August 29, 2024

Bad Medicine For The Ivies

“All professions are conspiracies against the laity.” — The Doctor’s Dilemma by George Bernard Shaw, Act I (spoken by Sir Patrick Cullen to fellow physician Sir Colenso Ridgeon). The recent presidential resignations at vaun...

July 13, 2024

Kelly and Becky: Similar Murders by Dissimilar Murderers

Amidst the breakdown of law and order in the United States, more severe punishments are now being demanded from many quarters.  But there are occasions where lenity is appropriate. On March 3, 1989, in Valley Stream, New York, thirteen-y...

March 4, 2021

Nobody's Tax Returns are Confidential Anymore

Way back when Atlantic City was still Atlantic City (i.e., before the casinos arrived), I went there in hopes of finding a job so that I could remain there for the summer, and for a few hours was employed in one of those Boardwalk tourist-trap establ...

October 23, 2020

How drug-smuggling in Israel could cause headaches for the USA

The Catha edulis plant, commonly known as khat, contains various alkaloids and other compounds that have psychotropic properties.  It is often used as a recreational drug, and its use as such is legal in Israel but outlawed in many other ju...

February 23, 2020

Jonathan Pollard: A Valuable Pawn?

The word on the street (and in the tabloid ink) is that Jonathan Pollard may soon receive a pardon from President Donald Trump, and then relocate to Israel.  That story has made the rounds before, but perhaps this time things may end differently...

January 17, 2020

Israeli Foreign Ministry's new 'guidelines' for overseas missions may have bad consequences

Israel's Foreign Ministry, with the approval of the Israeli Cabinet, has authorized Israeli embassies and consulates abroad to collect funds for the events they will host in commemoration of Israel Independence Day.  To be sure, the don...

August 16, 2019

Barring Omar and Tlaib: Minimal downside for Israel

After hints were dropped that the Israeli government might permit Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar to visit Israel "out of respect for Congress," Israel has in fact decided that Omar and Tlaib will not be admitted after ...

July 14, 2019

The contagious ridicule of the ‘Afrofuture Fest’

A group known as Afrofuture Youth has slated its "Afrofuture Fest" event for 3 August 2019.  Admission ticket prices for the event had initially been priced based upon color of skin ($10 for black and other "People of Color" ...

November 11, 2018

Academic anti-Semitism Encounters Setbacks

University of Michigan professor John Cheney-Lippold unabashedly reneged upon his agreement to write a recommendation letter for his student Abigail Ingber solely because the program to which Ms. Ingber sought admission is under the aegis of an Israe...

September 23, 2018

BDS Professor Revokes Recommendation Letter for Tel Aviv U

University of Michigan professor John Cheney-Lippold, having agreed to write a recommendation letter for his student, Abigail Ingber, withdrew his offer to do so upon realizing that the recommendation would be for study at Tel Aviv University, an aca...

August 1, 2018

Stanford, Israel, and hatred

Stanford college student Hamzeh Daoud, overwrought that the Israeli Knesset enacted the "Nation-State" Basic Law, made a Facebook posting: I'm gonna physically fight Zionists on campus next year if someone comes at me with the...

July 15, 2018

Temple University blows the whistle on its own book-cookers

My personal connection to Temple University in Philadelphia runs long and deep.   I graduated from Temple's School of Business more than two decades before real estate developer Richard J. Fox tendered the big check that gave the School...

May 6, 2018

The Raging Disaster that Is the New York Judiciary

New York penal law provides for what are known as "indeterminate sentences," whereby there is a fixed minimum time (which is the initial parole eligibility date) and a fixed maximum (which, for crimes such as murder, can be for the life of ...

January 26, 2018

More Questions on the Congressional Harassment Slush Fund

More than $15 million in public funds has reportedly been paid out to settle sexual harassment claims against members of Congress, with the approval of Congress's Office of Compliance.  The House Committee on Ethics'...

December 6, 2017

Congressional hush fund gives IRS a new card to play

In the Nov. 5 edition of these American Thinker pages, critiquing the damage Robert Mueller has wrought on the FBI, James Lewis opined in passing that the Internal Revenue Service has lost its public credibility, perhaps irretrievably....

July 31, 2017

Seattle's Income Tax Brings Out the Crazy in People

By unanimous vote, the Seattle City Council has now enacted an Income Tax ordinance imposing a tax on "high income residents,” i.e,  those whose annual incomes exceed $250,000 ($500,000 for joint filers). The new legislation is lar...

April 9, 2017

OK, California: How many genders are there, really?

My dad's class was among the first to receive their degrees under the "G.I. Bill," from the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering.  Indeed, his entire class of June 1949 had served in the military....

