Comments on: Outright Theft

By: crosspatch

crosspatch — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:12:13 +0000

Heh, and now the city of Vallejo (not far from Napa) wants to tax cell phone SMS text messages. Where does it stop? When are they going to tax "impure thoughts"?

By: crosspatch

crosspatch — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:51:00 +0000

Oh, and the California Franchise Tax Board is NOT the IRS.

By: crosspatch

crosspatch — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:50:20 +0000

Dana, that isn’t the issue. The issue is “where does it stop”. What if they raise the amount they are taking again next year? But they are being very careful here not to take enough to take you up another exemption. If you are already claiming the correct number of exemptions and try to increase it by one, you will not have ENOUGH taken out and will be penalized for it.

By: I love my hometown… « Public Secrets

I love my hometown… « Public Secrets — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:39:59 +0000

[...] Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard calls it outright theft. McQ puts it this way: “California – ‘We Need The Money More Than You.’” [...]

By: Dana

Dana — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 12:15:32 +0000

There is a way for Californians who have been claiming too few exemptions to get around this. I assume that most such people claiming too few exemptions are doing do to insure that they get a refund on their federal taxes. But Form W-4 (note: .pdf file) has a better option. You claim the proper number of exemptions, and if you want additional money withheld from your federal, but not state, taxes, to insure that you get a refund, line 6 on the Employee’s Withholding Allowance Certificate is "Additional amount, if any, you want withheld from each paycheck." The IRS even encourages this on the bottom of the worksheet, the "Two-Earners/Multiple Jobs Worksheet" section, giving you a worksheet to calculate what you'll need to have in additional withholding if you have two earners in the family, especially if they have significantly diferent wages.

By: John

John — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 06:27:54 +0000

feeblemind you are right on. Sitting here in New York Im just wondering when those perps up in Albany are going to do the same thing. Also as crosspatch said what is the limit? Will they stop or continue with even bigger forced “loans”?

By: feeblemind

feeblemind — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:24:15 +0000

Phineas and Crosspatch, you have every right to be outraged. It infuriates me and I don’t even live there. I can see where this could just roll and build when the money is not there come tax refund time. One wonders how many other states are watching California and the voters’ reaction, and wondering if they should play a similar shell game?

By: crosspatch

crosspatch — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 03:54:19 +0000

Yeah, feeblemind, we got refunds. They were delayed, though, until an agreement was reached which includes this little diddy … increasing the withholding beyond what is needed to pay the tax for next year.

So instead of having to pass a bond issue to raise money temporarily, they have simply agreed to take it from the taxpayers. Just yank it right out of our pay. And they will pay no interest. But this just increases the deficit and come next year they will be forced to pay out in refunds even more than they would have to pay otherwise. So it has the potential to compound the problem rather than solving it. All they have managed to do is kick the can down the alley for another year and doing it by robbing us of our hard earned.

And another thing: I keep hearing these liberals saying that we don’t pay enough in taxes. FINE. The state Franchise Tax Board and the US Treasury both accept donations. Anyone who feels they are not taxed enough is allowed to donate money to the government. Every time I point that out they shut right up. It isn’t that THEY feel they aren’t being taxed enough, they feel everyone ELSE isn’t being taxed enough.

I am so mad I could spit. So they are “just” going to take an extra $40 this year. But what is the boundary? What is the limit? What if they decide to take “just” another $40 next year on top of the $40 they took this year? What is to stop them? Nothing as far as I can tell prevents them from taking our entire paycheck if they wanted to.

There needs to be a boundary. Just as we are penalized for under withholding and claiming too many exemptions, the state should be penalized for over withholding when we have claimed the proper number of exemptions.

This notion of having open-ended access to our paychecks needs to stop.

By: Phineas

Phineas — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 02:16:40 +0000

Lynn, we don’t need your sympathy. This state is not a democratic republic. Thanks to safe seats and left-wing single-interest donor groups, this is a self-perpetuating oligarchy of professional politicians. Don’t worry, change is coming. It just takes time for the people to get mad enough to enact it.

Feeblemind, yes, we got our refunds. They avoided the IOU fiasco (this time) at the last minute.

By: feeblemind

feeblemind — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:43:45 +0000

Crosspatch, you beat me to it with your 3:51 pm comment. Question: Did CA taxpayers ever get their refunds this year? I never heard anything about it.

By: LYNNDH

LYNNDH — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:39:47 +0000

Well CA voters keep voting them in. No sympathy on my part at all. This will be on top of all the new Fed taxes part of health and the crapntax bills.

By: Phineas

Phineas — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:21:15 +0000

I’ve known about this one for a couple of months, now. It made me mad when I first learned of it, and it’s got me even madder now. At the moment, I’d vote for one of the local feral cats before I’d vote to reelect my Assemblywoman. (Speaker Karen “Free speech is terroristic” Bass.)

By: crosspatch

crosspatch — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:54:35 +0000

In my opinion, this has the potential to simply make things worse. They are taking the people’s cash out of their paychecks and if they don’t have the money to pay up next year, they are going to be in a WORLD of hurt.

By: crosspatch

crosspatch — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:51:55 +0000

The problem with this whole thing is there is no limit to how far they could take this. What prevents them from taking our entire check and dolling out cash as they deem we are worthy of having and then “paying” us at the end of the year with an IOU that the bank may or may not honor?

What guarantee do we have that the state will have the cash at the end of the year to repay all the extra withholding? They didn’t have the cash to repay this year’s refunds and were talking IOUs.

So there is no limit on how much they feel they are allowed to take from us and they don’t have to make any guarantees that they will be able to pay it back. They believe our paycheck is their money.

Firing the bastards isn’t enough. That entire mentality needs to somehow be erased.