Category Archives: Current Events

Taxes

Once again, I am remiss in posting anything. My only excuse is age-related – I guess having turned 83, I’m just slowing down. Otherwise, my health is good. I find this latest from my friend and fellow Marine Greg earth-shattering as well. I cannot believe the Supreme Court can find anything in the Moore case to go along with the government. Absolutely crazy and could change everything about a capitalistic economy.

Taxing Tremors                                                              By: Greg Maresca

A 7.6 earthquake and its resulting tsunami on New Year’s Day that shook Japan set the stage as the faultless metaphor that will reverberate throughout 2024 and beyond.  With the impending presidential election aside, the tremors of improbability arrived a month earlier when the Supreme Court decided to hear a case with profound implications for the federal income tax.

Moore v. U.S. will decide if the federal government can tax unrealized capital gains not yet received under the 16th Amendment.  The justices agreed to hear the Moore’s appeal as the couple wanted their $14,729 refund that the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against. The Ninth Circuit, known in legal circles as the “Ninth Circus,” has the worst record of any appeals court before the Supreme Court.

Like Roe v. Wade did last year, this case will have a huge and lasting ripple effect regarding future taxation that should concern everyone.

It is no secret that the nation is accruing debt that is unsustainable. The day of reckoning approaches. The irony is the case is named Moore – indeed “more” income through taxation.

Over a century of income tax laws has resulted in thousands of pages of decrees that carve out craters of exemptions in a labyrinth of directives. The tax code is a bloated, crony orchestrated, lobbyist measured disaster for those unable to manipulate it by hiring all those cunning accountants and attorneys who are paid handsomely to circumvent it.

When was the last time a member of Congress did their own taxes?

A fundamental reckoning from the ground up is long overdue to bury the income tax along with the IRS and replace them with a consumption tax or flat tax.

To tax unrealized capital gains not yet received is extreme. The power to regulate and tax is the power to destroy. Congress’s authority to tax does not include reinvested capital and personal property as income.

Income is money received.

Assets may increase in value, but until they are collected as interest, dividends or sold, there is no income. If you cannot spend it, it is not income.

You can’t pay the rent or fill your gas tank with paper gains or the appreciation of your home.  When you gain on any financial instrument but do not sell you earn a “paper profit.”  If unrealized gains are taxed, and the taxpayer has no cash to pay, a forced liquidation would be necessary for payment.

Are you prepared to pay a tax because your assets go up in value?  House, car, pets, trading cards, comic books, Auntie Estelle’s antique coffee table – where does it end?   Provided market values decline would monies be refunded?  Stop laughing, that was no joke.

Uncle Sam wants all the golden eggs without having to buy the hens, the henhouse, and the chicken feed. The power brokers in Washington believe everything is subject to taxation real or imagined.

It is pitiful that this case is even necessary.

A tax in bad faith resulted in a revolution nearly 250 years ago. Such taxation realizes the socialist dream of equal outcomes regardless of effort, ingenuity, innovation, or lack thereof. Ayn Rand’s nightmare is finally realized.

The Supreme Court’s job is not about maximizing taxable income for Uncle Sam but to interpret if this tax is constitutional.

A ruling in favor of Uncle Sam will unleash Congress’ taxing power and devastate our economic system as we know it.  Going forward, all unrealized income will become whatever the government says it is.

The Supreme Court’s decision is expected in June right in the middle of the presidential campaign. Provided the government loses and refusing to allow what they perceive as a crisis; Democrats will condemn the decision as a political red herring.

A Moore victory would also challenge other sections of the tax code that stands at nearly 7,000 pages.  Provided they are unconstitutional; they must fall, too.

The income tax has been around since 1913 and its ability to produce revenue has never been assuaged by politics. The hardcore issue is the United States does not have a taxing problem, but a spending problem. Revenue is up but it can’t compete with current spending levels.

A ruling in favor of the government would only exacerbate such spending.

Postscript: I have given up on all the latest coming out of the military and especially our Corps. Absolutely sad! I am simply too old to even bother with it anymore. My stress level is more important to me.

In case you have not read your copy of the latest “Semper Fidelis, or if not retired and don’t get it, I always look at the “Taps” column looking for friends with whom I served. I saw MajGen Dennis Murphy listed this month. Sad, I considered him another Ernie Cheatham – a warrior. He gave me Huxley’s Whores.

Well, this is election year. Do we really believe the liberals are going to allow a legal, valid election? I don’t!

 

 

Originally posted 2024-01-19 13:08:35.

DID YOU KNOW THIS?

