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EDITOR OF REDSTATE

Barack Obama Wants to Increase Your Taxable Income By Taxing Your Phone Usage

This is how the Obama administration is going to raise your taxes without actually increasing the tax rates — they’re going to kill you with a thousand little tax bills.

The latest? If you use your company cell phone to make personal calls, the IRS will consider it a taxable fringe benefit.

The Internal Revenue Service proposed employers assign 25% of an employee’s annual phone expenses as a taxable benefit. Under that scenario, a worker in the 28% tax bracket, whose wireless device costs the company $1,500 a year, could see $105 in additional federal income tax.

The IRS, in a notice issued this week, said employees could avoid tax liability if they showed proof they used personal cellphones for nonbusiness calls during work hours. The agency also could decide on a set number of phone minutes as “minimal personal use” that would be untaxed.

The burden is on you to show the IRS that you use a personal cell phone to make your personal phone calls. The law has actually been on the books since 1989 — put there by Democrats — but the IRS has never actually enforced it until now.

This is exactly what Obama is going to do — find rarely or never enforced provisions under the existing nebulous tax code and stick it to people who have jobs, while then turning around and funneling workers’ money to non-workers.

COMMENTS

  • Mike gamecock DeVine
  • DerKrieger

    …and refuse to take work calls on my personal cell phone. The big cell phone companies will be hurt most by this as tens of thousands of work lines are dropped.

  • http://www.800cart.com Ron Robinson

    Getting a cell phone SIM with unlimited international roaming: $ 200

    Moving my web site to a Bahamian server offshore: $ 75

    Setting up my Belize corporation owned by a Bahamian Trust: $ 1500

    Setting up offshore credit card processing and bank account: $ 650

    Slipping a credit/debit/ATM card drawing from offshore account into my pocket: $ 0

    Sending an email to president@whitehouse.gov sneering at Obama for trying to tax my brain: priceless

    Yes, in my world, this is genuine fun!

    Obama is simply helping every global business segment except US business when he tried this stuff.

  • George Neitz

    When the law went into effect the employees of all the bell sytem companies got a little present in the next years w2 showing an imputed income for our home phones which were subsidized by the corporation.
    For some it was an awakening to the insidiousness of the democrat tax code, for the conservatives it was just another told you so.
    And even now on retirement I still pay this tax on my phone bill not really a big deal cause they pay for the phone.

  • red4ever

    If I use my personal phone for business, I get a tax credit for that. Trust me, it will more than offset.

  • Common_Cents

    about not raising taxes. Of course he’ll tell us its one crisis after another that he inherited from Bush that will force us to raise taxes. Just like not “wanting to run the banks, mortgage, auto companies” but he was ‘forced’ to do so.

    BTW, I posted this same cell phone thread earlier today about 10am here:

    http://www.redstate.com/common_cents/2009/06/12/new-meaning-of-taxation-without-representation/

  • molybdanthan

    In case you didn’t know, Stevie Ray Vaughan covered it, as well a band called Nickel Creek (vastly superior to Nickelback).

    And my advice to
    Those who die.
    Declare the pennies
    On your eyes.

    ‘Cause I’m the taxman.
    Yeah, I’m the taxman,
    And you’re working for no one but me.

  • ss396

    During the primaries, Obama and his minions went over the laws and rules surrounding the conduct of the various primaries. They did this in great detail, with an eye on how to work them to his best advantage. Everyone can do this, of course, but the rest of us respect the spirit, the purpose, and the intent of these laws and rules. Obama et al went solely after their strict wording. That is largely how he gamed the primaries to an advantage that no one else had really done before. Where most folks have a fairly good general knowledge of the rules, his people had exact detailed knowledge of what and how they could be exploited. They were overwhelming, even to the primaries’ captains.

    Now he is doing the same thing at the national level.

  • louisiana

    In Louisiana, REPULICAN rep. White introduced a bill for a 15cent surcharge
    on internet access. It gets better…the most outspoken critics of the bill
    are 2 democrats! Jindal has been a subject of some interest here. Seems
    LA Sen. Landrieu gave him a tongue lashing yesterday on C-span, more
    or less saying ,stay in LA , forget about national politics.

  • molybdanthan

    Might as well expect this within the next 2 years. As well as new taxes on mileage, food production/distribution, bullets, reproduction, breathing, and anything else that we’d need to mount an adequate defense.

  • http://cannedjam.com cannedjam

    although i’m not sure if the almost 20% in taxes here in NYC that I pay on my personal cell phone is much worse

  • Mike gamecock DeVine
  • http://fairfaxgardener.blogspot.com ddstrain

    be an unreimbursed employee business expense, and thus deductible. Not a tax lawyer, so I’m not 100% sure.

    But their next step would be to do the same thing to Blackberry’s and other data-centric devices. That will be a direct, negative impact of productivity,

  • fidsyd

    I guess Obama thinks he has a reason because apparently we have a very large debt we need to pay off in this country. Probably because of all of that spending Obama did when he entered office in January 2001.