COMMENT: 

Dear Marty,

Hope you are doing great. Recently you may have heard Cristiano Ronaldo, the best football (what you guys wrongfully call soccer 😉 ) player in the world has left Spain’s Real Madrid and signed for Italian Juventus. There are many reasons behind this which involve broken promises of a better salary and especially lack of support on his situation with the Spanish tax department which has been very aggressive on him and other football players lately; now it has surfaced he is even planning to cancel a construction of a hotel of his own in Madrid, sources point to the tax witch hunt as the main reason for this decision as well. This way Spanish La Liga has lost one of the two best players in the world who happened to each play for one of the two biggest clubs in Spain, now the most important football match in the world has lost a lot of appealing as well.

It’s incredible how governments destroy all good things in their despair to find money, not realizing they only dig themselves deeper into trouble. Btw, Cristiano sold about 520,000 Juventus jerseys with his name only on his first day at his new club making around 52 million Euro which is half what Juventus paid for his transfer and way more than the extra 18,8 million the Spanish government is demanding from his pockets, if you add what the guy generated in publicity and TV audience one doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that running him out of Spain was not a wise business decision.

JC

REPLY: Those in government NEVER make wise business decisions. All they ever do is envy people in the private sector. You generally have two types of people who work in the bureaucracy (excluding Department of Justice). They tend to be there because they are afraid of risk and seek government jobs because there is ZERO chance of getting fired. The other person is there to punish the world for their own lack of talent. Far too often they will hunt down people with money to abuse them as much as possible as a pay-back to society for their own failures. The Department of Justice is either a parking place for people who CANNOT find a real job in the REAL WORLD, or they are there to win prosecutions and then pretend to be selling their experience to get those big paying jobs. They are either looking for such a job or they enter that field and then become a politician. As Nigel Farage said: Politicians are dominated by lawyers, but they are the failed lawyers

A lot of people have emailed in about the outrageous taxes being imposed on those who own boats. A number of people are complaining about California that they sail there and dock in San Diego briefly and go visit Mexico and then get a property tax for having a boat even when they are not citizens of California. This is really getting insane. A number of cities are doing this and they shift the burden to you to object. I have mentioned before where I was given a parking ticket in a private lot in front of Starbucks in New Jersey. Of course, it was illegal. They also know you will not take off a day from work to go to court to object and a $50 fine is not worth hiring a lawyer. So what happens? You pay the fine. They are doing this to boaters and they order the marinas to report the boats docketed there and they treat them as if you are a citizen and just send you a bill for $900 or more

Politicians are truly amazing. When they need money, they are never short of ideas of things to tax. New Jersey is proposing to now tax water from the tap. The proposal is being submitted by State Senator Bob Smith D-Middlesex. Of course, Smith is trying to say it’s not actually a tax and calling it a “user fee” even though you already get a water bill. A “user fee” would be a flat rate. He wants 10 cents per 1,000 gallons so it functions more like a tax than a one-time fee like getting a driver’s license. Smith obtained his J.D. in 1981 from the Seton Hall University School of Law. The only thing law teaches you is how to call a pig a cow and get away with it. It is probably inevitable that they will figure out a way to tax the air for making it clean.

They have in a way managed to tax sex as well over the centuries. In Nevada, they have proposed a $5 tax every time a prostitute performs a service. This is nothing new. The Roman Emperor Caligula (37-41AD) inaugurated a tax upon prostitutes per client (the vectigal ex capturis). There was the bachelor tax which was a punitive tax imposed on unmarried men. The Lex Papia Poppaea was introduced in 9 AD by emperor Augustus (27BC-14AD) to encourage marriage. Penalties were therefore imposed on those who were celibate, with an exception granted to Vestal Virgins. (Ulp. Frag. xvii.1). The law also imposed penalties on married persons who had no children from the age of twenty-five to sixty in a man. Women were taxed who had no children from the age of twenty to fifty (Gaius, ii.111)  (Tacit. Ann. xv.19). As strange as that may sound, New Jersey and Michigan proposed a tax on bachelor men to change their behavior. They would also tax people without children within the member states of the Warsaw Pact to produce children for the army.

