Tax tyranny is upon us (Reid's sneaky 1099 provision under Obamacare will make you a criminal

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Tax tyranny is upon us (Reid's sneaky 1099 provision under Obamacare will make you a criminal

URL Source: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news ... /oct/5/tax-tyranny-is-upon-us/

Published: Dec 3, 2010
Author: Robert Zubrin

Dear Republicans, I am writing this to ask to you take up arms on a critical issue, which you seem to be
virtually ignoring - to your cost and that of the nation.

This is the matter of 1099 tyranny.

You see, while he was ramming through the health care bill, Harry Reid hid in its 2,500 pages of gibberish a provision requiring all businesses
- big, small and even sole proprietorships - to file a 1099 form
reporting every purchase of $600 or more from every vendor - including
small purchases adding up to $600 or more.

This is complete insanity. I own a small research-and-development business with 15 employees. We make hundreds of purchases in the $600 range each year. We
would need to file several hundred of those 1099s. Big corporations
would need to file millions of them. Furthermore, vendors such as
hardware stores will need to keep track of all their sales to each of
their customers - tens of thousands for a typical big store - in order
to provide an accurate 1099 totaling the purchases of each and every
customer who is, or might be, a small business. These forms would have
to be reconciled with the records of each business, or the IRS would
have grounds to accuse one or the other of a discrepancy.

This bill will not bring the federal government any tax revenue. Rather, by adding to the overhead of companies big and small, it will take away
from their bottom line and reduce the taxes they are able to pay
accordingly. In my case, I will have to hire a person for $50,000 per
year to do nothing but try to obtain and verify the information of such
forms. That will cost the federal government $12,000 in lost taxes. If I
were a smaller company, however, say with four employees, I could not
afford to do that and so would have to either go out of business (thus
costing the feds a great deal of tax revenue) or operate illegally and
live in fear of prosecution. As for the hardware store, the owner will
have to hire a platoon of clerks, which either will reduce his profits
and the taxes he pays or force him to increase his sales prices, which
will cut into the taxable income of all of his business customers.

But it gets worse. Because there is no fundamental difference between a sole proprietorship and any private person, there is no reason why this
provision, if accepted, should not be applied to every taxpayer.
Consider: Do you know how much you spent at your local grocery store
last year? Certainly more than $600. But how much exactly? What, you
don't know? You will need to know, or under this law, you would commit
tax fraud by failing to report accurately the exact amount you spent at
every store, hotel, gas station, airline, etc., at which you spent $600
over the course of the year. You would need to get a 1099 from each of
them to include in your tax return. If you failed to do so, you could be
subject to prosecution. And if you somehow do get all your forms in
correctly, you still will be subject to endless arbitrary audits and
harassment because you will never be able to prove the accuracy of your
submittal to the Internal Revenue Service. Is this the kind of nation we
want to live in?

Nearly every Democrat in the House and Senate voted for this law. You need to crucify them for it. I have shown this law to hard-core Democrats, including Obama district captains, and they
all agree it is outrageous. Why are you focusing on side issues, where
you have 50 percent support, when you can fight for a vital cause where
99.99 percent of the people will back you? Mr. Reid's 1099 tyranny law
is not a small matter. It is a very big deal. Passed through fraud, it
is much worse than the publicly debated provisions in the rest of the
health care bill or the repeal of the George W. Bush tax cuts. The
nation is being threatened with a totalitarian tax nightmare. It will
not only destroy businesses coast to coast, it will endanger the freedom
of every citizen.

Take a stand on this issue, and you will have the support of nearly every American, left, right and center.