The concept of taxing income is a modern innovation and presupposes several things: a money economy, reasonably accurate accounts, a common understanding of receipts, expenses and profits, and an orderly society with reliable records. For most of the history of civilization, these preconditions did not exist, and taxes were based on other factors. Taxes on wealth, social position, and ownership of the means of production (typically land and slaves) were all common.

A Brief History of Income Tax in the United States

In the Beginning

As a new nation, the United States Constitution becomes the centerpiece of government in this country with each colony adopting it by 1787. One of the provisions of the Constitution allows the federal government to tax the people as it sees fit. Pennsylvania was the first to object to a tax.

Originally, any tax proposal would fund the daily obligations of running a central governing body for the good of the nation. Congress would establish a federal individual income tax in 1861 to raise funds to support the Civil War effort.

They let that federal income tax expire in 1872 and soon came to the reality that funding the government was a top priority and that each citizen must participate in that effort.

The implementation of an initial federal income tax was not lasting as the Supreme Court votes it unconstitutional in 1894.
Congress did adopt and enforce the corporate income tax in 1909 while, at the same time, beginning talks about a Constitutional amendment to establish a federal income tax.

The Sixteenth Amendment

Congress approves and adopts this amendment in 1913 and the annual collection of an individual income tax begins. People with income above $500,000 pay the highest income tax rate of 7%.
In 1914, the Bureau of Internal Revenue presents the first Form 1040 even as members of Congress were vocal about the fact that the form was too complex.

Over the next sixty years, the income tax rate gradually rose to a record high of 94% and drops to 80%, where it settles until the late 1960s. When it began, the income tax in the United States was grossly unfair. Yet, over the years, fixing it only made it grossly unfair, complex, arbitrary and corrupt.

It was under President Howard Taft that the constitutional amendment legalizing a personal income tax and a corporate income tax came into being.
Taft’s proposal was brilliant, ahead of its time and became the law in 1913 as his term was ending.
President Woodrow Wilson and a solid Democratic Congress were prompt to enact a personal income tax.

A Two-Tax Dilemma

Deductions from income, a feature of the first federal personal income tax remains to this day. It reduces taxable income by the amount of the deductions. The corporate income tax, a temporary setup, remains in effect to this day allowing the upper class, who own businesses and optimize their riches, to use the two taxes to their advantage.

The lawyers and accountants, working within the system, were capable of finding creative legal methods to utilize the two systems to the client’s advantage. Congress spent many hours with income tax reform to outlaw or regulate these loophole advantages. While its goal was admirable, they only made the tax code more cumbersome.

One consequence of keeping the corporate and personal income tax separate was public accusation of unfair practices.

The rich are not paying their fair share to support the government and its infamous budget.

Internal Revenue Service

A Brief History of Income Tax in the United States

During the mid-to-late 1950s, the Bureau of Internal Revenue became the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Its Commissioner and Chief Counsel are appointments made by the President and brought to the Senate for confirmation.

Forty years later, the IRS Restructure and Reform Act brought a reorganization meant to resemble an organization in the private sector. The new model was one of customer service grouping customers with similar needs together.
April 15th is Tax Day, although it was not always the deadline for filing the individual income tax.

The IRS Mission
Provide America’s taxpayers top quality service by helping them understand and meet their tax responsibilities and enforce the law with integrity and fairness to all.

This mission statement describes our role and the public’s expectation about how we should perform that role.

• In the United States, the Congress passes tax laws and requires taxpayers to comply.
• The taxpayer’s role is to understand and meet his or her tax obligations.
• The IRS role is to help the large majority of compliant taxpayers with the tax law, while ensuring that the minority who are unwilling to comply pay their fair share.

Revenue and Expense Precipice

The accounting system for the balance of incoming revenue and outgoing expenses suffers abandonment in favor of limitless spending and then borrowing to finance spending. Income tax monies became bailouts for large companies. These companies are so vital to the economy that we could not allow them to fail.

The 10-year tax breaks from President Bush’s stimulus packages are on extension for one or more years. With the advent of a new presidency, income tax reform is more than just a possibility.
The United States’ debt ceiling reaches a new height almost everyday and revenues cannot possibly sustain the growth of this debt.
A new world order is emerging and the history of income tax in the United States is about to acquire a new chapter.

Related articles

• How is America’s Income Tax Burden Weighted? (turbotax.intuit.com)
• TurboTax – What are Income Taxes? (turbotax.intuit.com)
• TurboTax – A Brief History of Income Taxes (turbotax.intuit.com)
• What Are IRS Publications? (turbotax.intuit.com)

Family Safe Online Summary in Numbers:

How to Keep Your Family Safe Online?

• 70% of parents talk to their children about online safety at least 2-3 times a year; 45% talk to their children least once a month.
• 74% of parents are connected to their children’s profiles on social networking sites.
• 71% of parents have taken at least one action to manage their children’s use of the Internet or cell phones. Parents are checking to see where children are searching online, setting time limits, setting parental controls on video sites, and using filters to limit where their children go on the Web.

Kudos to dads:
• 71% of dads (compared to 63% of moms) say they are taking at least one action to help manage their children’s online behavior, including having conversations about respecting the privacy of others and checking their children’s privacy settings.
• Fathers more often check to see what personal information can be easily found about their children by searching their names online.
• 53% of dads surveyed told us they plug their children’s names into a search engine at least 2-3 times per year (compared to 38% of moms), and 33% of dads told us they search at least once a month.

Parents at Google (Eric Schmidt, Vic Gundotra, Jacquelline Fuller, Alan Eustace and Jeff Huber) from Mountain View, California talking about their approach to helping keep their children safe online:

Related articles

• Online Safety: Basics for Parents (webroot.com)
• A Parent’s Guide to Online Safety (webroot.com)

How SOPA would affect you?