There have been plenty of ingenious excuses to impose taxes. When it comes to taxes, politicians just always show their creativity. California wanted to tax per mile a spacecraft traveled in the air after launch. Taxes are supposed to be about using services. They create a road and you pay to use it. Taxing space shots was really insane for they created nothing. Another issue that is probably unconstitutional turns on taxing people who have no right to object in a democratic process. Taxation without representation is what California began by taxing sports players for playing a game in California. Now many states have followed suit. The same process is underway in Europe. It was California which first imposed the Jock Tax back in 1991 as retribution following the Chicago Bulls beating the LA Lakers in the finals. The politicians wanted to punish Chicago and boldly said that the next time “His Airness” (Michael Jordan) played in Los Angeles, the money he made on those games was officially subjected to the California State Income Tax. Since that time, half of the states in the union have followed California and adopted a Jock Tax, taking a cut from high-paid heroes. So they get to tax your income for services you do not use and you have no right to object because you cannot vote in that state. That is taxation without representation – the reason for the American Revolution.

This clever way of figuring out things to tax has been going on since colonial days. Before income taxes, England imposed the Window Tax of 1696. They taxed you per window you had in your home. This was imposed in England, Scotland, and Great British Empire and enforced throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The wealthy had bigger houses and a lot of windows. This tax directly led to the bricking up of many windows you will still see to this day. But they also altered society with the Window Tax in many ways creating row housing. That way you had fewer windows. Once Britain adopted the Window Tax, it spread around Europe. You will see old buildings in Poland with the windows still bricked in to reduce the taxes. If you get to visit Kraków, just walk the street in the old city and you will see more windows bricked up than open on some streets.

In Philadelphia, they also adopted the Window Tax being part of the British Empire. You see row housing in the old city to avoid the Window Tax. The clever minds of greedy politicians did not stop there. The term taking a “step up in life” came about because they also began to tax the number of steps you had into your house. The more steps, the higher the tax. So if you had more steps, that meant you were rich.

The Global Warming crowd is supported by the government because it provides the excuse to invent taxes. They argue that the number one producer of methane gas is cows who are causing global warming more so than cars. Now cow flatulence is the leading cause of global warming because of a cow’s slow digestion, mixed with a gas-producing diet of greens. Hence, to somehow reduce global warming, they claim that storing thousands of cows in one location creates large clouds of methane.  To somehow make global warming OK as long as you pay a tax, Ireland, and Denmark, along with other EU nations, have begun taxing cattle owners on cow flatulence. The argument is that cows are responsible for 18% of the greenhouse gases causing global warming. Now Ireland is taxing farmers $18 per cow while Danish farmers pay $110 per cow. None of this reduces global warming, it just creates more revenue for the politicians.

They imposed taxes on spirits and cigarettes to encourage people to stop drinking and smoking – so they claimed. However, when the governments realized that stopping smoking is costly for them as tax revenue declined, they then imposed like New York City taxes on e-cigarettes. Sweden and other EU member states have suddenly realized they have a similar problem with people switching to electric cars. OMG, tax revenue will evaporate into the clean air. Now they are looking at taxing the electricity that replaces fossil fuels.

In the USA, Oregon and Illinois want to tax per mile you drive under the same excuse that electric cars are reducing their tax revenue. California is now investigating taxing people per mile they drive. They always do these things AFTER an election and NEVER before. The I-95 interstate federal highway up and down the East Coast is another e4xperiment where they are tracking cars and how they travel so they can impose a tax on per mile you drive.

Then you have state pensions in trouble. How to make up the difference? California wants to add a tax to cover state employee pensions. Then you do not even realize that phones and electricity are taxed by federal, state, and local governments. You just never see the breakdown.