March 12, 2017

Pitzer College is Failing its Students

  Pitzer College, one of the prestigious Claremont Colleges, is an unabashedly far, far left institution which grants undergraduate degrees at more than $66,000 per year.  The latest viral news story coming out of Pitzer is that some so-...

February 4, 2017

Steven Mnuchin and Robo-Denial

As a member of the professional tax community, my interest in the goings on over at the Treasury Department is a bit more keen than that of most Americans. And as an American expatriate, I am impacted financially in ways which leave my stateside coun...

December 12, 2016

The Liang prosecution

The facts behind the complex matter of Akai Gurley's deadly shooting in Brooklyn on 20 November 2014 are, in their bare essence, undisputed: Akai Gurley was fatally shot by rookie police officer Peter Liang in an unlit stairwell in the notoriousl...

November 20, 2016

Recognizing and preventing the politicization of American health care

On 17 November 2017, Kenneth Kaushansky, M.D., the senior vice president of health sciences at the State University at Stony Brook (N.Y.) and the dean of the School of Medicine, sent out the following "all hands" e-mail: Yesterday graf...

November 3, 2016

In defense of Trump's nondisclosure of his tax returns

In a 30 October 2016 NBC News Meet the Press interview, vice presidential candidate Mike Pence effectively confirmed what had been a foregone conclusion – that the income tax returns of his running mate, Donald Trump, would not be publicly...

October 26, 2016

An update on judges doing wrong and pleading insanity

Recently, the matter of insanity among judges came up through Sol Wachtler, former chief judge of the Court of Appeals of the State of New York, and Diane Kroupa, who sat on the United States Tax Court.  Each of these now ex-judges beclouded the...

September 4, 2016

Israeli government enjoined from disclosing personal account information to the IRS

One disadvantage of United States citizenship is that all income from whatever source, worldwide, is subject to taxation.  This is true regardless of how one obtains American citizenship; indeed, there are many "accidental Americans" w...

July 8, 2016

The Hillary Affair and its Repercussions to the American Taxation System

American tax laws being as complex as they are, the tax return preparer is a key player in ensuring proper compliance, serving as a vital bridge between taxpayer and the Internal Revenue Service. Unfortunately, some of those entrusted with the task h...

June 25, 2016

The IRS and the politics of delay

The Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee (ETAAC), convened to provide public input from diverse perspectives to the Internal Revenue Service regarding electronic administration of the taxes, has issued its 2016 Report to Congress (de...

June 14, 2016

Insanity sitting on the bench

Oh, the lower back pains that inevitably afflict a judge who sits all day on the bench!  And the medications resorted to by such judges contribute to depression and bipolar disorders, which lead to temporary insanity, which leads them to harass ...

April 19, 2016

Are Koskinen's days as IRS commissioner numbered?

The efficacy of the Internal Revenue Service's information security and data stewardship practices has of late been questioned by many, including this author.  Even members of Congress are susceptible to identity theft in connection with the...

April 14, 2016

The IRS again fails to protect taxpayer information

The Internal Revenue Service has long been authorized to settle tax debts for less than the full amount owed under certain limited circumstances when doing so would serve the best interests of the government and the taxpayer.  The process begins...

March 30, 2016

Maruca's Hard Drive Reappears

The IRS seems to be plagued by an epidemic of hard drive crashes. In an 11 February 2016 Statement to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the IRS insisted that the hard drive of former IRS official Samuel Maruca had been erased,...

March 7, 2016

Tax exemptions as a rationale for censorship in academe

On March 2, 2016, the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Ways & Means Committee held a hearing on "Protecting the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses."  Subcommittee chair Peter Roskam was quite enthused over the topic; ran...

December 24, 2015

The Flushing Remonstrance: A Vital Document in American History

Sunday, 27 December 2015 marks the 358th anniversary of the Flushing Remonstrance, a relatively obscure document that has profoundly impacted America's values of freedom. In 1657, Peter Stuyvesant, the Director General of the then-Dutch colon...

December 3, 2015

Academics now BDS-ing young Israeli kids

Shachar Rabinovitch, a 13-year-old Israeli girl, was researching a school assignment regarding horses.  Shachar took the initiative to contact one Marsha Ann Levine, Ph.D., an anthropology academic with an extensive publication and research trac...

August 25, 2015

Class action lawsuit filed against IRS for data breach

Back in January 2014, it seemed likely that the Internal Revenue Service's "Get Transcript" program would facilitate the depredations of identity thieves against the IRS.  Sixteen months later, some sophisticated hackers bore ou...

