What the heck is up with these Republicans anyway? There's just no end to those pricks!
Lindsay Beyerstein, passing on a story about testimony from Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee on the "Shackle Women To their Stoves Until Till They Go Into Labor Then Shackle Them to The Bed Act" "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" (emphasis mine.)
if a woman got audited, IRS agents would have to figure out whether a woman used any tax benefit or credit pay for an abortion, Nick Baumann of Mother Jones reports. (Imagine if every angry boyfriend could call up the IRS tip line and get his girlfriend audited over an abortion.)
Barthold said that if a woman used any kind of tax credit, or benefit, to pay for an abortion, the onus would be on her to prove that she was the victim of rape or incest, or that the abortion was needed to save her life. Alternatively, she could prove that her insurance doesn't cover abortion.
Source: TAPPED
To paraphrase Rand Paul, Republicans want it to be safer to be a chizophrenic in an Iowa gun store an American women in an IRS office.
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The guns and mental illness
Submitted by Holly (not verified) on Fri, 2011-03-18 19:25.The guns and mental illness thing is actually not so clear-cut. I'm going to agree that anyone who is likely to have hallucinations, delusions, or homicidal or suicidal impulses should probably not have access to a gun, but that doesn't cover everyone with mental illness. I mean, *I've* been under psychiatric treatment (reason enough to disqualify a person in some states), even though the issues at hand--ADHD and moderate depression--didn't make me a "OOGY BOOGY I SEE MARTIANS I'M GONNA SHOOT THE MARTIANS" sort of mentally ill person. "Mental illness" covers a lot of people and they're not all "crazy" in that sense. And frankly not all schizophrenic people, especially ones who've been long-term compliant with treatment, are likely to start shooting Martians either.
The tax credit thing is ridiculous, though. I mean, you get a tax credit, you put it in your bank account, then you take money out of your bank account to get an abortion--asking if it's "the same money" is like a philosophy question. I can't call up my bank and say "no, you need to make sure these are *different* dollars."
Eh. My brother wasn't
Submitted by figleaf on Sat, 2011-03-19 10:20.Eh. My brother wasn't schizophrenic but he was mentally disabled. And definitely shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near firearms. Because he killed himself with one when he was 20. (There's no way to know if it was suicide or an accident -- either one is equally possible.) So while I'm relatively more sanguine about causal gun ownership (I lugged one around when I was a bartender in a seedy-dive beer bar) I'm also pretty sanguine about keeping them out of the hands of people who really shouldn't have them.
That said, the schizophrenia crack wasn't mine, it was a Republican Iowa state legislator's characterization of a NRA-backed no-background-check law he evidently voted for anyway. It was one of those classic cases where he didn't know his mike was still live.
figleaf
The more I think about
Submitted by Holly (not verified) on Fri, 2011-03-18 19:40.The more I think about this... it also seems like a huge HIPAA (health privacy) violation. If your receipts include an $800 bill from a women's health clinic, I don't think an IRS agent of all people is allowed to ask whether that's for treating pelvic inflammatory disease or taking a cervical biopsy or being seen for urinary incontinence or any of the many, many other noncontroversial but extremely private things people do at the gynecologist. Do they really want to put people in the position of having to explain "oh no, that wasn't an abortion, that was just for when I caught syphilis"? TO AN IRS AGENT?
"Can of worms" barely begins to cover it.
A circumcision joke? Really?
Submitted by tu quoque (not verified) on Sat, 2011-03-19 00:48.A circumcision joke? Really? Would you make a rape joke so casually?
Hey man, figleaf's a
Submitted by Holly (not verified) on Sat, 2011-03-19 08:58.Hey man, figleaf's a circumcision survivor, he's got the right.
Whereas "survivor" typically
Submitted by figleaf on Sat, 2011-03-19 10:07.Whereas "survivor" typically references a remembered trauma, Holly's right that in my case survivor might be the right word. Both my mom and my pediatrician grandfather expressly instructed the hospital staff that I wasn't to be circumcised. (In the 1920s and 1930s he was a nationally famous baby doctor and a big advocate of breast feeding and no circumcision.) One of the nurses evidently couldn't tolerate the notion that such nice city people would leave their son looking like the "ignurnt hillbilly babies" so she basically forced the issue by "accidentally" giving me phemosis, allowing the swelling to get to a point that circumcision was required. I don't know if she kept her job but I definitely didn't keep my foreskin... or more than about 60% of the normal genital sensation even normally circumcised penises have.
