1) They are convinced their firearms scare the Army. The Army does not give two shits about you, all your buddies, and your AR-15s combined. It does not matter how many after-market parts you added. Since WW1 the Army has fought no wars where enemies armed with firearms caused most casualties. Hippy-artist-types scare the shit out of the Army because they can design creative booby-traps, and creative booby-traps were the VC's bread and butter. Iraqi and Afghani insurgents, too. There's a reason IEDs are called "improvised."
2) Historically firearms have never stopped the Federal Government from opressing Americans. This is largely because in America the Feds do not oppress US Citizens. What tends to happen is US Citizens oppress each-other, and then whine to high heaven about Abe Lincoln being a tyrant when he frees half the state.
Later on the Posse Comitatus Act allowed ordinary gun-owning Americans south of the Mason-Dixon line to ethnically cleanse their states of pesky black near- majorities (or actual majorities in the cases of South Carolina and Mississippi), impose Jim Crow, etc.
In most countries there's a method the government can use to find out if a proposal it wants to enact is Constitutional before it gets passed. In many countries there's actually a specific Court, completely separate from the regular Court system. In others they just ask the Supreme Court. The Canadians have been doing this since 1875.
This looks really weird to Americans, but OTOH it would have been really nice if instead of arguing for two years about whether ObamaCare was Constitutional Pelosi could just have sent a note to John Roberts.
Asking legal scholars doesn't really help because legal scholars can disagree with each-other, and with the Supreme Court. Pelosi would have been told by almost all scholars it was perfectly fine, and the mandate was not a tax. But then the right-wing outrage machine got going and everyone was somewhat surprised Roberts ruled that it was Constitutional at all, and shocked that he ruled it was Constitutional precisely because the mandate was a tax.
There's actually a specific legal provision for that. Canadian governments can ask Courts for "Advisory opinions" on whether a particular law is Constitutional. These cases are also called "reference questions."
Since we invented Judicial Review basically by accident (the Founders were convinced the natural give-and-take of government would keep everyone Constitutional, and therefore didn't include any Constitutional provisions for dealing with what happens when somebody says the Constitution was violated), there is no text authorizing anyone in the Federal government to ask for Advisory Opinions.
What does exist is text banning the Courts from hearing a case where there's no controversy. So I can't sue you because you plan to do me harm, I have to wait until the harm is done. In legal terms I have no standing to sue until I've started losing money. In Constitutional questions you can only have Standing if you're harmed (or are about to be irreparably harmed, it's very rare but the Courts occasionally ignore standing rules if the case is really clear). But even with that there's no way for Obama to ask Chief Justice Roberts whether her new Healthcare Law will pass his Constitutional tests because Obama is clearly not gonna be harmed by a law he helped pass.
This is what happens when you write a revolutionary legal document in 1789 and then only update it when you realize that slavery sucks, women should vote, etc.
They do it for stock, and almost no stockholder has physical shares. Shares can be fractional. My Sharebuilder account had three decimal places.
You're really over-analyzing the definition of property. If it can be bought and sold it's property. If it can be traded you are legally required to report every time you trade, and whether that trade resulted in a tax loss for you or a gain. Let me put it to you another way:
If there was any way to hack the definition of property so that something that could be sold for lots of money was not property, would Mitt Romney pay taxes?
I changed that like three times in my most, bnut eventually I realized it doesn't matter whether they are popular in an objective sense of the word.
As far as the IRS IS concerned they're popular now because lots of Americans claim to be millionaires based on Bitcoin, and some of those Americans like to shout from the mountaintop that it's untaxable. If those idiots would shut the fuck up they might actually get away with paying no taxes on their bitcoin. Since they don't the IRS is gonna have to actually send a few of them to prison so most Americans realize they're wrong.
Which means they need to enforce capital gains taxes on BTC, which in turn means they will probably actually bother to figure out whose selling BTC.
Just because you out-perform your co-workers doesn't mean you didn't get the job (and thus the salary) by lying. The act of fraud isn't your job performance, it's your application. Moreover the victim isn't necessarily your boss, it's the qualified applicant who didn't get the job due to the fake resume.
You got money due to a fake document. That caused hard to both the employer (which spent money on you), and other applicants (who didn;t get the job. That is the definition of Fraud. Depending on how good the job is, the premium for college degrees in your field, etc. it may not rise to the level of Criminal Fraud. And you are not likely to go to prison even if it does because nobody prosecutes that shit.
But that doesn't mean you would actually get off if the government tried to send you to prison.
Either all your transactions get taxed (the way they picked), or you always pay the high personal income tax rate.
If virtual currencies stay popular it's highly likely that Congress will write some new rules that make more sense, but also force virtual currencies more into the normal, highly regulated, fairly transparent (especially to cops) financial system.
There's specific rules governing this with stocks. First-In-First-Out would mean your appreciation (and gain/loss) is based on the oldest coin still in your wallet. Last-In-Last-Out does the opposite, and all the numbers are based on the coin you purchased most recently. You could also figure the average cost of the coins in your wallet and use that as your basis. You get to pick which method you use.
It looks like you could switch from LIFO to FIFO and back from year to year. The sole restriction seems to be that you can only use each coin once.
