iftttwall – Page 23653

Why did the IRS just threaten me with imprisonment?

October 21, 2014
Santiago, Chile

I walked in the door this morning to my apartment in Santiago, happy to be back in Chile after a week away.

(One of the things that I really love about this place is the weather. The weather forecast in the entire central region of Chile is typically just a string of yellow circles. Yet it’s not so hot that you need air conditioning. I love it.)

But my mood was quickly spoiled when my maid handed me an envelope.

“It looks official,” she said, staring at me to gauge my reaction. She was right. The sender was the United States Department of Treasury.

Clearly my first thought was wondering why the US government was sending me anything, especially to my apartment in Santiago. My second thought was utter astonishment that the US Postal Service had managed to get it here!

I ripped it open and found… a check. Made out to me. It was my tax refund.

As an aside, I’ll tell you that living overseas has a lot of huge benefits. One of them is that your taxes are almost always going to be lower.

If you’re American, you can earn up to $99,200 in foreign income, tax free. This amount goes up every year (not that there’s any inflation).

If you’re married, you and your spouse can BOTH claim the foreign earned income exclusion, meaning you can earn nearly $200,000 as a couple, tax free.

And when you include the additional deduction you can receive on foreign housing, your total tax benefit living overseas can easily be upwards of $250,000 or more.

Just imagine being able to put an additional $250,000 in your pocket each year, instead of giving that money to a bankrupt government to finance drones, bombs, and body scanners. (More on this in another letter…)

In my case, I have income from other sources, including certain investment income that still gets taxed. And just to be on the safe side, I ALWAYS overpay my taxes, so our friends at the IRS send me a refund each year.

This is the first year in ages that I remember receiving a physical check; I must have forgotten to fill out the direct deposit section of the 1040.

And while checks seem like vestigial relics of a financial era long gone, it’s not a big problem to deal with down here. Chileans really like checks, and it turns out that a number of Chilean banks we deal with are more than happy to immediately clear foreign checks from the US.

Then I glanced back at the envelope. It said, “Forgery or endorsements on Treasury checks is a Federal crime. Maximum penalty is a $10,000 fine and ten years in imprisonment.”

Wow. In the Land of the Free, you can’t even deposit a tax refund check without being threatened with fines and imprisonment. It’s unreal.

We’ve talked about this before. Even the most basic, innocuous tasks now involve threats and intimidation.

If you apply for a passport on form DS-11, the government threatens you with “fine and/or imprisonment under U.S. law including the provisions of 18 U.S.C. 1001, 18 U.S. C. 1542, and/or 18 U.S.C. 162.”

Applying for a social security replacement card threatens you with “penalty of perjury”.

Applying for a driver’s license in my home state of Texas threatens me with “five years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine.”

And of course, the instruction book for IRS form 1040 includes an entire section threatening anyone about to file his/her taxes with civil, criminal, and administrative penalties.

There’s very little you can do in the Land of the Free that doesn’t involve the threat of fines and imprisonment anymore, including simply depositing a check.

They’ve criminalized almost every aspect of existence. EVERYTHING—how your children are educated, the purchasing power of your savings, the privacy of your email, what you can/cannot put in your body– is regulated by the state.

Any deviation from the standards that they establish is criminalized. And they shove these threats in our faces at every opportunity.

The idea of a government for the people, by the people, of the people… has long been lost. They don’t even pretend to serve the people anymore… it’s just threats and intimidation.

This is not how a free society is supposed to operate. And as we explored in yesterday’s podcast, it’s a sign of the top.

We have reached peak government. Like any bubble, this one is about to burst.

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Portland Alt-Weekly: Vote No on GMO Labeling! Will Wonders Never Cease?

Sanity has broken out at foodie
hipster ground zero: The Portland Mercury is
urging its readers to vote no on a ballot measure
which would require labeling of foods containing genetically
modified organisms (GMOs). The editorial is framed by a bunch of
we-swear-we’re-not-evil positioning, including calling Monsanto and
Coca-Cola “shadowy multinational corporations” and declaring that
“industrial farming” is “problematic.”

But then there’s this spot-on analysis of what such initiatives
are really about:

And yet, after much debate, we’re coming
down just on the “no” side of this issue.

The essential problem is dishonesty. Measure 92’s proponents
argue it’s all about helping consumers make an informed choice.
They insisted in our interview they have no problem with GMOs, and
no other motives, ulterior or not, besides the spread of
information.

But this campaign—like identical efforts that narrowly failed in
California and Washington recently—is quite clearly a bid to get
food companies to abandon GMOs, a backdoor attempt at altering our
agricultural landscape.

