budgets

IRS GESTAPO

Posted on by Helena

The IRS employs roughly 100,000 people. The total requested budget for 2014 including for Program Operations amounted to $13,358,007,000. And somehow they just can’t seem to make ends meet. No one feels sorry for them. The Commissioner for the IRS, John Koskinen refers to the IRS employees as ‘long-suffering’.

IRS Agents make about $82,000 on average, Customer Service Reps make about $44,000, and Special Agents about $120,000. Taking a look at what these ‘long suffering’ people are rewarded is making me nauseous:

1) 2/3 of cost of health insurance,

2) long term care insurance,

3) ‘the best retirement program in the world’, per their website, FERS, the employee contribution is currently set at .08% which amounts to roughly $65 on the annual average salary

4) life insurance,

5) on the job training,

6) reimbursement of college course expenses,

7) merit and job performance rewards (their website claims their employees are given more than any other government agency),

8) overtime pay AND premium pay for working more than 8 hours in a day,

9) 4 hours annual leave per pay period, which is every two weeks, adding to 2.6 weeks per year

10) 4 hours per pay period for sick leave = 2.6 weeks per year

11) 10 paid holidays,

12) the ability to telework from home,

13) free childcare

14) free counselling services

15) locality pay adjustments – for example if you live in Houston or LA, your base rate is adjusted up about 28%. There are over 30 different city areas that have bump up adjustments

To qualify as a grade GS-7, you need a bachelors degree with an overall gpa of 3.0 or higher. The overall average IRS employee salary is $83,000.

Between October 2010 and December 2012, the IRS paid more than $2.8 million to about 2,800 workers with ‘recent conduct issues’. A conduct issue includes willfull failure to pay taxes, unauthorized access to a taxpayers private information, abuse of agency leave policy, misuse of IRS property, falsification of official forms, and behavioral problems. None of these issues qualified the individual for firing, instead they were given bonuses. These are the ‘long-suffering’ employees the new Commissioner lauds. The bonuses included more than $1 million in cash awards for roughly 1,100 employees with federal tax-compliance problems.

But their budget and conduct woes do not end. Between 2010 and 2012, the IRS spent $50 million on conferences. And remember the illegal targeting scandal? The targeting occurred in 2010, was discovered in 2013, and the ‘investigation’ continues. No one has been sanctioned. No one fired. No fines. No fees. The FBI has concluded that there was no evidence that might require criminal charges being filed for the corruption. And like Hillary, the solution was to crash Lois Lerner’s hard drive, and wipe clean and scrap her phone. Case closed.

Because our government is inherently corrupt, we have another government agency whose task it is to investigate and squash fraud from within. This agency is called The Government Oversight and Reform Committee.

Now the IRS is facing more problems as it confesses to wasting millions of dollars on decorative items and blames the Republican party for these sprees given budget cuts have made their workload over taxing. One Senator even went so far as to state that the budget cuts never even hurt the IRS, they just hurt the American people. Really? And to make it better, they want more money. Specifically, they want $490. million just to enforce Obamacare penalties, and $122.8 to enhance greater collection of taxes.

SEIZURES: As of 2012, the amount of funds that the IRS had seized from individuals aggregated $3.2billion. The IRS may seize any property or cash from a taxpayer based on ‘suspicion’ of an illegal activity. Most taxpayers forfeit the money because getting an attorney to fight the IRS costs more than the value of the asset and can take upwards of 6+ years. One third of all the cases involved no criminal activity whatsoever. Contrary to normal US law, it is the citizen’s responsibility to prove innocence in order to get their property returned. The money and properties seized are available to the agency making the seizure without any appropriation by Congress. The IRS has stated that going forward it will curtail these sort of seizures and try not to target individuals where there is no suspicion of the money involved coming from an illegal source.

So where is the IRS spending such a huge chunk of its budget? According to the CATO Institute, there are two main categories of IRS functioning; handouts, which include tax credits including Obamacare subsidies, and administration which is the basic functioning – tax return processing, help, enforcement and other. Of the two categories, administration costs have remained relatively unchanged, while handling of credits has jumped more than 400% since 2000.