The problem is how the US Government, and especially Congress, works.
The US government has a lot more power-brokers then pretty much any other government. That means that a) when power-broker #97 has a reasonable-sounding idea that only adds one little wrinkle to tax law he can get it through and b) no one power-broker can say "fuck this, let's iron out the wrinkles" and actually have it happen.
If this was Canada and Speaker Boehner could fire half his caucus simply be refusing to sign their renomination papers, or there was a Finance Minister who could re-write the tax code on the fly we'd probably have a much simpler tax code.
Many people at the beginning bought them with cash from companies that are no longer in business. It might be a little hard for the IRS to track.
"Not in business" could make it easier. A bankrupt entity isn't able to hire a lawyer to stop the IRS from going through it's paperwork.
Moreover the IRS doesn't actually need records. What it needs is proof you got money and you didn't put it on your tax forms. If they get your bank records they'll know exactly how much money you made when you sold Bitcoins from when you deposited it. They will tax your ass on that full amount. Plus penalties, and interest. Any attempts to talk them down will result in extremely polite,. professional, "fuck yous," and attempts to dodge by ignoring the bill will be met with increased penalties and wage garnishments.
If you'd declared the Bitcoins and deducted your costs (in tax terms "reported the basis") then you'd have saved money, on the original tax bill, paid no penalties and interest, and never been told "fuck you" by the IRS.
So basically if the IRS really wants to screw early Bitcoiners they will be screwed. It'll be more work then screwing people who dodge their tax bills with questionable home office deductions, but that just means the IRS will really enjoy screwing BTCers.
You can still do that legally. But if you don't report it on your tax forms, and it counts as a capital gain, and they catch you you're gonna be in trouble.
Whether they'll be able to catch you is the tricky question. With most capital-gains they do it because there's a paper trail. Local property tax authorities know when you bought your house, how much you paid, etc. Federally-regulated banks report stock-sales. If Bitcoin doesn't stay popular they may not bother developing ways to track your ass down and nail it to the wall. You'll almost certainly get away with it unless you use your untaxed Bitcoin wealth to turn your life into a rap video or something.
If Bitcoin does stop popular the top exchanges will all be forced to report sales to the IRS and other tax authorities. International tax agencies just skooshed Swiss bank privacy rules like they were a bug, a bunch of geeky hobbyists represented by the disgraced Mt. Gox don't stand a chance.
First off if you're in a state that actually spends only 8% of it's SDP you're in a minority. Most states are in 9% or 10% range. More people live in one state that's above 11% (Cali) then all sub-9% states combined.
The Feds support a lot of state-level spending through indirect programs. Student aid like Pell Grants, Race to the Top money, and support for police allows a lot of libraries to be built.
The NSA, billion-dollar-bombers, and campaign contributors only actually add up to a small fraction of the Federal budget. A huge chunk is transfer payments set up before most campaign contributors were born. Medicare and Social Security alone are a majority of Federal spending in the 2010-2019 period. Medicaid is another fairly large chunk, this year ObamaCare subsidies kick in, with Pell grants, Earned Income Credit, military retirements, the VA, etc. I'd estimate 2/3-3/4 of Federal spending is simply the Feds shuffling money from the accounts of some Americans into the accounts of American who American voters have decided deserve the money more.
The "Billion-dollar-bombers" could be gotten rid of easily in theory. In practice those pesky American voters tend to look on defense cuts as encouraging Putin to be Hitler Mk. II, so it's unlikely they'll be cut. Whatever it's other crimes, the NSA budget is a rounding error (literally: $11 Billion is under 1/3 of a percent of the total) on the Federal total. "Handouts" to campaign contributors tend to be exaggerated. There's generally no quid-pro-quo. What happens is the company that would be a shoe-in if the government decided to study the effect of dung beetle blood on the flu virus finds a candidate who supports studying dung beetle blood and sends him a check. If Congressional votes could actually be easily bought then we wouldn't have a DRIC project, we'd have a second span to the Ambassador Bridge.
Which means that when Federal spending cuts get talked about proposals tend to be both ambitious and vague (ie: every Paul Ryan "budget" ever) or specific and miniscule (like your proposal, which the NSA's 0.31% off Federal spending). The specific/miniscule cuts that could actually get passed would almost certainly include most support for states and cities because Congress doesn't get yelled at when Jindal has to expel scholarship students from Louisiana State.
Goddamn cheapskates can be obsessive. And not smart-obsessive.
If you do some actual math you'll note that any individual program is a rounding error in terms of a $Trillion budget. You'll also note clever assholes can provide plenty of rationales why even obvious spending programs suck. Remember the "volcano research" gaffe?
As for the programs you mentioned, for God's sake do some actual research. You're wrong about the C-130. It's one of the reasons that we can do the things we do, and in the context of the Air Force budget it's barely a rounding error. The "militarization" of police forces is even cheaper.
If you actually want to reduce the size of the federal government, and it's attendant tax burdens, you have to do at least two of three things.
1) Gut Social Security.
2) Gut Medicare.