See, the science we possess on GMOs indicates they’re almost
certainly safe to eat. Indeed, the Yes on 92 representatives who
attended our endorsement interview acknowledged purchasing and
eating GMO products all the time. But there’s a clear motive for
wanting “conspicuous” labeling on those foods, and it’s not to
remind consumers that GMOs are harmless. Without sufficient
context, a label is likely to sow doubt or apprehension in shoppers
who assume it’s a warning, and that there’s a reason they should be
warned….

There are more straightforward ways of trying to change
America’s problematic farming trends than a labeling measure that
takes pains to protest it’s not actually out to do that.

The paper also notes that there are already foods available with
reliable GMO-free labeling for customers who feel strongly about
restricting their own consumption, rather than focusing on
what other people buy and sell.

The Mercury is practically establishing a pattern here
(a
trend of two, anyway) since it took
a bold stance in favor of floridated water this spring.

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The Magic Number Is Revealed: It Costs Central Banks $200 Billion Per Quarter To Avoid A Market Crash

We have all seen it countless times before: visual confirmation that without the Fed’s (and all other central banks’) liquidity pump, the S&P would be about 70% lower than were it is now.

Most recently, this was shown last Friday in “Another Reminder How Addicted Markets Still Are To Liquidity” in which Deutsche bank’s Jim Reid said:

The recovery from the lows after Bullard spoke yesterday is another reminder how addicted markets still are to liquidity. Indeed in today’s pdf we reprint and update a table from our 2014 Outlook showing the various phases of the Fed’s balance sheet expansion and pausing over the last 5-6 years and its impact on equities and credit. We have found that the relationship broadly works best with markets pricing in the Fed balance sheet move just under 3 months in advance. We’ve also included our oft-used chart of the Fed balance sheet vs the S&P 500 to help demonstrate this. So end July / early August 2014 was always the time that this relationship suggested markets should enter a new more difficult phase. So we still think central bankers hold the key to markets going forward and there seems to be a hint of change in the Fed.

Another view was shown over the weekend, in “The Chart That Explains Why Fed’s Bullard Wants To Restart The QE Flow” which shows that when the Fed’s excess reserve firehose is turned on Max, stocks surge; when it isn’t – as has been the case recently – they tumble.

So now that “best Keynesian practices” are out of the window, and everyone has once again turned Austrian, and only the “flow of money” (either inside or outside) matters, the question is how much do central banks need to inject to keep the stock market from crashing, let alone continuing to levitate. Luckily, Citi’s Matt King has just done the math, and the answer is…

Here is his answer:

We think the markets’ weakness owes more to an almost belated reaction to a temporary lull in central bank stimulus than it does to any reduction in the effect of that stimulus in propping up asset prices. Figure 5 shows the rolling 3m combined liquidity injection by the Fed, the ECB, the BoE and the BoJ, plotted against the rolling 3m change in spreads. While the relationship is not perfect – liquidity flows across asset classes and across borders, and there are announcement and confidence effects in addition to the straightforward impact on net supply – it is this, not fundamentals, which we would argue has been the major driver of markets for the past few years (Figure 6 shows the same series plotted against global equities).

In case anyone missed it, and in case there is still any debate about this issue which we first explicitly stated nearly 6 years ago and were widely mocked by the all too serious intelligentsia, here is the key sentence again:

“it’s the liquidity injections, not fundamentals, which we would argue has been the major driver of markets for the past few years.“

And with that piece of New Normal trivia behind us, we continue:

For over a year now, central banks have quietly being reducing their support. As Figure 7 shows, much of this is down to the Fed, but the contraction in the ECB’s balance sheet has also been significant. Seen from this perspective, a negative reaction in markets was long overdue: very roughly, the charts suggest that zero stimulus would be consistent with 50bp widening in investment grade, or a little over a ten percent quarterly drop in equities. Put differently, it takes around $200bn per quarter just to keep markets from selling off.

If anyone ever needed any confirmation of what we said in June 2012, that “The Stock Is Dead, Long-Live The Flow: Perpetual QE Has Arrived“, now you have it, and only qualified but quantified. Because to translate what Matt King – Citi’s most respected strategist and the only person on Wall Street to warn about the Lehman collapse and its consequences before it happened, just said – if and when the global central bank liquidity tracker ever drops to $200 billion per quarter or less, the market will crash.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1yfKeks Tyler Durden

The Most ‘Distrusted’ News Sources In America

You know there’s a problem with the media when Al-Jazeera is trusted more than NBC, CNN, and MSNBC. As Pew research’s Journalism Project shows in the following table, the study attempted to measure not just whether people had heard of a variety of news sources, but which ones they really trusted when it came time to get straight info about politics and governments.

