If you don’t buy health insurance, will you really pay the tax? “Though ObamaCare’s individual mandate imposes a tax on people who do not purchase government-approved health insurance, the law explicitly neuters the IRS’s ability to collect the tax.” According to this article, the IRS has two options – to ask you for the money or to reduce the size of your tax refund. Obamacare has to be one of the worst, most incompetent pieces of legislation ever written.
This post was last modified on January 31, 2021
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This POS legislation is just more proof that the fools who shoved it through had no FRECKING clue what in the hell was in it.
As for the IRS asking for the money, that is pure bull shit. They will just take it either as the article says from your refund (if you get one) or they will take it from one of your banking accounts. Another little tool that they (IRS) just love to use, in dealing with the IRS, you are always guilty of something. The IRS will even tell you if you win in court you actually lost and they don’t have to abide by the judges ruling.
A close friend of mine in Idaho, was in "Tax Court" over some issue or another, and showed up with his copy of the tax code, which he was going to use to argue his case. I've seen the transcripts. The judge told him that if opened that book in his courtroom, he would be held in contempt. "Those laws don't apply in my courtroom."
That's when I became a Libertarian.
Sounds like a body could have a heap o fun forgetting to mention his health insurance on a tax return, make the IRS spend 6 months chasing him for it, then sending in the forms a few days before they was ready to crack the whip on 'im.
/Hey, a new Olympic sport!
Of course, there are probably many pages of this monstrosity which no one has gotten around to reading yet, and if a catastrophe were to happen - BO reelected - the Justice Dept. and the IRS might find a provision buried somewhere inn it that allows the government to shoot anyone who doesn't buy the insurance, or who complains about it, or who didn't vote for BO, or...
Tax returns are the remuneration of an interest free loan given to the irs. They cannot be penalized for holding more money than you owed them, but you sure can get screwed by them for turning the tables.
While responsible for the payroll of a company that had over a hundred employees, I adjusted my income tax withholding attempting to have the lowest balance at tax time. 3 years my wife and I were flat even with the irs. It got a little trickier when she got into sales and started getting commission checks which were difficult to predict, but we kept it pretty close.
The income withholding is a good example of government smoke and mirrors. If people were responsible to pay taxes from their income on their own, they'd realize just how outrageous the amount they irs takes from them is. Instead, many actually think the more of a return they get, the more they're sticking it to The Man.
Exactly. Excess withholding is essentially an interest-free loan to the government. If you get a $1000 tax refund at the end of the year, it really means you've lent the government $1000 at 0% interest for all or part of 1 year (assuming the excess taxes was taken out in equal weekly installments over the course of the preceding year.) Many people intentionally program their withholding for such a tax refund because they look at it as a form of forced saving, but there are better ways of doing it for most people. Of course, now that the Fed has driven interest rates into the ground, it may not be as big a deal as it once was, but still, if you had a paycheck deduction plan as a form of saving, you'd still have some sort of access to your money. With excess withholding, you can't get at it until April of the following year. And if you look at what has been going on in Crookifornia, they were delaying and/or paying tax refunds with scrip for a while - a trend that will likely continue as more and more states are squeezed for cash.
So... why all the new IRS employees? Does anyone think they will actually abide by the law they wrote? Nope. The "payment" one will have to endure for not having insurance will be nonstop harassment from the IRS.
So… why all the new IRS employees?
All that begging takes time.
The IRS is not known for abiding by the law.
ask you for the money or to reduce the size of your tax refund
In other words, if you don't want to buy into the plan, just make sure you owe the IRS at the end of the year. ;-)