3) Decide the post-Hitler decision to have a military capable of responding to m ultiple criuses at once world-wide was a dumb idea and fire half the Pentagon. Note that this doesn't involve eliminating any actual programs (our boys will still need or transport even if there are only 50k of them instead of 500k).
None of these three things ever happen because actual Americans, including you, are incapable of telling somebody who puts in 40 hours a week that the government spending he was planning on benefiting from (ie: Social Security, Medicare, or a job in the military) has to go away.
As far as I know, there are no laws requiring people to be honest on their resumes. They will obviously get fired if caught, but not arrested and charged with a crime.
Saying something you know is untrue (ie: I have a degree) to get money (ie: a job) is fraud.
It probably won't actually be prosecuted, but that doesn't mean it could not be prosecuted.
Reading the article it didn't seem like the actual math was the problem. The problem seemed to be that the verification requirements were diverse, sundry, and obsolete.
So you might now this guy studied fish for x years with the EPA, transferred over to managing the rivers with the Corps of Engineers, moved to Interior (which manages commercial fishing regulations), did a stint in the Park Service, and then had a job evaluating NSF Grant proposals studying fish. That's five institutions you have to get paperwork from verifying precisely how long this guy worked with each one, some of that verification may be able to be emailed to you, but others may need paper forms signed.
The private sector could probably pull this off without making too many mistakes, but the private sector's definition of "too many mistakes" tends to be several orders of magnitude higher then the Federal governments. This is because people take the Federal government very seriously, and really hate it when they fuck up.
Let's say you ran a multi-billion company, and you had a program cutting prices for non-profits. Your program has rules designed to weed out the most political non-profits. The program administrator filters applications based on criteria targeting one of the main political parties. No non-profit actually has it's application denied (or loses it's price-cut) based on these criteria, but they do have to jump through a bunch of pain in the ass hoops to get approved. That's not a huge scandal. But when the IRS failed to approve applications from the Tea Party quickly enough manner Congressman started talking indictment.
In this case the risk would be that a pension applicant shades the truth a bit, and before you get official verification you start paying out, which leads to a 20/20 investigation of corrupt Federal retirees.
So, you're insinuating that the people doing it by hand can do the "almost impossible" work easier than having it coded? Seriously?
Keep in mind this is the Federal Government.
If they screw up the pension because that guy's six years in the Spokane-area EPA didn't count due to his having to take a demotion after using the n-word in paperwork then it's a fucking disaster. Whereas the private sector would see that extra $5-$10k a year as a rounding error, learning experience, and potential lawsuit; the Federal government sees it as a potential CNN or Congressional investigation and freaks the fuck out.
In other words the problem is not calculating the benefit given the proper data inputs. That is probably done automatically already. The problem is almost certainly getting the data that needs to be fed into the system verified. If you read the article the waste the workers mention is not that they couldn't figure out the pensions easily, it's that they couldn't start paying the pensions as long as this one asshole hadn't sent in a paper signature.
The paper signature thing makes me think that some of these pension rules haven't been amended in the past 20-30 years, which is kinda what happens when you have Checks and Balances and Congress that doesn't agree with the President.
This is largely because the IRS has to send out refunds as quickly as possible. It does some checks that can be automatic quite quickly (for example you can't send in a return with wrong W2 or SSN information because the Social Security database is quite good), but other info simply can't be checked in any reasonable time-frame.
For example a lot of people have businesses that aren't big enough to require full-scale accounting services. Their income is fully taxable, but the IRS has no idea which bank account is used for the business, or even if a bank account is used for the business at all. I know a nanny in NYC. Her business is a purely cash affair, she's got no bank account, and she doesn't keep very good records; so how the fuck could the IRS verify whether her income is $15k or $50k?
Which means they can either take her at her word (which is almost certainly wrong, because she doesn't know what the real numbers are, even tho she isn't actually trying to cheat them), and send her check or they can delay her check and send an accountant to grill her for a few hours. Since they don't have the budget for the accountant, they go with the first option.
Which means that if I have a scam filing fake returns I can file a whole lot of the damn things before the real people involved notice their name/SSN has already been used and the IRS realizes there's a fucking problem. It's very hard to get away with this for more then a year or two because the IRS knows exactly which house got the damn check for that guy, but until I get caught I can have a lotta fun.
BTW, combating this was part of the reason the IRS tried to make all paid tax preparers take an official exam last year. Professional tax preparers (like me IRL) are unlikely to file 80 returns for the same scammer because we know that the IRS will get our asses eventually, OTOH some dude who took a class and now has a business opening up accounts on Turbotax for all his buddies is not likely to deal with the poor schmuck who tried to stiff the IRS of $15k 7 years ago and didn't realize he'd been caught until 2/3 of his pay check disappeared. The Courts ruled the IRS did not have the statutory authority to do this.
Note that all these problems are actually Congress's fault, because it's Congress that decided sending the nanny a check was preferable to sending her an accountant; and it's Congress that wrote the statute that did not allow the IRS to force people to take the Tax Professional exam.
The laws are complicated as hell, but very few individual returns are terribly complicated. The ones that are complicated tend to be the same complicated year after year, so if they get audited once and an IRS agent sits down with the paperwork and verifies it's all cool in 2007 then nobody human needs to look at it for a decade or two.