From “most distrusted” to least…

As Pew Research’s Journalism Project reports,

There is not a single news source distrusted by at least half of all panelists or those with mixed or mostly conservative views. Six sources are distrusted 50% or more of consistent conservatives distrust and four are distrusted by most consistent liberals.

It’s worth keeping in mind when reading the table that the ‘distrust’ numbers may be low for some less well known outlets mainly because most respondents have never heard of them, rather than because most respondents do trust them.

* * *

An alternative way to look at the data…

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1FxaAmY Tyler Durden

Voter ID Laws Suppress White, Latino, and Black Voting About the Same Amount

Voters “Republicans
Are Trying to Make Sure Minorities and Young People Don’t Vote This
November,” reads a Mother Jones headline. How?
MJ continues…

…shorter voting hours, restrictions on voter registration
drives, and the requirement that voters present a government ID or
proof of citizenship to cast a ballot.

With regard to imposing voter ID requirements, a new study
reports that the nefarious Republican plot is likely to fail if the
goal is to suppress black and Hispanic votes relative to white
votes. Researchers Rene Rocha from the University of Iowa and
Tetsuya Matsubayashi from Osaka University in Japan have published
an article, “The
Politics of Race and Voter ID Laws in the States: The Return of Jim
Crow?” in the current issue of the Political Research
Quarterly.

They do find that states with relatively small minority group
populations and dominated by Republican governors and legislatures
have passed more voter ID requirements, both photo ID and non-photo
ID, than states with larger minority group populations and/or
dominated by Democrats. But what effect do such requirements have
on voter turnout?

In a September, 2014 report, the Government
Accountability Office noted, for example, that one study that
compared ethnic subgroup voting in Kansas and Tennessee (which had
adopted new voter ID requirements) to five states that had not done
so, found that…

…turnout was reduced among African-American registrants by 3.7
percentage points more than among Whites in Kansas and 1.5
percentage points more than among Whites in Tennessee. However, we
did not find reductions in turnout among Asian-American or Hispanic
registrants, as compared with White registrants, thus suggesting
that the laws did not have larger effects on these registrants.

However, in summarizing the general research on voter ID
requirements, the GAO found:

Another 10 studies GAO reviewed showed mixed effects of various
forms of state voter ID requirements on turnout. All 10 studies
examined general elections before 2008, and 1 of the 10 studies
also included the 2004 through 2012 general elections. Five of
these 10 studies found that ID requirements had no statistically
significant effect on turnout; in contrast 4 studies found
decreases in turnout and 1 found an increase in turnout that were
statistically significant.

The study cited by the GAO that showed minority group vote
suppression and most other prior research compared voting changes
between states that had adopted voter ID requirements and those
that had not. The researchers in the study Political Research
Quarterly parse time series data noting changes in voting
participation before and after voter ID requirements were adopted
in individual states. Contrary to the earlier state-to-state
comparisons, the new study using time-series data extending over
the past 30 years finds:

Our primary explanatory variables, photo ID and nonphoto ID
laws, have no statistically discernible relationship with the
probability that whites, blacks, and Latinos voted in the general
elections between 1980 and 2010 except that the nonphoto ID law has
a positive and significant relationship with Latino turnout. In
short, more stringent ID requirements for voting have no deterring
effect on individual turnout across different racial and ethnic
groups.

The GAO report also found that data on voter fraud is not
centralized and scanty in any case, but did note that …

…there were no apparent cases of in-person voter impersonation
charged by DOJ’s [Department of Justice] Criminal Division or by
U.S. Attorney’s offices anywhere in the United States, from 2004
through July 3, 2014.

Frankly, whatever the intentions of Republican lawmakers with
regard to imposing more stringent voter ID requirements – prevent
fraud or suppress votes – the data suggest that the requirements
are a big waste of time and money.

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Homeland Security To Restrict West Africa Travelers Entry To America

While President Obama has declared his experts say banning travel from the Ebola-stricken West African nations is not the optimal route to stopping the deadly virus’ spread in the US, Homeland Security has a different plan as Rep. John Conyers comments:

*U.S. SAID TO RESTRICT TRAVELERS FROM EBOLA REGION TO 5 AIRPORTS
*U.S. TRAVEL RULE WOULD AFFECT LIBERIA, SIERRA LEONE, GUINEA

Good thing Ron Klain is involved in the decision-making process… oh wait…

*TWO PEOPLE BRIEFED ON DHS PLANS COMMENT ON PENDING ANNOUNCEMENT

As Bloomberg reports,

Homeland Security Dept will require airline passengers originating from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea to enter U.S. through airports with Ebola-screening measures, according to statement from Rep. John Conyers.

