thought slavery died 150 years ago, think again. You and I are slaves to the federal government and the IRS is our slave master. If screaming at the federal government would do any good, I’d be willing to try.

Our paper, the Daily Herald, carried an Associated Press article recently reporting that the IRS failed to do background checks on its contractors.

The unverified contractors got confidential information on 1,400,000 Americans without government checks to assure the information would be kept private. For instance, a printing contractor received a disk with 1.4 million social security numbers on it. No background checks were done on the employees who used the disk. Don’t you know there were a dishonest few who are having a heyday with that information? One of the couriers used for confidential information had recently spent 21 years in prison. Other contractors were given private information but never required to sign on the dotted line to keep the information secure.

In what may be the understatement of the year, the federal inspector who conducted the investigation said, “Allowing contractor employees access to taxpayer data without appropriate background investigations exposes taxpayers to increased risk of fraud and identity theft.” Do you think???

Great. They hire 16,000 new agents to spy on our health care, record our data and conversations, punish our political alliances and bite our income in the patootie with the taxes they collect but they can’t mind their own store? How incompetent/unfair can you get?

This is colossal disrespect for citizens. But, why should they care? We are not individuals whose welfare matters, we are serfs. If you disagree, ask yourself how much money and time you spend to calculate and pay your taxes. Who pays you to do that? If you do your own taxes, no one. If you are hired to do a company’s taxes for a living, who compensates your boss for your salary? No one. The federal government demands that you do the work to tell them how much of your money they are going to take from you. No one pays you to do that work—tens, even hundreds of hours and you get no pay other than to have them take your earnings. If you fail to perform or make mistakes you are fined, or even sent to jail. The IRS then adds the stress of a potential audit to make you squirm with worry. If that’s not slavery, clue me in.

Our Founders cringed at the thought of what income tax has done to us. They tried to protect us. But in our great “wisdom”, driven by the slogan “Stick it to the Rich!”, a hundred and one years ago we passed the 16^th Amendment to the Constitution, giving the federal government the right to put its paws in our pockets—the very thing the Founders tried so hard to prevent. Far from sticking it to the rich, the middle class got the shaft. The rich hire fancy lawyers,  make sly investments and set up tax-exempt foundations to shelter their earnings. The middle class pays, and pays, and pays some more, and the Internal Revenue Service is the chain gang boss.

And now we find out they don’t even care enough about us to secure our private information. How calloused can you get?

Identity theft—coming to an IRS near you!

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