OTOH we have checks and balances, a small-c-conservative form of government, and a Legislature where every legislator has a lot of power. That means that if in 1975 Congressman Dingell decides to help retirees he can probably get that done, but only if he helps a limited number of retirees (because helping a lot would be expensive). So some department gets a tweak boosting their pensions. If in 1995 Congressman Souder decides Federal pensions are a too expensive then he can probably do something about that, but (again) only by gently tweaking the rules for a small number of retirees.
And since the only guy with the power to force the system to be rational is the President himself, and the President himself generally has a bigger vision then rationalizing Federal retirement benefits, it all ends up crazier then the tax system.
At least with the tax system the Congressman who invented the 1040EZ can boast about doing something most people actually liked.
Privacy rights in US Federal law basically boil down to how much the Court is willing to BS itself because the Constitution doesn't have an Amendment directly (and clearly) intended to address the issue. This is largely because when those Amendments were written in the 1790s privacy rights weren't something that governments had figured out how to abuse, and since then the Courts have managed to stretch other Amendments to cover a lot of the gap. The Fourth is usually mentioned, but all it explicitly bans are "unreasonable searches" without warrants. The Third is almost never referred to in US law. States can be better, but they can also be worse.
The bill I'm talking about, and I thought you were talking about, is the Posse Comitatus Act. It is intended to stop the Army from enforcing US Laws. This sounds really good on paper, because who would want that? But in practice it was basically a response to the post-Civil War Republicans attempts to force the South to treat black people like people. The local authorities did not want to treat black people like people, so they resisted, and eventually they were able to a) get the troops withdrawn, and b) get a law saying that the Army could only be used in aiding law enforcement under certain very strict conditions. One of those conditions is "if the Governor asks for it." And if South Carolina has decided to join the system then it follows the Governor (or one of his lawfully appointed representatives) asked for that shit.
Note that the Posse Comitatus Act is a perfect example of why it's very complicated to protect freedom in the US. Keeping the big bad Army from arresting people sounds like a pro-freedom position, but IRL the Act's major effect was to show everyone that Reconstruction was truly over, and Southern states could no longer be forced to treat black people like people.
I'd hope the constitution still applies to them, and that they get warrants to collect information form other policing agencies. [See the other comment, too, re limited powers of the military in peacetime]
And which Constitutional clause says the government can't retain data?
The Fourth stops certain kinds of searches, but has nothing to do with retention. "Search" in legal terms only applies to things that aren't public, so if the Navy is compiling publicly available police reports the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply.
As for their limited police powers, the limit is they can't be local/state cops unless the local cops ask for help using a set procedure. If the local cops query the Navy database then they are (by definition) asking for help. They actually can't be totally limited from law enforcement because they have Constitutional authority over their personnel and their military bases.
The bill reads like it's a lot more, but (like pretty much all broad-sounding limits on US Law Enforcement), it includes multiple innocuous-sounding "buts" that make it useless to protect anybody who isn't running a private militia enforcing white supremacy with the connivance of the local government.
You're exaggerating the social conservatism of black pols. In the 43-strong black caucus there are three people who oppose gay marriage. As you get down to a more local level social conservatism gets stronger. It's probably exaggerated in Mississippi because the only way to get anything done is to get buy-in from extremely socially conservative whites, which means that a black pol who gets things done in the statehouse has to pander to them. Black pols in a more normal situation (ie: New York State) tend to be on the cutting edge of the gay rights movement because they need to build coalitions with secular white people.
You're closer on the number then I thought (it's 37.3% black, and I thought it was about a third), but Mississippi is a bit of an insane example. They keep their elections from being a lot closer by having an extremely high incarceration rate, particularly for blacks, and making it virtually impossible to regain your right to vote after being imprisoned. Everybody else is 25-30% or so black, and a 10-15% gain in the black population nets to about 8 points for Democrats, which makes most southern states go from impossible wins to Ohio.
It's not that surprising. All the states involved are coastal states except New Mexico. The Counties shaded dark blue are almost all in areas with a lot of Naval activity (ie: SoCal includes San Diego). A lot of very red states don't even have a County participating. Wyoming, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma aren't in it.
Actually... yes... If you have a security clearance you are required to report traffic violations resulting in large fines. Until recently the limit was $150, but in the last couple of years they upped it to $300. Apparently the US government thinks that if you routinely drive 90 in a 50 you are irresponsible or something.
My best guess is that in 1952 some low-level Federal Agent in a jurisdiction where drunk driving was a fine squished some lady, the media found out he'd kept his job despite multiple tickets, and there was a massive controversy in which several of his bossed were Named in the Paper (the Civil Servants motto: "Don't get your name in the Paper.") and now they're paranoid it'll happen again.
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Gun nuts annoy me for two reasons.
1) They are convinced their firearms scare the Army. The Army does not give two shits about you, all your buddies, and your AR-15s combined. It does not matter how many after-market parts you added. Since WW1 the Army has fought no wars where enemies armed with firearms caused most casualties. Hippy-artist-types scare the shit out of the Army because they can design creative booby-traps, and creative booby-traps were the VC's bread and butter. Iraqi and Afghani insurgents, too. There's a reason IEDs are called "improvised."
