There’s got to be a better way to do this:
Don’t be alarmed. More than 130 million households will get letters from the Internal Revenue Service beginning next week and it’s good news, not bad.
The letters are part of an extensive outreach effort to make sure people don’t miss out if they are eligible to receive a tax rebate check under the recently passed $168 billion economic stimulus plan.
The IRS letters will remind people to file a 2007 tax return so they will receive the stimulus payment.
Is it really necessary to send out 130 million pieces of paper, in 130 million envelopes, requiring the appropriate postage, for this effort? Who, by now, doesn’t know there’s talk of a rebate? What’s the cost of this mailing alone?
Filed under: Musings | Tagged: government, irs, Musings, News
More WASTE of your TAX dollars. How many people could they feed or house or cloth with that money. Or help with heating bills. AMEN!
Sure there’s a better way.
Mail out $300 checks to all these households (total cost: roughly $40 billion), along with a letter that explains to them that they may be eligible for more if they are below a certain income level or have dependent children, and to receive it, they will need to file a return for 2007.
The reason they have to do this mailer, though, is because the Democrat Party insisted that anyone who makes over $75k — and thus, who would already file a tax return — should receive nothing, while people who ordinarily WOULDN’T file a tax return because they don’t pay any taxes should receive the money instead. Hence, the IRS has to notify people it doesn’t ordinarily talk to — but at the same time, must repetitively notify people who probably aren’t going to be eligible because it doesn’t know if their income has changed or not.
Again, the easy and cost-efficient way would have been to send out a broad portion of the money with notification to people of how to file for more if they are eligible. But that would have put money in the hands of the “rich”, and the Democrat Party can’t ever allow that.
Why should the government be doing that sigh? Let me keep my money and I can donate more to charity.
Rich people are evil NDT! It’s wrong to make money!
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Jamie, you would be surprised how clueless some people are. They hardly know what day it is, let alone that they are getting free money.
Assuming it costs them 50 cents per mailing (printing costs, paper, envelops, workers, etc.), that’s 65 million.
If the USPS charges the IRS regular first-class rates, that’s an addition 48.1 million. That means it takes 113.1 million to merely inform Americans they can get a tax cut.
But don’t worry, we can always get more money from our bank: The People’s Republic of China. You friendly neighborhood loan officer, Hu Jintao, is always ready to refinance our debt.
Have you ever known the goverment to do anything sensible or efficient?
I work in a public library. For months now we’ve had people coming in who had heard that the government was handing out money. According to these people, “they” said that the money was at the library. (Probably = “You can get tax forms at the library so you can get your money.”)
Is it too tinfoil-hattish of me to wonder whether
(A) this is in part designed to get a much larger bank of government data on the people who don’t normally file a return,
and
(B) this is in part designed to give the fall elections a boost by making incumbents all able to claim that THEY handed you free cash, while their opponents stood by and did NOTHING!
?