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IRS Computer Problems Shut Down Tax Return E-file System (foxnews.com)
Mr.Intel writes: The IRS stopped accepting electronically filed tax returns Wednesday because of problems with some of its computer systems. The outage could affect refunds, but the agency said it doesn't anticipate "major disruptions." A "hardware failure" forced the shutdown of several tax processing systems, including the e-file system, the IRS said in a statement. The IRS.gov website remains available, but "where's my refund" and other services are not working. Some systems will be out of service at least until Thursday, the agency said. "The IRS is currently in the process of making repairs and working to restore normal operations as soon as possible," the IRS said.
MFM hard drives don't last forever.
Totally! If we just elect Bernie then problems like these will be a thing of the past.
Instead of worrying about filing taxes 100% of income goes right to the Feds and every year you can apply to the Federal Government for a welfare package that will be given out based on politically correct preferences regarding race (no whities), gender (no Benjamins for Benjamin unless Benjamin was born Bethany), language & lack of citizenship (Habla Ingles? No Dinero!), and of course, whether or not you used a substantial portion of last year's welfare check to pay off Union "community organizers" Vido & Guido who run Bernie's local chapter of the Revolutionary Guard.
All you need to do is fill out a trivially simple 200 page form in triplicate, get it notarized by an official government agent, send it via certified mail and wait 18 - 24 months. Take that corporations!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Just because it is fiat does not mean you want it worthless. Money still has value, under your plan it would not.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Sorry everyone! It's my fault. I just e-filed the day before because I'm due for a big refund. They didn't like that, so conveniently a hardware problem occurred. :(
Life is not for the lazy.
Money has no intrinsic value. The worth of money is in what people believe it can be exchanged for. If you flood a market with currency, it will not take long before even the text on the bills claiming that they are "legal tender for all debts, public and private" and the threat of governmental force against those who would refuse the currency are not enough to retain any value.
The USA has an economic advantage from the US dollar being an accepted international trade currency. Foreign currency speculation and international investors buffer the consequences of ill-conceived federal monetary policy. No amount of investors and currency speculators can restrain the abject idiocy of factorial devaluation that would result from a government just printing money until debts are paid off. Every government that has gone that way ended the process by abandoning their old currency and defining a new one not tied to the old agreements.
No, it has value because the people says it does.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
That's a great idea. Not surprisingly your plan is shared by other brilliant folks, such as Venezuela's new economy czar Luis Salas. He has pointed out that "inflation does not exist." Specifically, the traditional Western economic model that claims printing money devalues currency is bogus and all price increases are merely the result of the parasitic businesses seeking excessive profits. Therefore government should do as you say and print whatever funds they require while diligently preventing greedy speculators from raising prices.
And it's a good thing, too. Prior do Luis Salas's incredible insights Venezuela's fortunes were looking pretty bleak. Doubtless his printing presses will be able to turn all of that around and the rest of the world will be thrilled to restock PDVAL's shelves in exchange for beautiful new bolivars. Why, only yesterday we learned that Luis is importing newly printed cash by the planeload to implement this strategy.
So thankfully your thinking has been adopted in the nick of time and saved Venezuela from collapse. Good work.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The IRS is certainly an expense, partly because the tax code is extremely complex and partly because the US government is designed with efficiency as a top priority. However, getting rid of taxes and printing money doesn't actually work - it's been tried more than once. Google "hyperinflation" for some examples.
The crux of it is that if the government prints whatever money they need, they end up "needing" trillions of dollars. Even voting on spending on stop it; 51% of people will vote for "free" health care, "free" college education, "free" housing, "free" cell phones, "free" solar companies, etc. If the people don't have to pay for these things fairly directly through taxes, they vote to spend like a drunken Ted Kennedy on amateur night at the strip club.