2) Historically firearms have never stopped the Federal Government from opressing Americans. This is largely because in America the Feds do not oppress US Citizens. What tends to happen is US Citizens oppress each-other, and then whine to high heaven about Abe Lincoln being a tyrant when he frees half the state.
Later on the Posse Comitatus Act allowed ordinary gun-owning Americans south of the Mason-Dixon line to ethnically cleanse their states of pesky black near- majorities (or actual majorities in the cases of South Carolina and Mississippi), impose Jim Crow, etc.
In most countries there's a method the government can use to find out if a proposal it wants to enact is Constitutional before it gets passed. In many countries there's actually a specific Court, completely separate from the regular Court system. In others they just ask the Supreme Court. The Canadians have been doing this since 1875.
This looks really weird to Americans, but OTOH it would have been really nice if instead of arguing for two years about whether ObamaCare was Constitutional Pelosi could just have sent a note to John Roberts.
Asking legal scholars doesn't really help because legal scholars can disagree with each-other, and with the Supreme Court. Pelosi would have been told by almost all scholars it was perfectly fine, and the mandate was not a tax. But then the right-wing outrage machine got going and everyone was somewhat surprised Roberts ruled that it was Constitutional at all, and shocked that he ruled it was Constitutional precisely because the mandate was a tax.
There's actually a specific legal provision for that. Canadian governments can ask Courts for "Advisory opinions" on whether a particular law is Constitutional. These cases are also called "reference questions."
Since we invented Judicial Review basically by accident (the Founders were convinced the natural give-and-take of government would keep everyone Constitutional, and therefore didn't include any Constitutional provisions for dealing with what happens when somebody says the Constitution was violated), there is no text authorizing anyone in the Federal government to ask for Advisory Opinions.
What does exist is text banning the Courts from hearing a case where there's no controversy. So I can't sue you because you plan to do me harm, I have to wait until the harm is done. In legal terms I have no standing to sue until I've started losing money. In Constitutional questions you can only have Standing if you're harmed (or are about to be irreparably harmed, it's very rare but the Courts occasionally ignore standing rules if the case is really clear). But even with that there's no way for Obama to ask Chief Justice Roberts whether her new Healthcare Law will pass his Constitutional tests because Obama is clearly not gonna be harmed by a law he helped pass.
This is what happens when you write a revolutionary legal document in 1789 and then only update it when you realize that slavery sucks, women should vote, etc.
They do it for stock, and almost no stockholder has physical shares. Shares can be fractional. My Sharebuilder account had three decimal places.
You're really over-analyzing the definition of property. If it can be bought and sold it's property. If it can be traded you are legally required to report every time you trade, and whether that trade resulted in a tax loss for you or a gain. Let me put it to you another way:
If there was any way to hack the definition of property so that something that could be sold for lots of money was not property, would Mitt Romney pay taxes?
You do realize that you can mine to a wallet and transfer to and from that wallet to anywhere in the world. No exchange is needed.
And how do you intend to sell your BTC without an exchange? Or rather, who do you intend to sell you Bitcoin to?
Some guy you find on a website crawling with IRS agents?
On some new Mt. Gox based in Russia?
There's a reason almost all gold transactions get taxed even tho gold works a lot better as a currency then BTC.
I changed that like three times in my most, bnut eventually I realized it doesn't matter whether they are popular in an objective sense of the word.
As far as the IRS IS concerned they're popular now because lots of Americans claim to be millionaires based on Bitcoin, and some of those Americans like to shout from the mountaintop that it's untaxable. If those idiots would shut the fuck up they might actually get away with paying no taxes on their bitcoin. Since they don't the IRS is gonna have to actually send a few of them to prison so most Americans realize they're wrong.
Which means they need to enforce capital gains taxes on BTC, which in turn means they will probably actually bother to figure out whose selling BTC.
Just because you out-perform your co-workers doesn't mean you didn't get the job (and thus the salary) by lying. The act of fraud isn't your job performance, it's your application. Moreover the victim isn't necessarily your boss, it's the qualified applicant who didn't get the job due to the fake resume.
You got money due to a fake document. That caused hard to both the employer (which spent money on you), and other applicants (who didn;t get the job. That is the definition of Fraud. Depending on how good the job is, the premium for college degrees in your field, etc. it may not rise to the level of Criminal Fraud. And you are not likely to go to prison even if it does because nobody prosecutes that shit.
But that doesn't mean you would actually get off if the government tried to send you to prison.
There's no non-messy way to do this.
Either all your transactions get taxed (the way they picked), or you always pay the high personal income tax rate.
If virtual currencies stay popular it's highly likely that Congress will write some new rules that make more sense, but also force virtual currencies more into the normal, highly regulated, fairly transparent (especially to cops) financial system.
There's specific rules governing this with stocks. First-In-First-Out would mean your appreciation (and gain/loss) is based on the oldest coin still in your wallet. Last-In-Last-Out does the opposite, and all the numbers are based on the coin you purchased most recently. You could also figure the average cost of the coins in your wallet and use that as your basis. You get to pick which method you use.
