These Days the IRS Will Tax Anything, Even if It’s Stolen

These Days the IRS Will Tax Anything, Even if It’s Stolen

 

 

By Michael Reagan with Michael R. Shannon

 

Tuesday, 04 January 2022

Who knew the Internal Revenue Service was a hotbed of sunny optimists?

We would venture to guess that every taxpayer in the United States has a mental picture of the average IRS employee and we would propose that picture is not one of “Pollyanna.”

Our current thoughts on the most optimistic branch of the federal government centers on the Federal Reserve System.

This Dr. Pangloss (a person possessing unfounded optimism) collection — some of whom are doctors — is currently feverishly trying to convince the public that printing trillions of dollars in new money isn’t going to create a crippling wave of inflation.

The economy and the public aren’t listening and inflation has skyrocketed to extreme not seen in over 40 years.

But maybe you favor the U.S. Department of Education as the most optimistic.

We are told yearly that just a few more billions pumped into this mediocrity factory will result in a Rhodes Scholar in every pot!

Or maybe it’s the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that has been fighting poverty since 1966 and losing.

Either way, we’re certain the IRS didn’t come to mind when we first mentioned optimism.

That organization is the perpetual wet blanket agency that sends the tax collector to grab the keys of the new prize car from the hand of the charity raffle winner.

The IRS appears to be suspicious by nature, harboring no illusions as to the basic goodness of man when it comes to voluntarily paying taxes.

That’s why we were surprised to read the following on Outkick.com that exposed the hidden cabal of optimism brightening at least one corner of the IRS: “Right there in the income tax department of the IRS is the section on ‘Stolen property,’ which states: ‘If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless you return it to its rightful owner in the same year.'”

This will come as news to the Burn, Loot, Murder crowd.

They just assumed once they side-stepped the “security guard” and were past the tag-detector at the store door, the stolen goods were theirs.

Now the IRS wants its cut?

It’s bad enough that the fence only gives them a few dimes on the dollar in return for all that boosting.

Now, functionally illiterate products of public schools are supposed to calculate the tax?

See what we said about optimism?

This gambit may have worked with Al Capone, but “Scarface” was a known quantity and his spending was easier to track. Packs of looters in hoodies and face burkas?

Not so much.

We’ll only take this IRS initiative seriously when Home & Business TurboTax starts asking filers if they had any looting income in the past year.

            Michael Reagan, the eldest son of President Reagan, is a Newsmax TV analyst. A syndicated columnist and author, he chairs The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Michael is an in-demand speaker with Premiere speaker’s bureau.