It would appear that the IRS is scrambling for more money in order to be the caretaker of Obamacare which is seriously cutting into the benefit package for their ‘long-suffering’ employees. Are you feeling sorry for them yet?

THE CANCER BANK IS FULL

Posted on by Helena

Over the last 40 years the National Cancer Institute has spent over $90 billion on cancer research and treatment. Their annual budget is now about $5 billion per year. What has that bought us?

  • The number of new cancers each year is approximately 1.677 million.

  • The number of cancer deaths is about 35%.

  • The states with the highest rates per capita are Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Delaware.

  • Lung cancer came in first for all these states.

  • Nationally, prostate and breast came in second and third.

  • The highest death rates were in the south; Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi – etc…

  • While the death rate from breast cancer is down, the rates for contracting breast cancer are up.

  • Black males have the highest rates of cancer

  • White females have a higher incidence rate than black females

So what does this all mean?

It means that progress has not measured up to the dollars spent. It means that early detection is the main reason for the decrease in death, but that research has done little to nothing to actually mitigate – cancer.

How are the research dollars spent?

At the National Cancer Institute, 4% of funding is designated for prevention.

The American Cancer Society has stated that its funding will be prioritized as follows:

  • tobacco control

  • nutrition and physical activity

  • colorectal cancer

  • breast cancer

  • survivorship and quality of life

  • access to care

I’m not exactly sure what ‘tobacco control’ entails. But the concept is that given black males have the highest incidence of cancer and lung cancer has the highest rates, controlling tobacco could lower the overall stats. How does one – control tobacco?

Since 1965, tobacco use in the US has declined from 42% to 20%. This does not reflect any cures, it simply presents the fact that as a result of less people smoking, lung cancer incidences are lower. Research did not contribute to this result. Awareness did. If we completely eliminated smoking, the incidence rate of lung cancer would parallel.

New studies on breast cancer are stumped on why this disease is affecting more and more young women. And now the reports indicate three potential causes; birth control pills, hormone additives to our food supply, and nutritional deficiencies. We have long known that estrogen therapy increases breast cancer risk. Now we know that messing with hormones at all – increases risk in the young and old. Growth hormones can be found in milk, chicken, eggs, dairy. These hormones alter the natural balance and are linked to cancer. Period.

Parabens are chemicals with estrogen like properties. Parabens are found in shampoo, lotion and makeup. These chemicals have been found in breast cancer tissue up to one million times what is normal. Chemicals accumulate in our body. Our body has no idea what to do with them and so it stores them – forever.

And while a product may contain a low amount of paraben and claim to have no effect, the issue is that MOST products contain paraben and the cumulation effect IS the problem. In addition, the rise of Breast Cancer IS the problem. The relationship between paraben and hormones and breast cancer IS the problem. So why risk it?

Prevention is the only course of action – CURE has done nothing.

Over 34% of the budget for American Cancer Society is spent on ‘fundraising’. Their CEO raked in nearly $800,000 in compensation. In 2010, compensation, travel and conferences accounted for 62% of the program and supporting services budget.

I fail to see how the actual expenditures here have much of anything to do with their ‘stated priorities’.

Susan B Komen. A little better; 15% of their budget goes to fundraising. 26% is directed for marketing. Salaries and compensation amount to 23.5%. 8.6% is spent on donor benefits. The CEO pay package was $684,000.

But the question remains – what is spent on ‘the cure’? It would seem that cancer research is simply a cheerleading squad. What has been cured? The race participation has dropped in some states by as much as 50%. What are we racing for? To pay higher salaries?

We talk about the banking crisis, the greed and such – but isn’t the banking industry simply the largest in an ever larger pool of what we have become?

This is not to say that all charities or all banks are not fulfilling their obligations. It is to say that research is necessary in order to evaluate who is truly an advocate. In the cancer industry the last two largest and most amazing innovations came from an engineer whose wife had contracted cancer, and an eighteen year old girl in High School. Their budget? Maybe a few hundred dollars. Their motivation? One thousand percent. The time it took them? Months.