It looks like you could switch from LIFO to FIFO and back from year to year. The sole restriction seems to be that you can only use each coin once.
The problem is how the US Government, and especially Congress, works.
The US government has a lot more power-brokers then pretty much any other government. That means that a) when power-broker #97 has a reasonable-sounding idea that only adds one little wrinkle to tax law he can get it through and b) no one power-broker can say "fuck this, let's iron out the wrinkles" and actually have it happen.
If this was Canada and Speaker Boehner could fire half his caucus simply be refusing to sign their renomination papers, or there was a Finance Minister who could re-write the tax code on the fly we'd probably have a much simpler tax code.
Many people at the beginning bought them with cash from companies that are no longer in business. It might be a little hard for the IRS to track.
"Not in business" could make it easier. A bankrupt entity isn't able to hire a lawyer to stop the IRS from going through it's paperwork.
Moreover the IRS doesn't actually need records. What it needs is proof you got money and you didn't put it on your tax forms. If they get your bank records they'll know exactly how much money you made when you sold Bitcoins from when you deposited it. They will tax your ass on that full amount. Plus penalties, and interest. Any attempts to talk them down will result in extremely polite,. professional, "fuck yous," and attempts to dodge by ignoring the bill will be met with increased penalties and wage garnishments.
If you'd declared the Bitcoins and deducted your costs (in tax terms "reported the basis") then you'd have saved money, on the original tax bill, paid no penalties and interest, and never been told "fuck you" by the IRS.
So basically if the IRS really wants to screw early Bitcoiners they will be screwed. It'll be more work then screwing people who dodge their tax bills with questionable home office deductions, but that just means the IRS will really enjoy screwing BTCers.
You can still do that legally. But if you don't report it on your tax forms, and it counts as a capital gain, and they catch you you're gonna be in trouble.
Whether they'll be able to catch you is the tricky question. With most capital-gains they do it because there's a paper trail. Local property tax authorities know when you bought your house, how much you paid, etc. Federally-regulated banks report stock-sales. If Bitcoin doesn't stay popular they may not bother developing ways to track your ass down and nail it to the wall. You'll almost certainly get away with it unless you use your untaxed Bitcoin wealth to turn your life into a rap video or something.
If Bitcoin does stop popular the top exchanges will all be forced to report sales to the IRS and other tax authorities. International tax agencies just skooshed Swiss bank privacy rules like they were a bug, a bunch of geeky hobbyists represented by the disgraced Mt. Gox don't stand a chance.
First off if you're in a state that actually spends only 8% of it's SDP you're in a minority. Most states are in 9% or 10% range. More people live in one state that's above 11% (Cali) then all sub-9% states combined.
The Feds support a lot of state-level spending through indirect programs. Student aid like Pell Grants, Race to the Top money, and support for police allows a lot of libraries to be built.
The NSA, billion-dollar-bombers, and campaign contributors only actually add up to a small fraction of the Federal budget. A huge chunk is transfer payments set up before most campaign contributors were born. Medicare and Social Security alone are a majority of Federal spending in the 2010-2019 period. Medicaid is another fairly large chunk, this year ObamaCare subsidies kick in, with Pell grants, Earned Income Credit, military retirements, the VA, etc. I'd estimate 2/3-3/4 of Federal spending is simply the Feds shuffling money from the accounts of some Americans into the accounts of American who American voters have decided deserve the money more.
The "Billion-dollar-bombers" could be gotten rid of easily in theory. In practice those pesky American voters tend to look on defense cuts as encouraging Putin to be Hitler Mk. II, so it's unlikely they'll be cut. Whatever it's other crimes, the NSA budget is a rounding error (literally: $11 Billion is under 1/3 of a percent of the total) on the Federal total. "Handouts" to campaign contributors tend to be exaggerated. There's generally no quid-pro-quo. What happens is the company that would be a shoe-in if the government decided to study the effect of dung beetle blood on the flu virus finds a candidate who supports studying dung beetle blood and sends him a check. If Congressional votes could actually be easily bought then we wouldn't have a DRIC project, we'd have a second span to the Ambassador Bridge.
Which means that when Federal spending cuts get talked about proposals tend to be both ambitious and vague (ie: every Paul Ryan "budget" ever) or specific and miniscule (like your proposal, which the NSA's 0.31% off Federal spending). The specific/miniscule cuts that could actually get passed would almost certainly include most support for states and cities because Congress doesn't get yelled at when Jindal has to expel scholarship students from Louisiana State.
Goddamn cheapskates can be obsessive. And not smart-obsessive.
If you do some actual math you'll note that any individual program is a rounding error in terms of a $Trillion budget. You'll also note clever assholes can provide plenty of rationales why even obvious spending programs suck. Remember the "volcano research" gaffe?
As for the programs you mentioned, for God's sake do some actual research. You're wrong about the C-130. It's one of the reasons that we can do the things we do, and in the context of the Air Force budget it's barely a rounding error. The "militarization" of police forces is even cheaper.
If you actually want to reduce the size of the federal government, and it's attendant tax burdens, you have to do at least two of three things.