June 8, 2015

The OPM data hack: relatively speaking:

We now see, unfolding before our very eyes, what will in all likelihood prove to be only the beginning of the fallout from the hacking of the Office of Personnel Management's database of current and former federal employees.  Of course, the ...

May 28, 2015

Can the IRS survive the "Get Transcript" hacking?

On 26 January 2014, my American Thinker blog posting expressed data security and identity theft concerns anent to the Internal Revenue Service's "Get Transcript" program, which purposes to efficiently provide individual taxpayers with t...

May 11, 2015

The Jekyll and Hyde of Funding the IRS

There are calls from various quarters regarding the need to adequately fund the Internal Revenue Service. The spectrum of such concerns is quite diverse, and includes not only the National Taxpayer Advocate and the National Treasury Employees' Un...

January 30, 2015

Tax refund feeding frenzy at Walmart

As the tax filing season gets underway, many persons and entities become insinuated into the income tax return filing process.  As noted recently by this author, one key interloper is the tax return preparer. And now, Connecticut Revenue Serv...

January 28, 2015

CYA at IRS

On account of the Internal Revenue Code's complexity, the tax return preparer is now a key link in the tax compliance process.  Help with completing the income tax return is regularly enlisted not only by the ordinary citizen, but by some IR...

January 10, 2015

How free is Obama's free community college education?

President Obama is now touting a plan to provide 2 years of free community college schooling for the masses.  He has taken his message to the official White House website, and to the social media such as Facebook. It must be borne in mind tha...

December 1, 2014

Slow Learners at the IRS

If system specifications required that (1) the assailant is rewarded; (2) the public foots the cost of the crime; and (3) the victim gets punished twice, then no such scheme could be better engineered than the Internal Revenue Service's process o...

September 2, 2014

Taxpayer Information Naked in the Clouds

The complexity of America's tax laws have provided a significant livelihood for the tax practitioner community.  The Internal Revenue Service is well aware of this, and strives to maintain productive relationships with the practitioners. ...

July 18, 2014

IRS Sharing Personal Income Tax Information with the Census Bureau

There are many compelling reasons to engage in genealogical and family history research, whether for personal curiosity or for establishing one's legal status and rights.  One useful resource in such research is the United States Census....

July 10, 2014

How 'Federal' is the Long Island Railroad Labor Dispute?

One quirk of the federal labor laws places the Long Island Railroad under federal cognizance, and outside the ambit of New York's public employees' Fair Employment Act – the so-called "Taylor Law," which, among other things, p...

June 23, 2014

Lois's Hard Drive: Procuring the Procurement Records

During the past few days, a new line of inquiry regarding Lois Lerner's "missing" e-mails has emerged in The American Thinker.  On 20 June 2014, Richard Kantro noted the irony of how the very government that has every aspect of eve...

June 14, 2014

Education Tax Benefits? Not for Adjunct Faculty!

The traditional reason for a college or university engaging a faculty member on a basis other than tenured or tenure-track was that the faculty member had valuable specialized skills and/or expertise to teach the students, but was not postured to tea...

May 12, 2014

Tax Farming in America

One piece of tax legislation introduced by Senator Ron Wyden after he took the helm of the Senate Finance Committee is the EXPIRE Act, whose primary purpose is to extend various expiring provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. The proposed legislati...

April 18, 2014

Identity Theft as Rationale for Tax Evasion

Identity theft has long impeded the orderly administration of America's taxation system. Now the inevitable has occurred -- claimed fears of identity theft have been proffered by tax evaders as an excuse for not filing tax returns. The Amer...

April 12, 2014

Tax Return Preparers Exemplify a Gaping Hole in the Treasury's Vault

I recently discoursed in American Thinker regarding the restrictions imposed by Section 203 of the Bipartisan Budget Act upon the Social Security Administration's Death Master File (DMF). Section 203 marks an effort to prevent fraud by restrictin...

January 26, 2014

Does the IRS's 'Get Transcript' Program Really Get It?

The IRS has had significant problems in protecting taxpayers from identity theft (including cases where the IRS's own employees were complicit). A recent posting by this commentator, discussing Congress's efforts to embargo the information in the D...

December 20, 2013

Congress is Plugging the Wrong Hole

Section 203 of the budget bill passed by Congress restricts access to a Social Security Administration database known as the Death Master File. The misguided passage of this restriction will carry negative side effects and fail to achieve its purpose...

May 25, 2013

IRS Deficiencies and Health Care

David Ricardo observed that taxation "frequently operates very differently from the intention of the legislature by its indirect effects." As reflected in the news headlines, Americans are now bearing the brunt of the indirect effects of misguided IR...