U.S. enhanced-screening airports: New York’s John F. Kennedy International, Newark Liberty, Washington Dulles, Chicago O’Hare, Atlanta Hartsfield; about 94% of fliers from affected areas fly through those airports

Conyers is ranking Democrat on House Judiciary Cmte

* * *

But in irony of ironies, Rwanda has started screening US and Spanish arrivals fo Ebola too… (as WaPo reports)

According to the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda, the tiny land-locked East African nation has begun screening passengers from the United States and Spain for the deadly virus.

From a note on the embassy’s Web site:

Visitors who have been in the United States or Spain during the last 22 days are now required to report their medical condition — regardless of whether they are experiencing symptoms of Ebola — by telephone by dialing 114 between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. for the duration of their visit to Rwanda (if less than 21 days), or for the first 21 days of their visit to Rwanda. Rwandan authorities continue to deny entry to visitors who traveled to Guinea, Liberia, Senegal, or Sierra Leone within the past 22 days.

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Battleships And Helicopters Join Hunt For Missing Submarine: Sweden Prepares To “Use Weapons To Surface Sub”

The hunt for missing October continues.

Recall that over the weekend, one of the less reported stories was that Sweden had deployed its various army, navy and air force units to hunt down what was reportedly a damaged Russian sub that had sunk in the Stockholm archipelago, something which Russia vehemently denied.

Since then, things have escalated and as both the FT and RIA reported, Swedish authorities declared a safety distance of 10,000 meters (5.4 nautical miles) from all military vessels taking part in the search for the alleged foreign sub.

According to the Swedish Expressen newspaper, air traffic over the search area has been suspended. Such a large area of Swedish airspace has not been cordoned off since the ’80s, the newspaper added. The fly ban will not affect passenger flights.

Swedish Navy vessels have reportedly sealed off a channel between Nynashamn and the island of Nattaro south of Stockholm. A large number of military vessels and helicopters are reported to be moving southward.

The Swedish Armed Forces first launched a major operation off the coast of Stockholm on Friday after receiving information, reportedly from a civilian, about the presence of an unknown underwater object in the region.

According to the Swedish Armed Forces, there have been three “very credible sightings” of an unknown object off the Swedish coast, suspected to be “foreign underwater activity.” Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven stressed Monday that the ongoing operation is “not a submarine hunt,” but an “underwater investigation.”

But the key question remains, just whose sub is it that is missing? Earlier on Monday, a Russian Defense Ministry source told RIA Novosti that the unidentified object in Sweden could be a submarine belonging to the Dutch Navy.

A spokesperson for the Royal Netherlands Navy told RIA Novosti that a Dutch submarine had recently visited Stockholm, but stated that it was no longer in Swedish waters when the “suspicious object” was first observed in the Stockholm archipelago.

Additionally, Bloomberg reported that a distress call caught in Swedish territorial waters on Oct. 17 has been incorrectly linked to presence of Dutch submarine, citing His Majesty’s Bruinvis, Karen Loos-Gelijns, spokeswoman for Defense Ministry says in e-mailed statement. She said the submarine went to Tallinn on Friday morning, stayed there over the weekend. She added that Dutch navy ships Tromp, Amsterdam, Evertsen, Zealand, submarine Bruinvis participated this month in international exercise Northern Archer in the Baltic Sea.

In other words, the Netherlands is refusing to take blame for the sub. As it Russia – recall that previously a spokesperson for the Russian Defense Ministry denied that the damaged sub belongs to Russia, stating that “there have been no extraordinary, let alone emergency situations involving Russian military vessels.”

But while the originating nation of the offending sub, if there is indeed one, refuses to step up, Sweden is starting to lose patience. According to an update by TheLocal.se, battleships, minesweepers, helicopters and more than 200 troops continue to scour the area where they believe the sub is located.

Sweden’s military has now been out on the hunt for five days, with the operation moving “across the archipelago” on Tuesday.

Jesper Tengroth, press officer for the Swedish military, told The Local that the focus had switched from just the southern islands on Monday.

Swedish military vessels are now also patrolling open seas in the Danziger Gatt strait, news agency TT said. But Tengroth would not give any further details about where Swedish ships and military units were stationed for “operational reasons”.

After three civilian sightings of suspicious activity in the Stockholm archipelago, Sweden’s Armed Forces have launched a full-scale investigation.

In fact it has gotten to the point where Sweden may simply blow up the offending military equipment just to make the point that “The most important value of the operation – regardless of whether we find something — is to send a very clear signal that Sweden and its armed forces are acting and are ready to act when we think this kind of activity is violating our borders,” Supreme Commander General Sverker Göranson said.