So the government prints a shit-ton of dollars to pay for all this stuff. The actual value of the dollar, aka prices, is set by supply and demand. Printing more dollars reduces the value of the existing dollars. (The value of each dollar is separate from the government declaring that the official money is called the dollar, aka fiat.) So the value of the dollar falls when the government prints a bunch. The next month, the government needs to pay their bills again. Remember now the value if each dollar is less, so they have to print more in order to pay their bills. Printing more reduces the value of the dollar again, so the next month they have to print even more. In about a year, the dollar becomes basically worthless. At that point people stop using the official currency and switch to another country's currency.
Since the US became a super-power through WWII, several countries with local currency that was hyperinflated by their government printing it switched to the US dollar, specfically because the US dollar is stable. The number printed isn't decided by the government, but by an independent board tasked with keeping the value properly "stable". (Properly stable here means slight inflation because slight inflation reduces unemployment).
Ahh, but spending is what keeps an economy moving.
Right, but you need money to be spent in your local economy to keep the local economy moving... not in the economy of Dubai or whatever, unless you happen to live there
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because the US Tax Code is so fucked that some people don't ever know if they will be getting a refund or owe more until they do the paperwork in February.
I am one of those people. Last year I owed, this year I'm getting a refund.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
That should read:
because the US government is NOT designed with efficiency as a top priority.
Bi-cameral legislature isn't efficient, it would be more efficient to have one body. In fact, debate isn't efficient, it would be more efficient to have all the decisions made by Kim Jong Obama. Public hearings certainly aren't efficient. It's not efficient to have courts examine the Constitutionality of federal laws. Obama once taught a course on the Constitution, it would be more efficient to just assume he knows what he's doing and all of his decisions are constitutional. But we've decided that when it comes to the federal government, some things are more important than efficiency.
A lot of people simply don't understand how the system works. One of my in-laws convinced her husband to put in 0 withholding allowances (or maybe 1; I forget) for years, ending up with a huge refund. Mind you, they had several children, so it was a relatively immense check. I think she thought somehow this was a hack that got them free money. Meanwhile, he had to borrow money from his own kids sometimes, because his cash flow was so bad.
Possibly, or it was a hack she used on her husband. It's hard to justify big expenses when you've got a little extra money coming in each month, but if you suddenly get a check for $8k...."honey, lets take that Caribbean cruise I've conveniently been planning since last April (when we 'unexpectedly' got that $8k tax refund and took our European tour)"
The $5 in interest I would have earned by depositing that wealth in a money market account isn't worth the risk of paying too little and being fined. Nor is it worth expending the time and effort required to ensure that I pay the minimum necessary to avoid the penalty.
Government doesn't print money (or even do the digital equivalent). They borrow money from private banks and the Federal Reserve. The personal income tax (which was passed at roughly the same time as the Federal Reserve was established) is merely the federal government's tool for guaranteeing that the bankers will always get their interest payments.
I work on a team that writes billing and invoicing software for my company. I can tell you with first hand experience that accountants have no fucking clue how a computer works, other than what they can do in Excel. Because of this, they want to do EVERYTHING in Excel whether it's even remotely the right tool or not.
Example: someone wants to export the general ledger from the billing system to an Excel spreadsheet, and doesn't understand why a two million row data set might be a problem for Excel.
These issues are exactly why "Business Intelligence" tools exist - to provide Excel-ish functions, backed by a real database. But they don't want to hear that, because it means that Excel might actually have limits, and they would have to learn a new tool.
Getting closer to TFA, I'm sure that somewhere in the IRS they have honest-to-goodness network engineers who set this shit up, or at least contractors that they paid to do it. Hardware failures happen in any data center, and you try to mitigate with redundancy and automatic fail-over. But it's never perfect, there's always something that gets missed, or something that doesn't work exactly as expected.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Correct, money has no intrinsic economic value. Just like gold, silver and diamonds. The economic value any of these things have is the value that people, as a whole, give to them.
we usually use them all (money, gold, etc) as place holders for exchange of goods, services or labour.