Then there are airfares. In the USA, the number of agencies who have their hands out for taxes you never see is amazing. They ensure that your ticket is generally anywhere between a 20% tax to 100% doubling in the price of airfare. This is one reason why airlines are charging for checked bags and just about anything that use to be free for if they are not part of the ticket, then they are not taxed. It’s a bit overwhelming to consider just how many governmental departments and agencies are directly involved in the nation’s commercial aviation system that you have to pay for. This long list includes — but is not limited to — the U.S. Department of Transportation; its subsidiary, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA); the Transportation Security Administration (TSA); Customs and Border Protection; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service; and the National Transportation Safety Board. Furthermore, commercial airports throughout the United States are operated on state, county, and city levels, as well as by independent port authorities and operators. So when you are standing in abusive lines and forced to take your shoes off in the USA and no other country, remember, you are paying for that privilege. Just the very basic starting fees are:

•  Domestic Passenger Ticket Tax: collected for FAA; 7.5% of ticket price
•  Domestic Flight Segment Tax: collected for FAA; $4 per segment, defined as “a flight leg consisting of one takeoff and one landing by a flight”
•  International Arrival Tax: collected for FAA; $17.70
•  International Departure Tax: collected for FAA; $17.70
•  September 11th Security Fee: collected for TSA; $5.60 one-way for flights departing the United States, but not to exceed $11.20 round-trip
•  Passenger Facility Charge: collected for “commercial airports controlled by public agencies”; up to $4.50 per passenger

The more connections, the higher the tax. On top of all that, you are charged $200 to change a ticket and if you do not make the flight, you can be just out and have to buy another ticket. The airlines will not refund all the taxes included in the ticket. You will find the mind-blowing travel charges exposed by the Business Travel Coalition. The average person trying to travel will usually find up to half the ticket price on domestic flights can be just taxes. Every possible agency is involved and they all have their fingers in your pocke

QUESTION: Hi Martin,
You are unique in your insight into the growing theft of our money and dignity by the increasingly draconian authorities. Sometimes it’s hard to tell in this era of clickbait and fake news whether something you read is real. In the case of Councils, however, which universally seem to be repositories for people with no skills and not enough guts or street smarts for real politics, anything is possible. How do we, especially the elderly, defend ourselves from these rapacious thieves?

Regards,
Pete

ANSWER: I wish I had an answer for you. For governments there in Britain to proposed to charge £25.92 to help an elderly person who has fallen is outrageous. This is beyond belief. As lawyers often say, “If you hit someone with your car, back up and make sure you kill them. It’s cheaper than to have to pay for the rest of their lives for an injury.” This seems to be the policy adopted by governments. As the crisis in finance builds, we will see more and more of this sort of thing to “save” money.

In the USA, all I can do is recommend moving to one of the 7 states without an income tax. If you are elderly and need medical services, Florida is probably the best spot. They also have Homestead, so nobody can take your house and throw you out on the street. The Florida homestead exemption is a Florida constitutional provision which protects Florida residents by providing them with legal benefits and protection. Thereby, a resident’s primary home is secure from levy and execution by their judgment creditors. A judgment creditor cannot force the sale of your homestead to satisfy a money judgment. Florida is THE BEST spot to protect property.

QUESTION: You said that if you owe taxes the government can deny you a passport? I never heard that one.

ANSWER: Oh yes. This has been in place for several years. The Wall Street Journal just reported that “at least 362,000” Americans will be unable to renew their passports because of back tax bills. They can take your homes, garnish your wages, and deny you the right to leave the country. Effectively, the IRS can actually starve you to death with all the rules they have and nobody on the other end will ever be there to look at the combined damage.

Judgment creditors can garnish your wages in order to collect the judgment up to a maximum of 25% of your disposable income. However, creditors of a few types of debts such as back taxes, child support, and student loans, can garnish your paycheck without a judgment. In other words, you have no right to actually contest this in a court of law. They can just garnish your wages on a whim or even on a mistake, placing the burden on you to argue with them.

The U.S. Department of Education or anyone collecting on its behalf can garnish up to 15% of your disposable income to collect on defaulted student loans. These agencies do not have to sue you first and get a judgment in order to garnish, but they must provide you with notice of the garnishment ahead of time. You can thank the Clintons for that one who eliminated the right to even go bankrupt from student loans even if a university charges you for a degree in which you cannot find employment, which today is over 60% of graduates. Universities could care less if you are getting a degree that is actually worth something. They just want the money.