As a result, Sweden’s military has announced that if it finds a suspect foreign vessel in the Stockholm archipelago, it is prepared to force it to the surface “with weapons if necessary”.

“Our aim now is to force whatever it is up to the surface… with armed force, if necessary,” he added.

He added that submarines are “extremely difficult” to find, and that Sweden has never succeeded in the past when it came to tracking them down.

“And no one else has either,” he added.

If the sub is indeed Russian, it would be quite a hit for Sweden, which in more than a decade of hunting Russian U-boats in the 1980s and early nineties, never succeeded in capturing one, except in 1981 when the U137 ran aground several miles from one of Sweden’s largest naval bases, triggering an embarrassing diplomatic stand-off for Russia.

Early Tuesday afternoon, at least five naval ships were stationed for more than two hours in an area east of Ingarö, the closest reported point to the Swedish mainland since the operation began. DN reported that one of the ships had “made contact” with something, but General Göranson denied the claim.

Göranson’s comments to the Swedish media came after a nearly two-hour long meeting with Sweden’s defence committee behind closed doors.

They also followed reports in the Dagens Nyheter newspaper that there had been more than 100 reported sightings of a suspect vessel from members of the public in the past day or so. “We’re still getting more reports, and I want to underline the fact that we’re happy about this,” Göranson added.

Here is a cross-section of what has been alleged to be a Russian X-Ray/AC-12 class submarine, the Losharik.

In any event with every passing day, the surfacing of the damaged sub gets closer, assuming of course one exists. And if, as the local Swedish media reports allege, the sub does belong to Russia and the result if a major political humiliation for the Kremlin, will Putin just sit idly by, especially since what is going on close to Stockholm has become a regional spectacle. As the FT reported, “the Swedish military operation is being followed around the region. Edgars Rinkevics, Latvia’s foreign minister, wrote on Twitter at the weekend: “Closely following events in the Swedish territorial waters, may become a game changer of the security in the whole Baltic sea region.“

It may indeed, and the answer will be forthcoming. After all there is only so much air a sub can store.

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Ohio’s GOP Governor: Repeal Obamacare—Just Not This Part That Affects Ohio

For years, Republicans promised to “repeal and
replace” Obamacare. But although several replace plans were drawn
up, the GOP never rallied around any of them. Now, with Obamacare’s
coverage expansion kicked in, the party seems increasingly unable
to reckon with the prospect of repeal.

For example, here’s Ohio’s Republican Governor John Kasich
talking about the Medicaid expansion.

The Associated Press
reports (link
via Greg Sargent):

Ohio Gov. John Kasich says he doesn’t think there will be
a repeal in Washington, even if Republicans win a Senate majority
and consolidate their hold on the House in next month’s
election.

“That’s not gonna happen,” the Republican governor told The
Associated Press during a recent re-election campaign swing.

Kasich called The Associated Press Monday night to clarify that
he was speaking specifically about a repeal of Medicaid expansion
and not of the entire Affordable Care Act—although opponents in
Washington don’t usually draw such distinctions.

He said he believes the ACA “can and should” be repealed, but
that opposition to the Medicaid expansion “was really either
political or ideological,” adding, “I don’t think that holds water
against real flesh and blood and real improvements in people’s
lives.”

(Side note here: People on Medicaid like it, but the best
evidence is that it doesn’t do much if anything to improve one’s
measurable physical health outcomes.)

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder Signs “Right to Try” Law; a Win for Patient Rights

Last
week, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed a “right to try” law that
allows terminal patients who have exhausted all other therapies to
try drugs not fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA).

Senate Bill 991 and House Bill 5649 create the Right to Try Act
in Michigan.

The act allows those suffering from advanced illnesses to
receive experimental treatments outside of FDA-approval, if all
approved procedures have failed to help the patient. The treatments
would only be allowed under a doctor’s supervision. Under the law,
medical professionals and health care facilities are protected from
liability if the experimental treatment does not have a positive
result for the patient.

More
here.

As I noted recently in
a column for The Daily Beast about right-to-try laws,
Michigan is the fourth state this year to pass such legislation. A
ballot intiative in Arizona puts the matter to a vote on November
4. Among other things, I argue at the Beast that the current Ebola
hysteria may help spur the adoption of such laws.

You don’t have to be a doctrinaire libertarian—though it
helps—to see the value in letting people with nothing left to lose
experiment on themselves. They may get a new lease on life. The
rest of us get meaningful information that may speed up the
development of the next great medical intervention.

Read the whole thing.