Note: Gold and silver do have some intrinsic value in electronic circuitry, diamonds as industrial abrasives. However, this value is small compared to their main use is as objects of art, decoration and as place holders of economic value.
LOL!!!
OMG....you pretty much made me spew my hot tea on my monitor with that one.....
Haha...good one!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Because one of the top triggers for an audit is underpayment of taxes. I try to break even, but shade towards a small refund. Been through the grist mill once with the IRS, never, ever want to do it again.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You're someone who never cashed in options, are you? When you have the options - they have potential value, but no real value until exercised. Then you get to pay income tax on the realized gains of those options (because they are realized in less than 1 year time - you typically exercise and sell on the same day, or at least within a week).
Now, you CAN take out loans against the value of your options, if the options are for publicly traded stocks. But then you're essentially mortgaging your future for payments today, and hope that the value of the stock continues to increase. If it doesn't - you get into really bad financial situations really quick. And even if that's not the case, the loan may be considered as income by the IRS and subject to full income tax.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I of course meant NOT designed with efficiency as a top priority- and for good reason. See also http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I don't disagree with this philosophy. Yes the government is using your money and giving it back without interest. Yes you should be investing that money instead of letting the government keep it all year. But in the real world, having a 'bonus' of money at the beginning of the year, even if it's my money, and even if its money the government should have given to me throughout the year, is something I'm ok with. There are some things that make sense logically that just don't work in the real word, and I believe this is one of them.
Your state does not tax refunds as income. What happens is that your state taxes assume as a starting point that your federal taxes are as stated on your W2, and your state AGI is reduced by that amount. However, if you overpaid your federal taxes, some of that money is coming back to you and was not really taxes paid. That money (your refund) should have been taxed by the state, but wasn't, so it gets added in as income. Likewise, if you underpaid your federal taxes you can claim the underpayment as additional taxes paid and that money comes off your state tax, but you don't count that as the state 'rewarding' you for underpaying your federal taxes, do you?
It doesn't have to hit 100% for the effect to be largely the same.
Ronald Reagan once said in support of lower top tax rates that the old 91% rates from the 50s were pointless and counterproductive, because people would work for 3 months, then when they hit that rate, just stop working for the rest of the year (or work overseas or for cash) because no one was going to labor only to keep just 9% of their income.
What you fail to take into account with the 91% tax rate is that it was a marginal rate. It only applied to income over a certain amount. I'll use $1,000,000 for the sake of argument. So if the 91% rate applies to income over $1 M all of your income up to that point is taxed at the lower rate that people not making that much pay. And even if you reach the point where you're paying 91% taxes on income over $1 M you'll still make more money than if you purposely hold your income under $1 M. Now I'm not advocating for a 91% tax rate but I don't think something like a 50% tax rate on income over $10 million is crazy to contemplate.
Regarding the 91% tax rate it applied from around the end of WW II until Kennedy changed it to around 75% in the early 1960s. Yet that period was one of the most productive in terms of economic growth and infrastructure building to support that growth in the history of the USA. I don't think tax rates are as important to economic growth as a lot of people think.
No, stock options are almost always taxed as ordinary income. The basis of a stock option is not set until you exercise the option. With a stock option, you own NOTHING. It is simply a promise by the company to sell you stock at some future date at a fixed price - there is no value to you in that promise, until you exercise the option.
When you exercise the option, you then establish a cost basis of an actual item of value (the stock). Since few people have the money to actually buy their stock outright, they tend to sell the stock on the same day as they exercise the option. Cash out, so to speak. And thus actual ownership of the item - the stock - was less than 365 days, and so it is taxed as ordinary income, not long-term capital gains.
Rarely does someone pay capital gains tax on stock bought via a stock option. You have to pay for the option itself up front, then hold it for at least 1 year. Most people don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around - so they exercise the option and sell the stock on the same day. No money out of their product, but the profits are taxed as full ordinary income (and, because of the values, typically in the several hundred thousand dollar range, the majority is at 39% Federal - and in the state of California, usually 12% State as well).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!