Do You Owe The IRS More Than $10,000?

[jmowreader]

8. Penalties and interest can be far higher than back taxes

I've spoken before of my tax-evading former state legislator Phil Hart. This is the guy who wrote a tax-protester book entitled "Constitutional Income: Do You Have Any?" (this book puts forth the debunked tax-protester argument that the folks who wrote the Sixteenth Amendment intended that "income" be what we'd now call "capital gains," hence anyone with no capital gains has no taxable income. This sounds even more stupid than it actually is, but some people seem to like it.), believed his own words over those of the Internal Revenue Code, and stopped paying taxes for quite a few years. (And for extra entertainment, he also went out on the school system's conservancy land, cut down enough trees to build a huge log home without paying anyone for them, and claimed he was allowed to do it because you could do it many years ago. You could also lynch all the horse thieves you could catch many years ago, but now they don't let you do that either.)

Anyway, Phil Hart owes over $500,000 to the IRS. Only $90,000 of that is taxes; the rest is penalties and interest.