Crap, I seem to be running out of outrage again....
[link]
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has illegally stopped making public detailed tax enforcement data, which has been used to show which kinds of taxpayers get the most and toughest audits, a noted tax researcher says.
...
Long, who has researched and written about federal tax administration for more than 30 years, used the Freedom of Information Act to win the court order in 1976 directing the revenue agency to provide her regularly with its data on criminal investigations, tax collections, the number and hours devoted to audits by income level and taxpayer category and other enforcement records.
Since 1989, her FOIA requests have been submitted by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data-research organization at Syracuse of which she is co-director.
TRAC has used the records to report in 2000 that the Clinton administration was auditing poor people at a higher rate than rich people and in 2004 that business and corporate audits were down substantially and criminal tax enforcement was at an all-time low. TRAC also reported that in fiscal 2002-2004 IRS audited on average only a third of the largest corporations, which control 90 percent of all corporate assets and 87 percent of all corporate income.
OK, lets stop going after wealty individual and corporate tax cheats, and then lets illegally refuse to disclose that we're doing that.
Reminds me of a few years back - there was a conservative editorial in the WSJ advocating increased auditing, etc. of the poor, in order to get them to hate the government and thus not complain when funding benefitting the poor was cut.
Damn. I'm oosting over the Roomba hardcore right now.
Hee. From the site:
According to iRobot, "world-class roboticists created Roomba" and then "experts tested it." We take this to mean that the Roomba will almost certainly not massacre your entire family in a death orgy of inscrutable machine rage, but we regret that we cannot offer refunds in the event that it does. Hey, if you want a plantation full of robot slaves, you have to accept the risk of a bloody uprising.
I've starting taking a Calcium supplement because I hate drinking milk, so I know I don't get enough calcium in my diet, and because both my grandmothers had osteoporosis.
I worried about that, but my doctor told me that my love of cheese was taking care of my not drinking milk. Do you eat other dairy products?
A Buffista New Years resolution in today's Get Fuzzy [link] .
The whole time I was reading that article about the old man and the mouse, I couldn't stop thinking, "You know, if he'd only heeded the cautionary tale of the Squirrel Cop, this never would have happened."
The first thing I thought of, reading about the mouse-house fire.
I take a crap load of calcium every day. I take 2000 mg of calcium plus 800 mg of magnesium and a very potent synthetic vitamin D to help me absorb the calcium. This is all under a doctor's supervision, so it's not something the average person has to do. But it gets annoying taking all those pills every day.
Besides, people who take their vitamins have skin that makes better book binding material.
Exactly. People should also wash those vitamins down with lots of water.
These are cool: [link]
Also, check out her lamps.
Actually, when I took some powerful antibiotics recently, I was surprised to see that the instructions for taking them included suspending my multivitamin and mineral supplements for the ten days. Evidently that interferes with the body's absorption and processing of the drug.
signed, Glad I Read The Pill Bottle Carefully
These are cool:
Hey! I met her! Her baby brother stomped my heart into little bits and pieces! Though this should have no bearing on any Buffista's interest in her work, as she herself did no stomping (and, really, I spent an awful lot of time and energy stuffing my heart under his feet again and again, and my heart could have easily escaped with only minor bruising if I hadn't been so stupid).