1) Gut Social Security.
2) Gut Medicare.
3) Decide the post-Hitler decision to have a military capable of responding to m ultiple criuses at once world-wide was a dumb idea and fire half the Pentagon. Note that this doesn't involve eliminating any actual programs (our boys will still need or transport even if there are only 50k of them instead of 500k).
None of these three things ever happen because actual Americans, including you, are incapable of telling somebody who puts in 40 hours a week that the government spending he was planning on benefiting from (ie: Social Security, Medicare, or a job in the military) has to go away.
Why wouldn't lying on a resume be fraud? You're submitting a false document in hopes of getting money. That's the definition of fraud.
It's not likely to be prosecuted, or even result in a Civil Lawsuit, but that doesn't mean it's legal.
As far as I know, there are no laws requiring people to be honest on their resumes. They will obviously get fired if caught, but not arrested and charged with a crime.
Saying something you know is untrue (ie: I have a degree) to get money (ie: a job) is fraud.
It probably won't actually be prosecuted, but that doesn't mean it could not be prosecuted.
Reading the article it didn't seem like the actual math was the problem. The problem seemed to be that the verification requirements were diverse, sundry, and obsolete.
So you might now this guy studied fish for x years with the EPA, transferred over to managing the rivers with the Corps of Engineers, moved to Interior (which manages commercial fishing regulations), did a stint in the Park Service, and then had a job evaluating NSF Grant proposals studying fish. That's five institutions you have to get paperwork from verifying precisely how long this guy worked with each one, some of that verification may be able to be emailed to you, but others may need paper forms signed.
The private sector could probably pull this off without making too many mistakes, but the private sector's definition of "too many mistakes" tends to be several orders of magnitude higher then the Federal governments. This is because people take the Federal government very seriously, and really hate it when they fuck up.
Let's say you ran a multi-billion company, and you had a program cutting prices for non-profits. Your program has rules designed to weed out the most political non-profits. The program administrator filters applications based on criteria targeting one of the main political parties. No non-profit actually has it's application denied (or loses it's price-cut) based on these criteria, but they do have to jump through a bunch of pain in the ass hoops to get approved. That's not a huge scandal. But when the IRS failed to approve applications from the Tea Party quickly enough manner Congressman started talking indictment.
In this case the risk would be that a pension applicant shades the truth a bit, and before you get official verification you start paying out, which leads to a 20/20 investigation of corrupt Federal retirees.
So, you're insinuating that the people doing it by hand can do the "almost impossible" work easier than having it coded? Seriously?
Keep in mind this is the Federal Government.
If they screw up the pension because that guy's six years in the Spokane-area EPA didn't count due to his having to take a demotion after using the n-word in paperwork then it's a fucking disaster. Whereas the private sector would see that extra $5-$10k a year as a rounding error, learning experience, and potential lawsuit; the Federal government sees it as a potential CNN or Congressional investigation and freaks the fuck out.
In other words the problem is not calculating the benefit given the proper data inputs. That is probably done automatically already. The problem is almost certainly getting the data that needs to be fed into the system verified. If you read the article the waste the workers mention is not that they couldn't figure out the pensions easily, it's that they couldn't start paying the pensions as long as this one asshole hadn't sent in a paper signature.
The paper signature thing makes me think that some of these pension rules haven't been amended in the past 20-30 years, which is kinda what happens when you have Checks and Balances and Congress that doesn't agree with the President.
This is largely because the IRS has to send out refunds as quickly as possible. It does some checks that can be automatic quite quickly (for example you can't send in a return with wrong W2 or SSN information because the Social Security database is quite good), but other info simply can't be checked in any reasonable time-frame.
For example a lot of people have businesses that aren't big enough to require full-scale accounting services. Their income is fully taxable, but the IRS has no idea which bank account is used for the business, or even if a bank account is used for the business at all. I know a nanny in NYC. Her business is a purely cash affair, she's got no bank account, and she doesn't keep very good records; so how the fuck could the IRS verify whether her income is $15k or $50k?
Which means they can either take her at her word (which is almost certainly wrong, because she doesn't know what the real numbers are, even tho she isn't actually trying to cheat them), and send her check or they can delay her check and send an accountant to grill her for a few hours. Since they don't have the budget for the accountant, they go with the first option.
Which means that if I have a scam filing fake returns I can file a whole lot of the damn things before the real people involved notice their name/SSN has already been used and the IRS realizes there's a fucking problem. It's very hard to get away with this for more then a year or two because the IRS knows exactly which house got the damn check for that guy, but until I get caught I can have a lotta fun.
BTW, combating this was part of the reason the IRS tried to make all paid tax preparers take an official exam last year. Professional tax preparers (like me IRL) are unlikely to file 80 returns for the same scammer because we know that the IRS will get our asses eventually, OTOH some dude who took a class and now has a business opening up accounts on Turbotax for all his buddies is not likely to deal with the poor schmuck who tried to stiff the IRS of $15k 7 years ago and didn't realize he'd been caught until 2/3 of his pay check disappeared. The Courts ruled the IRS did not have the statutory authority to do this.
