From a life of abundance, now with only my 10 year-old Cougar, what I took with me in personal things, and $350 in cash, what I did not know was that the IRS told my wife to not sign the joint return I’d filled out. I left the form filled out, with my signature. My wife was to have signed it, and paid the tax we owed. Knowing I’d taken only $500 out of our bank account, my wife followed IRS instructions. She was to file a separate return, pay half of the tax we owed, and send the joint return in without her signature. It would be treated as my separate return. Instead of treating the joint return as a separate return and charging me half of the tax, the IRS treated the return as a joint return and charged me the full tax, plus penalty and interest.
I’d sold stock that was mine before we married. My wife was to have mailed me the check when it came. Instead, she forged my name on the check and cashed it.
On the Monday after Easter Sunday 1975--Easter, the first day of my new life--I found a job working in a boatyard. I rented an efficiency apartment and paid $200 up front, with the promise that in a few days I would pay the balance of rent and deposits. I didn’t know that $350 cash was it. I was not going to receive the check in payment for the stock I sold. Pay day was two weeks away.
I'm 36 years ahead of this particular moment of uncertainty for independent businesses. I had been the owner/operator of an independent lumber wholesale business. I bought from independent lumber mills and sold to retailers. The purpose for my wholesale lumber business was not only to search lumber mills for my customers’ needs, but to finance them. I borrowed large sums of money. My place in the market was eliminated, (1) by President Nixon’s price controls; (2) by double digit inflation and high interest rates. It is the same old thing over and over. The resourceful are being used,--government manipulation for the benefit of government and everyone else’s detriment.
I was forced to sell 15 acres of my land. Double digit inflation caused my land to sell for double what I paid for it. Although I made no profit in my business and no profit on the sale of my land, the government claimed I made a profit and charged me capital gains tax.
After my departure, while this pauper entrepreneur faced being put on the street, the not so rich government entitled received cost of living increases.
The IRS is always right, unless we taxpayers can prove them wrong. We taxpayers are guilty unless we can prove ourselves innocent in a government biased court. In 1975, I studied constitutional law in the county law library. I had a bigger than life calling. I sublimated my anger.
The IRS had called me a “Fifth Amendment freak.” They told me they knew how to deal with me. The IRS had sent me a tax assessment for the full 1975 tax. I had filed with the IRS a carry back loss form for prior year business loss. The IRS offered, illegally, to send my refund only if I would drop my petition to the Tax Court and pay their erroneous assessment out of my refund money. Because I refused, the IRS froze my refund. The IRS, expediently, is allowed to do such things “for the good of all.” At my tax court trial three years later, the IRS amended their erroneous assessment, no questions asked by the court; and, I’m not allowed to question anything but the mistake the IRS was alleged to have made. The tax court is not authorized to address constitutional issues. Nothing in the law says the IRS can’t make limitless mistakes, for the good of all. The individual counts for naught.
At the time of my departure, with unemployment high—down the street from my Miami apartment there was a mile long food stamp line—in that I was self-employed, I was not eligible for the government entitlement the United States grants the unemployed worker, for no particular reason. It took three phone calls to Miami boat yards to land a job. The pay was barely over the minimum pay government allows, but twenty percent of my meager wages was withheld for Uncle Sam, for no particular reason—just that it is the law. The press publishes screwball “tax protester” cases the IRS hands them.
For no particular reason, the IRS was playing games with this “tax protesting” pauper. My take-home pay did not leave me with enough to pay my rent. For the good of all, I was locked out of my apartment. For no discernable reason, the good of all means zero rights for the individual. You don’t hear this about raising revenue. You hear that anyone against a compassionate government is a terrorist.
I'm writing the story of my life. It will be published in January 2012. In my story, you will read why this "terrorist's"life is as good as it gets.
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