I rec’d the following this morning from a Blog to which I subscribe (Bunkerhill – God, Guns, and Guts Comrades). It is a very informative, truthful, well-researched blog filled daily with astounding facts very few are aware of, and this morning’s is a whopper. Today’s blog references an article from The Telegraph, the British News Service, dating back to 15 July 2015. The piece was written by Mr. Con Coughlin, the paper’s Defense Editor on the Iranian Nuclear Deal.

Obama’s Iran deal has just granted an amnesty to the world’s leading terrorist mastermind.

As head of the Quds Force in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Qassem Suleimani is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading terrorists. Now Barack Obama has effectively granted him an amnesty.

For a decade a more he has been the driving force behind an array of Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups, from Hizbollah to Hamas, which have orchestrated a reign of terror throughout the Middle East.

From a purely British perspective, he was responsible for training and equipping the Shia militias in southern Iraq who killed scores of British troops during the dark days of Iraq’s sectarian conflict following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and was reported to have trained the Taliban in the art of making deadly roadside bombs that killed and mutilated our Service personnel serving in southern Afghanistan.

So you can imagine my amazement when, leafing through the more obscure annexes of President Barack Obama’s “historic” deal with Iran (page 86 of the annex, to be precise), I found that Mr Suliemani – as the White House no doubt now refers to him – has been granted an amnesty and taken off the list of proscribed Iranians – together with a number of senior members of the Revolutionary Guards.

Thanks to Mr Obama’s scandalous capitulation to Tehran, Mr Suleimani has overnight gone from being one of the world’s most wanted terrorists to the White House’s newest best friend.

This is just one of the many troubling indications contained in the detail of the accord struck in Vienna between the P5 +1 and Tehran – that’s the official line, of course. The reality is this shoddy deal was worked out between the ayatollahs and the White House, with countries like Britain – which used to take a robust view of Iran’s endless procrastination on its nuclear activities – left impotent on the sidelines.

Another example of the craven concessions the White House had made to Tehran is the way future inspections will handled. Iran’s disinclination to make full and transparent disclosures on its nuclear programme is well-documented. Given the opportunity to cheat, they will do so. Which is why inspections by qualified teams of nuclear inspectors is so important.

Only from now on the onus will be on the West to make the case that Iran is not playing by the rules by handing over its intelligence to prove so. For under the terms of the accord, we must “justify” the need for inspections, which in effect means handing over all the intelligence we have on Iran’s illicit activities. Of course Iran has been desperate to find out how Western intelligence learned about the existence of nuclear enrichment sites like Natanz and Fordow and, if we comply with the requirements set out in the accord to the letter, this is what will happen, with all the implications that will have for all our sources who risk their lives to tell us the truth about what the regime is up to.

If I were Suleimani, I’d be organising an enormous party right now to celebrate a deal that is truly a “historic victory” for Tehran.

Should you not believe Mr. Coughlin, you may read the entire piece of trash (below) forced on America by a Muslim loving, narcissistic, incompetent POTUS and brokered by his  communist, lying, POS posing as his Secretary of State.

I don’t know about any of you, but I did not know any of this at the time, but there should have been some honest, caring , patriotic Americans at the time who should have been knowledgeable enough to raise holy hell. Now that we have killed the POS someone finds out he was given free reign to do as he pleased by our own hand. Did any of our illustrious MSM take the time to read the entire transcript or did they simply assume if it was brokered by the “Messiah,” it had to be a good deal. Our elected officials, and all the departments of government involved in over site and justice were obviously asleep at the wheel.

What have we become? Sheep!!!

Originally posted 2020-01-13 09:40:26.

Civil War II

I do not consider myself a conspiracy nut like some folks e.g., the white supremacists and the doomsday theorists. however, I have long had a belief we were slowly moving towards a showdown between to two sides of the aisle. In fact, there are even some on my side of the aisle who are sitting on the wrong side. I cannot remember in my lifetime (and I just turned 79 last week) where our elected officials have come under such scrutiny for unheard of wrong doings, yet nothing happens to them, not even a slap on the hand. They have all become millionaires at our expense. Tell me how an elected official can accumulate so much wealth on $174,000 a year salary? They are all lying crooks, thieves, outright robbers who are not serving the people, but stealing from them, and laughing all the way to the bank.

I also assumed the start of the conflict between the states would stem from the Second Amendment rights, and here it is. You need to read this article carefully, and you need to decide now on which side are you on. And regardless on your decision, you should be preparing yourself for the inevitable. It’s going to happen; we the people are getting fed up, disgusted with the very institutions designed to protect us from tyranny. The FBI, DOJ, CIA, NSA, etc. have always been our saviors, our safeguards against corruption and tyranny, yet today, they are being used against us.

We were saved by the last national election, and I believe he will prevail again come next year, but it will certainly get very, very ugly. Like the old infantry warning, keep you canteens filled and your powder dry.

I await your reaction and comments please.

