A LITTLE THIS, A LITTLE THAT

+ The July 2016 issue of my free monthly tax planning and preparation newsletter ROBERT D FLACH’S THE 1040 LETTER is now available to download.

This month I explain how much mortgage interest you paid during the year is actually deductible, discuss a Tax Court case that concerns a tuition tax credit, list a dozen “urban tax myths”, and introduce you to a unique newsletter for NJ state taxpayers.

Click here to read the July issue.

+ And the June issue (click here to read) discusses some special Summer Tax tips and has advice for recent college graduates who will soon be starting their first full-time job.

+ Here’s a suggestion.  Follow me by email – by entering your email address in the box in the right border and clicking “submit” – and get my THE WANDERING TAX PRO posts sent to your inbox. This way you will not miss a single tax tidbit.  I promise that I will not use, or sell, your email address for spam promotional activities.

+ Another problem I have with the GOP “Blueprint for Tax Reform” (click here and here for previous posts on the blueprint) concerns the itemized deduction for state and local taxes (property, income, sales). 

See my post “Defending the Deductions for Taxes and Mortgage Interest” from 2013 to see why I would keep this itemized deduction.

+ Kay Bell celebrated the holiday week-end with “13 tax quotes by famous people in positions of power” at her BANKRATE.COM blog.

She began with the old chestnut from James Otis – “Taxation without representation is tyranny."  Taxation with representation, especially the representation we have today, isn’t so great either (someone else said that before me).

I like the quote from Ronald Reagan - “The problem is not that the people are taxed too little. The problem is that government spends too much.”  Ain’t that the truth.  The money paid in salaries and benefits to the idiots in Congress is a total waste.

+ At TAXPRO TODAY Jeff Stimpson shared comments from tax preparers in “Tax Pros Highlight the IRS’s Biggest Challenges”.

Here are what I see as the major challenges facing the Internal Revenue Service –

ü  The idiots in Congress continue to force totally unrelated and unnecessary jobs on the IRS – most prominent being the administration of federal welfare and other social benefit programs like the Earned Income Credit and the refundable Child Tax Credit, educational assistance, and Obamacare.  Neither the IRS, nor tax preparers, should be forced to become Social Workers!

ü  At the same time the idiots in Congress continue to underfund the IRS – actually cutting its budget each year.

ü  Despite underfunding the IRS is faced with having to deal with the growing problem of identity theft, and the tax fraud resulting from refundable credits, which were created by the idiots in Congress.

As with a lot of issues, the cause of the problems and challenges facing the IRS all come back to the incompetence of the idiots in Congress.

The underfunding of the IRS by the idiots in Congress also creates a challenge for taxpayers and tax professionals.  The component of the IRS that has been hardest hit by underfunding, partially because of IRS mismanagement, is “customer” service.  As one example or the mismanagement, the IRS wasted time and money on a useless and valueless voluntary “Annual Filing Season Program” for tax preparers.

Your thoughts?

TTFN