I don't think of myself as a "survivor" though because like pretty much everyone else who's been subjected to the procedure I was too young to remember. If I may thrown in yet another poor-taste joke I'll add that it must have hurt -- I wasn't able to walk for a year after I got it.
My previously stated position is that, like pretty much all other body modifications parents should wait till the child is old enough to make the informed decision his or herself. For my own son our decision was if he wants to earn the money himself he can get it done at a piercing parlor when he turns 18.
That said, because there are people who were old enough to remember being circumcised, and therefore might be old enough to be triggered by references, I'll edit the post. Thanks for the head's up, TQ.
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Thank you. I really mean
Submitted by tu quoque (not verified) on Sat, 2011-03-19 11:25.Thank you. I really mean that.
It's obvious how horrific an
Submitted by FD (not verified) on Sat, 2011-03-19 08:59.It's obvious how horrific an invasion of privacy that is for the women concerned. I really don't think that's debateable. As an employent person, I'd also have serious concerns about this from the IRS agants perspectives - dealing with accounts of rape is traumatizing for trained professionals - and they want to tack that onto the job for number crunchers? Egads, I can't get over how surreal the suggestions coming out of this bill are.
Bad enough with Cameron making threatening noises about maternity leave - I cannot imagine living in a country where my politicians are seriously debating such things.
It's a bad bill. It's a bad
Submitted by K__ (not verified) on Sun, 2011-03-20 12:20.It's a bad bill. It's a bad idea.
I also think it's completely unrealistic & would be impractical to enforce, to the point where the costs outweigh the benefits.
I'm not fully understanding how an abortion audit would start. It would be too time-consuming to audit each and every person who has an abortion. There's something like 1 million performed in the US each year, right? So the IRS would probably select a small random sample from there rather than audit every one of those. (Which, is still highly invasive if have to explicitly spell out what medical procedures you had done each year. Form 1040 only asks for the aggregate expense, though it provides you with a worksheet to do the calculation. The worksheet doesn't have to be included with the tax form.)
But then, audits are themselves relatively unlikely to each individual. Your probability of an audit increases as your income goes up. So it's very rare for folks who would need to use a tax credit to pay for an abortion, or to seriously have to consider using a tax rebate to pay for an abortion, would be selected for an audit. Most people who get audited have enough $ so that they can probably pay for an abortion out of pocket, thus not needing to use a tax credit or rebate. Thus making an audit on the basis of abortion alone moot.
Or, if they did use a tax credit or rebate to pay for the abortion, how, exactly do you figure that out? The tax rebates come to citizens in a lump sum, right? So, what, how do you know that rebate got used on an abortion rather than on groceries for the week or got put in the bank? A receipt won't show where the money came from, it just says "You paid X amount on Y date."
So I don't like Beyerstein's question of, "What if every angry boyfriend could call the IRS up and get their (ex?)-girlfriends audited) because I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way. You might get the IRS to double-check the return and then maybe they'll decide to go for a deep audit or maybe they'll be like, "Eh, not worth it. Next."
It's just so impractical I can't imagine the IRS taking the bill seriously.
Of course it's a bad bill!
Submitted by figleaf on Sun, 2011-03-20 13:48.Of course it's a bad bill! The rules in the House of Representatives are set up at the moment to allow pretty much any amendments to be proposed for legislation. There's also almost universal certainty that bogus nonsense like this will be stripped out by cooler (and more Democratic) heads in the Senate. So at least in the House there's roughly zero cost to voting for shit like this and considerable liability, for Republicans anyway, to vote against it lest they get teabagged in the primaries.
The risk, though, is that sometimes stuff like that gets added in a way that makes it very difficult for the Senate to strip out, as when it gets stuffed back in in conference or gets attached to certain kinds of must-pass legislation.
My guess, though, is that in this case the desire to a) stick it to women any way they can and also b) hamstring or otherwise obstruct the proper business of the IRS would have made this little jewel just too tempting to resist in any event. (If it was to pass you can bet your boots 'wingers would have the IRS in court, frequently, to force compliance. Which, even if it didn't work, would further hamstring them.)
Thanks, K
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