Tax Cheat Proposes Taxing Penalties In Health Care Bill

For those who have been following along with the saga of Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), who has repeatedly failed to report income, failed to pay income tax, and made numerous other ethical and legal breaches of epic proportions, and who have been following along with my coverage of the health care bill (HR3200 - ObamaCare), the revelation that Rangel looks to sock tax cheats and all taxpayers in general should come as no surprise.

So what does Rangel want to do to tax cheats under ObamaCare. I've outlined some of the tax ramifications here, but the Post today includes the following:

The changes approved by the House Ways and Means Committee that Rangel chairs would strip away legal defenses and pile higher penalties on corporate and individual taxpayers facing IRS proceedings for what they claim are unintentional mistakes, experts said.

Rangel's bill would:

* Punish those who fail to alert the IRS to potentially questionable tax exemptions.

* Bar the IRS from waiving penalties against taxpayers who clearly erred in good faith.

* Double fines in certain circumstances.

"The bill raises penalties and eliminates many of the reasonable defenses that taxpayers have always been able to use when honest mistakes are uncovered," one lawyer told The Post.

In fact, the bill increases fines "in some cases even for honest mistakes," the expert added.

Proponents of the legislation claim that the harshest penalties are only meant to go after flagrant violations, but the strict language of the bill makes no such distinction.

Still, all this points to the fact that Rangel is insistent upon two separate tax codes - one for him, and one for the rest of us. It's past time that he be sacked as chair of the committee that writes the tax law when Rangel flaunts it openly and capriciously for years on end.

It's also past time that Democrats did something about this situation, but as I've noted, they have no interest in seeing him gone either. They wont do anything to remove Rangel, even though the situation would have resulted in civil penalties far earlier.