Tax and Personal Finance Tips

The Nations Pulse on Tax Problems

There are two movements currently in the US reflecting citizens’ concerns. The two movements are Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. Intuitively, one is inclined to think that the movements represent an opposite social and economic philosophy. But this may not be as clear cut as one may think. 

One could think, economically speaking that the Tea Party movement is about the allocation of resources. They want to cut programs in favor of others. Welfare and social programs do not represent high priority, military does. 

Occupy Wall Street seems to be concerned with distribution of those resources. Their movement, if one can reduce it to a snippet is about who gets and pays what. There is an overlapping, however, in issues of concern. 

While the Tea Party may be concerned about the allocation of resources, they also delve into the distribution of those resources when they call for abolishing social programs to balance the budget. Conversely, the Occupy movement may be concerned with wealth distribution, but they care about resource allocations when they demand the protection of environment. 

Taxes are no different than those social and economic issues. If one wants to anticipate the position of the Tea Party toward taxes one may guess that the movement would want to reduce taxes (as they do,) and reduce the size of the IRS. If IRS elimination as a collection agency is espoused by either movement, it would be the Tea Party movement that would do so. 

The Occupy Wall Street would probably call for a higher collection of taxes and this may entail reinforcing or augmenting the size and role of the IRS. The Occupy Wall Street movement specifically wants higher taxes on higher income people. 

Although the two movements seem to be starkly opposit when it comes to taxes, there may be an overlapping zone where both share some goals. In both movements, at the middle class level they do not want to pay more taxes. They may share fear of intrusion of the IRS in our life with its arsenal of IRS audits and IRS collection actions such as IRS levy, tax lien and others. 

Congress has tried to mitigate the effect of the IRS actions against the average citizen by creating the Taxpayers Advocate, by creating IRS tax resolution procedures such as installment agreement and offer in compromise. Such tax relief mechanisms many times provide the tax help desperately needed for some citizens. Many other times citizens suffer from IRS audits, back taxes consequences and aggressive collection actions. 

For tax purposes, beyond collection and taxing of individuals and corporations the two movements most likely do not have the reengineering of taxes as a high priority. And this is regrettable.