God help this nation because it can’t help itself anymore.

https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/it-begins-virginia-forms-active-militia-to-protect-sheriffs-citizens-from-unconstitutional-laws/

Originally posted 2019-12-17 10:16:50.

What a Girl!

Amazing! Worth the watch! What a smart little girl!

Originally posted 2019-12-02 10:06:57.

Social Security Waste & Fraud

You really cannot make this stuff up.  This report claims that this problem was discovered ten years ago and still has not been fixed. I can’t even begin to estimate how much money was and is still being paid to dead people. Someone is getting the checks. I wonder if the SSA knows whether the checks are cashed or not; probably not, civil service folks don’t want to bother with that. This seems to me to be something that could be easily fixed. Obviously,Americans are not reporting to the SSA when someone dies. OMG

Elon Musk’s DOGE team has unearthed jaw-dropping irregularity from the U.S. Social Security database.

The numbers are truly mind-boggling: over 25 million Americans registered aged 100 and older, with some purportedly older than the U.S. Constitution itself.

Late Sunday night, Musk tweeted a staggering claim accompanied by a table of ages, suggesting that the Social Security Administration might be paying out benefits to “vampires.”

“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the ‘death’ field set to FALSE. Maybe Twilight is real, and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” Musk quipped.

The table Musk provided shows:

  • Age 0-9: 38,825,456
  • Age 10-19: 44,326,480
  • Age 20-29: 47,995,478
  • Age 30-39: 52,106,915
  • Age 40-49: 47,626,581
  • Age 50-59: 45,740,805
  • Age 60-69: 46,381,281
  • Age 70-79: 33,404,412
  • Age 80-89: 15,165,127
  • Age 90-99: 6,054,154
  • Age 100-109: 4,734,407
  • Age 110-119: 3,627,007
  • Age 120-129: 3,472,849
  • Age 130-139: 3,936,311
  • Age 140-149: 3,542,044
  • Age 150-159: 1,345,083
  • Age 160-169: 121,807
  • Age 170-179: 6,087
  • Age 180-189: 695
  • Age 190-199: 448
  • Age 200-209: 879
  • Age 210-219: 866
  • Age 220-229: 1,039
  • Age 240-249: 1
  • Age 360-369: 1

This information released by Musk aligns with the audit conducted by the Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General (SSA OIG) in 2015.

According to the 2023 report:

In 2015, we reported that SSA had not established controls to annotate death information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies of age 112 or older and were likely deceased.

At the time, only 35 known living individuals worldwide were age 112 or older, however, SSA’s Numident included 6.5 million numberholders age 112 or older whose record did not contain death information.

Therefore, the numberholders’ information did not appear in the full DMF. We recommended SSA add death information to approximately 1.5 million Numident records where the numberholders’ death information appeared in SSA payment records.

We also recommended SSA determine whether it could efficiently correct the approximately 5 million remaining records. SSA agreed to explore the legal and technical feasibility, as well as the cost, to establish an automated process to update the millions of Numident records for individuals who appeared to be alive and age 112 or older, but ultimately decided not to update these records.

In response to our 2015 report, SSA considered multiple options, including adding presumed death information to these Numident records. SSA ultimately decided not to proceed because the “. . . options would be costly to implement, would be of little benefit to the agency, would largely duplicate information already available to data exchange consumers and would create cost for the states and other data exchange partners.”

SSA also believed a regulation would be required to allow it to add death information to these records, and adding presumed death information to the Numident would increase the risk of inadvertent release of living individuals’ personal information in the DMF.

We note that, as of January 2023, the full DMF included death information on approximately 137 million deceased numberholders. Over 18 million missing death records represents more than 10 percent of the records in the full DMF.

Therefore, the death information SSA currently provides Federal benefit-paying agencies–and will begin providing to the Department of the Treasury’s Do Not Pay initiative in December 2023–to help prevent improper payments to deceased individuals, omit information for more than 1 of every 10 deceased numberholders.

As of 2024, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that approximately 101,000 Americans are aged 100 and older, representing about 0.03% of the total U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center.

Individuals aged 110 and above are referred to as supercentenarians, a subgroup that is exceedingly rare. As of February 2025, the Gerontology Research Group reported that 136 Americans belong to this category.

Currently, the oldest living American is Naomi Whitehead, born on September 26, 1910, in Georgia, making her 114 years old. The longest-lived person in U.S. history is Sarah Knauss, who lived to be 119 years and 97 days, passing away on December 30, 1999.

For years, conservatives have sounded the alarm on government waste, fraud, and abuse—particularly within entitlement programs.

The Social Security Administration (SSA), riddled with inefficiencies, appears to have an entire army of ghost beneficiaries cashing in taxpayer-funded benefits.

Drive on Elon!!!!