Reflections on This Taxing Life

By Vernon Jacobs

Somehow, it seems there is something fundamentally wrong when so many experts are so profitably employed at protecting our sovereign citizens from our civil servants.  

The taxes you pay may be part of the price we bear to live in a civilized society, as it states on the top of the U.S. Treasury Department building in Washington, D.C. The taxes I pay are the plunder of an avaricious mob.  

Do you think we could get rid of the income tax by getting the F.D.A. to declare that it’s a cancerous growth? 

Most of the major religions of the world that ask their members to tithe only ask for 10% of their member’s income. If God only needs 10%, why does the U.S. government need 50%? 

Politicians are philanthropists who want give your money to other people.  

Some of our politicians have the strange notion that we can use the tax laws to solve every sort of social problem. They haven’t discovered that you can’t bribe someone to be honest.   

Simultaneous efforts to stimulate the economy with tax incentives while trying to close up tax loopholes is like heating water in a tea kettle to make it boil and putting a cork in the spout to shut off the whistle.   

During the past few decades, the U.S. Congress has discovered a form of perpetual motion. They call it “tax reform”. 

A tax reformer is someone who tries to cut his own taxes by eliminating other peoples loopholes.      

Those who say the rich people should be glad to pay half their income for taxes obviously aren’t rich.  

If we really want to simplify the tax law, we should start by making he Congress tax a five year vacation.    

If the tax laws were too complicated for Einstein to figure out, what hope is there for the rest of us?

The IRS has done an outstanding job of terrorizing the U.S. taxpayers into voluntarily paying their taxes.  

No one has ever experienced sheer terror like the taxpayer who received a past due notice from the IRS computer with their social security number in the box marked, “Past Due”.  

One of about 200 taxpayers is audited each year. Could that have anything to do with the nearly equal number of heart attacks each year?  

For those who have ever lived on a farm, it’s appropriate that the IRS changed their name from the Internal Revenue Bureau to the Internal Revenue Service. After all, what they do to taxpayers is like what the bulls do when they are servicing the herd.   

Ignorance of the law is an excuse from criminal charges. If you are ever confronted by an IRS special agent, the safest thing to say is, “No kidding? I didn’t know that.”         

Have you heard of the “audit lottery”? It’s a game where 99.5% of the people are winners. If the IRS audits your return, you lose. Everyone else is a winner.  

By Vernon K. Jacobs, CPA
Co-author of Legal Ways to Save Taxes Offshore & Onshore
http://www.offshorepress.com/legalways2save.htm