Over on the home page, David Freddoso looks at Obama’s plan to have the IRS prepare your taxes. (It was originally John Edwards’ plan.)

David points out that under this idea, most Americans would barely notice if the IRS overcharges them or sends a smaller refund than they deserved. In addition, we went over the proposal a few times here and found a few other flaws. Among them:

  • Does it provide immunity from audits? Can the IRS pursue you if they made the error in calculating your taxes?
  • “50 million returns prepared by the IRS? And mailed out? And rechecked again? How many more IRS employees would that take, and how much would it cost?”
  • Wouldn’t this amount to the IRS telling you what income they know about, and what income you can successfully hide by not telling them about?
  • If only 10,000 taxpayers in California took advantage of a similar plan in 2004, that would extrapolate to only 88-100 thousand taxpayers across the US (unless advertising and media exposure pushed up participation). How many filers use form 1040EZ today?

It must be fun to be a Democratic candidate. If it took several months and at least four mentions before the mainstream press asked Hillary about the Bosnia sniper fire, how long will it take for the MSM to ask Obama about any of these potential glitches?