Another IRS Nightmare

Yikes. This is a business killer:

A few wording changes to the tax code’s section 6041 regarding 1099 reporting were slipped into the 2000-page health legislation. The changes will force millions of businesses to issue hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of additional IRS Form 1099s every year. It appears to be a costly, anti-business nightmare.

Under current law, businesses are required to issue 1099s in a limited set of situations, such as when paying outside consultants. The health care bill includes a vast expansion in this information reporting requirement in an attempt to raise revenue for an increasingly rapacious Congress. [...]

Basically, businesses will have to issue 1099s whenever they do more than $600 of business with another entity in a year. For the $14 trillion U.S. economy, that’s a hell of a lot of 1099s. When a business buys a $1,000 used car, it will have to gather information on the seller and mail 1099s to the seller and the IRS. When a small shop owner pays her rent, she will have to send a 1099 to the landlord and IRS. Recipients of the vast flood of these forms will have to match them with existing accounting records. There will be huge numbers of errors and mismatches, which will probably generate many costly battles with the IRS.

I work in a small office. There are five employees, including the business owner. I can't imagine the burden of sending out a 1099, with a copy to the IRS, to every entity we do business with. I suppose it would include, at a minimum, the office supply store, the copy shop, the shipping company, the computer hardware vendor, the computer software vendor, the copy machine vendor, the cell phone company, the internet service provider, the professional liability insurance provider, and the accountant. All that paperwork to keep five people employed. What would the cost of compliance in terms of man hours be for a company of even moderate size?

And all those companies will be receiving 1099s not just from our little office, but from every client they have. And all that will have to be reconciled on their tax returns to satisfy the IRS. And all that paperwork on both ends will produce not a single good or service of any value whatsoever. It will all just be busy work to satisfy government bureaucrats who themselves produce not a single good or service of any value. Talk about eating up what should be productive time for nothing.

If the Democrats pass many more legislative initiatives with these kinds of Easter egg surprises in them, they will destroy private business in this country.

Neal Boortz has a collection of "predictions" from Earth Day 1970. Some personal favorites:

By...[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.
Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support...the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution...by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half....
Life Magazine, January 1970

Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.
Sen. Gaylord Nelson

The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

None of this nonsense came to pass. None of it!!! So when today's Earth Day practitioners predict their own brand of doom and gloom, color me skeptical.

So, a group of left-wingers is planning to infiltrate the tea party events on April 15th:

WHO WE ARE, Crash The Tea Party style, is a lesson in Marxism 101: “A nationwide network of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who are sick and tired of that loose affiliation of racists, homophobes, and morons; who constitute the fake grass-roots movement which calls itself “The Tea Party.” [...]

We will act on behalf of the Tea Party in ways which exaggerate their least appealing qualities (misspelled protest signs, wild claims in TV interviews, etc.) to further distance them from mainstream America and damage the public’s opinion of them.

Now, I have been to a tea party event. There was no racism (actually, the master of ceremonies was a conservative black man, who was enthusiastically cheered). There was no homophobia, nor any concern about sexuality of any kind. As far as morons go, how does one identify them? Maybe they can be found at gathering of left-wingers.

The whole thing reminds of an episode from the original Star Trek, in which Kirk was transposed with his double in an evil parallel universe. Upon his return, he asks Spock how he identified his misplaced twin so quickly, to which Spock replied, "It was far easier for you as civilized men to behave like barbarians than it was for them as barbarians to behave like civilized men."

Finally, by announcing their plans ahead of time, these people have guaranteed that any hint of bad behavior will not be tolerated at the tea parties, thus guaranteeing their own failure. Tell me again, who are the morons?

Joy

Our little girl, hunting Easter eggs. I love my family so...

Potpourri

Here's a collection of things I ran across over the last couple days.

From Charles Krauthammer:

Imagine the scenario: Hundreds of thousands are lying dead in the streets of Boston after a massive anthrax or nerve-gas attack. The president immediately calls in the lawyers to determine whether the attacking state is in compliance with the NPT. If it turns out that the attacker is up to date with its latest IAEA inspections, well, it gets immunity from nuclear retaliation. Our response is then restricted to bullets, bombs, and other conventional munitions.

However, if the lawyers tell the president that the attacking state is NPT noncompliant, we are free to blow the bastards to nuclear kingdom come.

This is quite insane. It’s like saying that if a deliberately uses his car to mow down a hundred people waiting at a bus stop, the decision as to whether he gets (a) hanged or (b) 100 hours of community service hinges entirely on whether his car had passed emissions inspections.

Here's a headline you don't often see: Muslim woman strangled by her burkha in freak go-kart accident

From the brilliant Victor Davis Hanson:

many Americans find that life in the real world is a lot more complicated than the near-constant us-vs.-them rhetoric about bad-guy insurers, surgery-hungry doctors, reckless financiers, greedy bankers, heartless corporations, and tight-fisted employers who con and hurt the blameless good guys now in need of President Obama’s all-knowing, benevolent government help.

Finally, this animation is very cool:

Here's an illustration of why government participation in private industry is a bad idea:

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood earlier this week cited the Sept. 29 European warnings in his decision to assess a record $16.4 million fine on the Japanese automaker for failing to alert the U.S. government to its safety problems quickly enough. LaHood on Tuesday said Toyota made a "huge mistake" by not disclosing safety problems with gas pedals on some of its most popular models sooner.

Remember, now, that the very same government owns 60% of General Motors, and Toyota is GM's most potent competitor. The result is one arm of government taking, without any apparent due process or judicial ruling beyond so-called "European warnings," over 16 million dollars from a private enterprise and, by extension, its stockholders.

And the beneficiary of this heavy handed confiscation? Yet another arm of the very same government.

Well, it's officially baseball season. We know because we saw this ad again for the first time this year:

Ya gotta love the liberals. Here's a group of womyn in Maine that decided to march down the street topless:

PORTLAND – About two dozen women marched topless from Longfellow Square to Tommy's Park this afternoon in an effort to erase what they see as a double standard on male and female nudity.

Clearly, this is a stunt designed to attract attention. And, not surprisingly, it succeeded! The result? Feminist outrage:

Ty McDowell, who organized the march, said she was "enraged" by the turnout of men attracted to the demonstration. The purpose, she said, was for society to have the same reaction to a woman walking around topless as it does to men without shirts on.

However, McDowell said she plans to organize similar demonstrations in the future and said she would be more "aggressive" in discouraging oglers.

Here's a rhetorical question: How does a topless feminist aggressively discourage oglers? And in attempting to do so, what has she accomplished?

I am picturing a topless woman, wagging her finger in my face for "ogling," while I stand smugly observing her breasts. What a childish scene. If you don't want 'em observed, don't walk around topless. Otherwise, ogling is fair game.

The whole thing reminds me of a joke:

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Shut up, that's not funny!