In other words, just how scandal-screeching Tea Partiers & other reactionaries think the I.R.S. should work. And how alleged progressives or liberals or whatever they call themselves allow it to continue, yr. after yr.It was my father’s unfortunate job to go to people who were seriously in arrears in their taxes and say, "We need to negotiate a payment schedule." He hated it. No, that’s not strong enough. He hated, hated, hated it. He especially hated it when the people were desperate and in trouble.
Not all were. Some of them were very rich guys who just felt it was beneath them to pay taxes. When my father called on one, he’d walk into a mansion in Bel Air or Beverly Hills. Most of them had on their walls one or more framed photos of themselves with Ronald Reagan and/or Richard Nixon.
My father knew what that meant. These guys would never pay their taxes in full and probably not at all. He’d be lucky to get five cents on the dollar out of them. And he’d be real lucky if his boss didn’t call him in and say, "We got a complaint from someone in Washington about you harassing this fine, patriotic gentleman." My father was about as menacing as Wally Cox with a broken fly swatter. In the meantime, the boss would order him to get every cent plus penalties out of the poor woman in Venice whose husband had never paid their joint taxes, then had deserted her and the six kids she now couldn’t afford to feed.
The woman in Venice was a real person. My father came home pale from the afternoon he called on her. She owed more money than she could ever possibly come up with and since she was not a Reagan donor, she was expected to actually pay it.
Again the question: Where's the real & justified outrage?
1 comment:
I could tell you a story about how the last three Administrations have been nothing but Wall Street whores, but would anyone care?
Note: the current one is the worst by far.
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