Note that all these problems are actually Congress's fault, because it's Congress that decided sending the nanny a check was preferable to sending her an accountant; and it's Congress that wrote the statute that did not allow the IRS to force people to take the Tax Professional exam.
The laws are complicated as hell, but very few individual returns are terribly complicated. The ones that are complicated tend to be the same complicated year after year, so if they get audited once and an IRS agent sits down with the paperwork and verifies it's all cool in 2007 then nobody human needs to look at it for a decade or two.
OTOH we have checks and balances, a small-c-conservative form of government, and a Legislature where every legislator has a lot of power. That means that if in 1975 Congressman Dingell decides to help retirees he can probably get that done, but only if he helps a limited number of retirees (because helping a lot would be expensive). So some department gets a tweak boosting their pensions. If in 1995 Congressman Souder decides Federal pensions are a too expensive then he can probably do something about that, but (again) only by gently tweaking the rules for a small number of retirees.
And since the only guy with the power to force the system to be rational is the President himself, and the President himself generally has a bigger vision then rationalizing Federal retirement benefits, it all ends up crazier then the tax system.
At least with the tax system the Congressman who invented the 1040EZ can boast about doing something most people actually liked.
Privacy rights in US Federal law basically boil down to how much the Court is willing to BS itself because the Constitution doesn't have an Amendment directly (and clearly) intended to address the issue. This is largely because when those Amendments were written in the 1790s privacy rights weren't something that governments had figured out how to abuse, and since then the Courts have managed to stretch other Amendments to cover a lot of the gap. The Fourth is usually mentioned, but all it explicitly bans are "unreasonable searches" without warrants. The Third is almost never referred to in US law. States can be better, but they can also be worse.
The bill I'm talking about, and I thought you were talking about, is the Posse Comitatus Act. It is intended to stop the Army from enforcing US Laws. This sounds really good on paper, because who would want that? But in practice it was basically a response to the post-Civil War Republicans attempts to force the South to treat black people like people. The local authorities did not want to treat black people like people, so they resisted, and eventually they were able to a) get the troops withdrawn, and b) get a law saying that the Army could only be used in aiding law enforcement under certain very strict conditions. One of those conditions is "if the Governor asks for it." And if South Carolina has decided to join the system then it follows the Governor (or one of his lawfully appointed representatives) asked for that shit.
Note that the Posse Comitatus Act is a perfect example of why it's very complicated to protect freedom in the US. Keeping the big bad Army from arresting people sounds like a pro-freedom position, but IRL the Act's major effect was to show everyone that Reconstruction was truly over, and Southern states could no longer be forced to treat black people like people.
I'd hope the constitution still applies to them, and that they get warrants to collect information form other policing agencies. [See the other comment, too, re limited powers of the military in peacetime]
And which Constitutional clause says the government can't retain data?
The Fourth stops certain kinds of searches, but has nothing to do with retention. "Search" in legal terms only applies to things that aren't public, so if the Navy is compiling publicly available police reports the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply.
As for their limited police powers, the limit is they can't be local/state cops unless the local cops ask for help using a set procedure. If the local cops query the Navy database then they are (by definition) asking for help. They actually can't be totally limited from law enforcement because they have Constitutional authority over their personnel and their military bases.
The bill reads like it's a lot more, but (like pretty much all broad-sounding limits on US Law Enforcement), it includes multiple innocuous-sounding "buts" that make it useless to protect anybody who isn't running a private militia enforcing white supremacy with the connivance of the local government.
You're exaggerating the social conservatism of black pols. In the 43-strong black caucus there are three people who oppose gay marriage. As you get down to a more local level social conservatism gets stronger. It's probably exaggerated in Mississippi because the only way to get anything done is to get buy-in from extremely socially conservative whites, which means that a black pol who gets things done in the statehouse has to pander to them. Black pols in a more normal situation (ie: New York State) tend to be on the cutting edge of the gay rights movement because they need to build coalitions with secular white people.
You're closer on the number then I thought (it's 37.3% black, and I thought it was about a third), but Mississippi is a bit of an insane example. They keep their elections from being a lot closer by having an extremely high incarceration rate, particularly for blacks, and making it virtually impossible to regain your right to vote after being imprisoned. Everybody else is 25-30% or so black, and a 10-15% gain in the black population nets to about 8 points for Democrats, which makes most southern states go from impossible wins to Ohio.
It's not that surprising. All the states involved are coastal states except New Mexico. The Counties shaded dark blue are almost all in areas with a lot of Naval activity (ie: SoCal includes San Diego). A lot of very red states don't even have a County participating. Wyoming, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma aren't in it.
Actually... yes... If you have a security clearance you are required to report traffic violations resulting in large fines. Until recently the limit was $150, but in the last couple of years they upped it to $300. Apparently the US government thinks that if you routinely drive 90 in a 50 you are irresponsible or something.
My best guess is that in 1952 some low-level Federal Agent in a jurisdiction where drunk driving was a fine squished some lady, the media found out he'd kept his job despite multiple tickets, and there was a massive controversy in which several of his bossed were Named in the Paper (the Civil Servants motto: "Don't get your name in the Paper.") and now they're paranoid it'll happen again.