Ever since 1988, child support orders include an automatic wage withholding order, even for child support that is not delinquent. The child support is withheld from your paycheck and your employer sends the money directly to the other parent. If you are required to maintain health insurance coverage for your child, the payment for that will be deducted from your paycheck as well. You can agree with the other parent to pay child support on your own, without resorting to wage withholding. The limit is up to 50% of your disposable earnings that may be garnished to pay child support if you are currently supporting a spouse or a child who isn’t the subject of the order. If you aren’t supporting a spouse or child, up to 60% of your earnings may be taken. An additional 5% may be taken if you are more than 12 weeks in arrears. Federally, child support payments and not considered taxable income. However, child support payments are also not deductible by the payer.

Taxing authorities, on the other hand, have their own limits for wage garnishment which is very subjective. The IRS bases the amount on how many dependents you have and your standard deduction amount. State taxing authorities may have their own formulas and they are all different. The IRS will send you a notice before it begins garnishing, but it does not have to get a judgment before doing so. They can take your funds BEFORE and you may not be able to afford a lawyer to help

The American Embassy personnel in Haiti are still under an order to take shelter and remain in place. They have been instructed: “Do not attempt to travel at this time.” Riots began on Friday in Haiti and have continued for three days when the government, instructed by the IMF to reduce government subsidies for fuel, resulting in a rise in prices on gasoline, diesel, and kerosene. The prices virtually doubled. While Haitian officials said they would increase social services spending and improve infrastructure, they are also directed to enforce collecting taxes. The IMF has directed many countries to engage in the hunt for taxes because deficits are rising. There is no long-term solution here for a simple exercise of math demonstrates that as increases rise, the interest rate cost of rolling the debt will crowd out all other spending forcing taxes to rise exponentially over the next decade.

The civil unrest has turned to set up flaming roadblocks, bringing travel around the city to an absolute halt, and looters are raiding stores and supermarkets just taking everything they can carry. Others have targeted hotels and businesses to just rob whatever they can find. Haiti is not unaccustomed to such riots. They tore the capital apart just back in September 2017 over politics. There were riots over food back in 2008 and were even attacking UN personnel

If there is a possible scam, someone will always figure it out. In Australia, they hunt money with unbelievable audacity and hand out tickets to motorists for everything. Someone has figured out a way to beat the government at its own game. They are cloning valid license plates and then racking up the fines. A BMW owner got a ticket for speeding while his car was parked in the driveway. When he looked closely, he discovered the ticket was for speeding 1,000 miles away from his home. The scammers figured out a brilliant way to beat the cameras. Just clone a license plate and you can speed and go through all the tolls absolutely free.

The Supreme Court’s decision to allow every state to tax the internet is complete insanity. Sources in Illinois are warning that the state is bankrupt and it now intends to wage an all-out assault upon the internet. They may, in the end, simply force many small companies to REFUSE to do business with anyone who lives in Illinois. From a business perspective, all you get are costs. They do not pay you to collect their taxes, and in the end, they subject you to huge fines, penalties, and prison for a job that amounts to indentured servitude. Where are the class action lawyers to make that argument? On top of that, if a policeman from New Jersey has NO JURISDICTION to arrest someone in another state, then how can the state impose forced employment on persons from other states? Constitutionally they cannot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They also violate the Commerce Clause.

Expect California to be next. We are looking at the real destruction of the economy. What if every nation then follows the same design because everyone is going broke trying to cover their own pensions? So to sell anything on the internet you suddenly have to file papers even stating you sold nothing in 50 states inside the USA. Using the same legal principles, then at the United Nations, the member states are 193 in total. Would a small business then have to file also in 193 countries and then state and provinces within each stating they DID NOT conduct business in their jurisdiction or go to prison?

If you asked how the West could collapse and everything move to China, the Supreme Court just delivered the means to accomplish that result. The problem is that Congress could overrule that, but they will not because they are NOT the representatives of the people. They represent the government. Someone MUST create a petition to Donald Trump directly. He would at least understand the problem.

Illinois should either dissolve itself or go bankrupt to end the pensions they cannot renegotiate.