Audited for Being Too Poor

Zandar brings us yet another dispath from the front lines of the War Against the Working Poor.

It all started a year ago, when Porcaro, a 32-year-old mom with two boys, was summoned to the Seattle office of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). She had been flagged for an audit. She couldn't believe it. She made $18,992 the previous year cutting hair at Supercuts. A few hundred of that she spent to have her taxes prepared by H&R Block.

"I asked the IRS lady straight upfront — 'I don't have anything, why are you auditing me?' " Porcaro recalled. "I said, 'Why me, when I don't own a home, a business, a car?' "

The answer stunned both Porcaro and the private tax specialist her dad had gotten to help her.

"They showed us a spreadsheet of incomes in the Seattle area," says Dante Driver, an accountant at Seattle's G.A. Michael and Co. "The auditor said, 'You made eighteen thousand, and our data show a family of three needs at least thirty-six thousand to get by in Seattle."

"They thought she must have unreported income. That she was hiding something. Basically they were auditing her for not making enough money."

It gets worse. Read the whole thing.

Zandar concludes:

Too poor. It'll only get worse as the middle class continues to vanish in this country. We have no problem with giving a trillion dollars to financial institutions that gambled and lost. It's unfair to limit CEO pay when they get government money, and in return the system gets rigged even more towards the banks so they can "pay the taxpayer back" while keeping the hundreds of billions under the table.

But we will take a year's pay out of a single mother's hide, and hound her family. We will declare her children unable to count as dependents for tax reasons, so that this year she can't use that nasty welfare tax cheat. But we'll give the banks hundreds of billions with no strings attached.

Our priorities as a country are so screwed up, we deserve what happens to us when it comes crumbling down.

I'm not that pessimistic, but I'll add this:

At the core of this is the mindset that a single mother earning $19,000 has done something wrong but a CEO who grabs a billion-dollar bonus after driving his company into bankruptcy has not.

The last time that mindset ruled the nation was just 80 years ago, when Wall Street speculators were the nation's heroes. All it took to change that belief was the collapse of the world economy and 25 percent unemployment.

It is within living memory that rich people, the "malefactors of great wealth," were the enemy, despised by "real Americans" for the crimes and exploitation assumed to be the source of their money. They don't have to be the enemy, if we can just stop equating pecuniary success with moral superiority.

We're never going to save the middle class until we stop demonizing people who work hard and pay taxes but need a little help.