SOPA and PIPA wouldn’t stop piracy

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as House Bill 3261 or H.R. 3261, is a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011, by House Judiciary Committee Chair Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) and a bipartisan group of 12 initial co-sponsors. The bill, if made law, would expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.

Presented to the House Judiciary Committee, it builds on the similar PRO-IP Act of 2008 and the corresponding Senate bill, the PROTECT IP Act.

The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.

Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for ten such infringements within six months. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

What is PIPA?

How PROTECT IP Act would affect you?

The PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 or PIPA), also known as Senate Bill 968 or S. 968, is a proposed law with the stated goal of giving the US government and copyright holders additional tools to curb access to “rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods”, especially those registered outside the U.S.

The bill was introduced on May 12, 2011, by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and 11 bipartisan co-sponsors.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that implementation of the bill would cost the federal government $47 million through 2016, to cover enforcement costs and the hiring and training of 22 new special agents and 26 support staff.

The Senate Judiciary Committee passed the bill, but Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) placed a hold on it.

…. for more details visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act

How PIPA would affect you?

Protect IP Act Breaks the Internet

The bill defines infringement as distribution of illegal copies, counterfeit goods, or anti-digital rights management technology. Infringement exists if “facts or circumstances suggest [the site] is used, primarily as a means for engaging in, enabling, or facilitating the activities described.”
The bill says that it does not alter existing substantive trademark or copyright law.

The bill provides for “enhancing enforcement against rogue websites operated and registered overseas” and authorizes the United States Department of Justice to seek a court order in rem against websites dedicated to infringing activities, if through due diligence, an individual owner or operator cannot be located.

The bill requires the Attorney General to serve notice to the defendant.

Once the court issues an order, it could be served on financial transaction providers, Internet advertising services, Internet service providers, and information location tools to require them to stop financial transactions with the rogue site and remove links to it.

The term “information location tool” is borrowed from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and is understood to refer to search engines but could cover other sites that link to content.

The Protect IP Act says that an “information location tool shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible, to remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order”. In addition, it must delete all hyperlinks to the offending “Internet site”.Source:PROTECT IP Act of 2011, S. 968, 112th Cong. § 3(d)(2)(D); “Text of S. 968,” Govtrack.us. May 26, 2011. Retrieved June 23, 2011. Bill Text – Protect IP Act

Nonauthoritative domain name servers would be ordered to take technically feasible and reasonable steps to prevent the domain name from resolving to the IP address of a website that had been found by the court to be “dedicated to infringing activities.”The website could still be reached by its IP address, but links or users that used the website’s domain name would not reach it. Search engines—such as Google—would be ordered to “(i) remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the [court] order; or (ii) not serve a hypertext link to such Internet site.”

What people are saying about about SOPA and PIPA?

Members of Congress are trying to do the right thing by going after pirates and counterfeiters but SOPA and PIPA are the wrong way to do it.

1. SOPA and PIPA would censor the Web

The U.S. http://youtu.be/Qcbg29Q0DhAgovernment could order the blocking of sites using methods similar to those employed by China. Among other things, search engines could be forced to delete entire websites from their search results. That’s why 41 human rights organizations and 110 prominent law professors have expressed grave concerns about the bills.

2. SOPA and PIPA would be job-killers because they would create a new era of uncertainty for American business

Law-abiding U.S. internet companies would have to monitor everything users link to or upload or face the risk of time-consuming litigation. That’s why AOL, EBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga wrote a letter to Congress saying these bills “pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job-creation.” It’s also why 55 of America’s most successful venture capitalists expressed concern that PIPA “would stifle investment in Internet services, throttle innovation, and hurt American competitiveness”. More than 204 entrepreneurs told Congress that PIPA and SOPA would “hurt economic growth and chill innovation”.

3. SOPA and PIPA wouldn’t stop piracy

…
read more: https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/sopa-pipa/

Protect IP Act Breaks the Internet

When I found out Fight for the Future needed help with their campaign against a new bill called PROTECT-IP, I had to take a little time away from Everything is a Remix Part 4 and produce the video above. PROTECT-IP is the latest piece of legislation aiming to chip away at your online rights in the name of protecting the entertainment industry’s business model. It’s legislation that won’t work, will give us yet more lawsuits, and will make the net worse.

Whether you lean right and hate business regulation, lean left and hate censorship, or lean neither way but hate useless legislation, PROTECT-IP is a bill everyone should oppose. I encourage you to head over to Fight For the Future and contact congress.

More here: http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa

So, it is up to you to decide support it or not.

Call your Senators today.

The Internet is a thriving ecosystem that powers our economy and our society. PIPA and SOPA threaten the web.

Join Our Censorship Protest!

Related articles

• DoctorSolve Thanks Customers But Encourages Vigilance After SOPA/PIPA Defeat (prweb.com)
• Thanks to Customers, SOPA Defeated but Online Pharmacies Canada Remains Vigilant (prweb.com)

Tips to Protect Online Identity by using Strong password.

Big company spent millions of dollars to keep customer date secure
At a same time we as customers or/and users sometimes ignore warnings and suggestions just to make passwords easy to remember.

Tips to Protect Online Identity by using Strong password

We sometimes keep same password all over the social media, or online banking accounts for the same reason.  Then some of us wander how it possible that someone break and still personal data that quick and from so many accounts.

The goal is to get users to choose better passwords. The problem is that as creative as humans are, we are way too predictable.  Try to make a list of totally random words, inevitably some sort of pattern will emerge in your list.  That is the easiest and exactly what hackers use sometimes to break the password in the first place. Selecting good passwords requires education.

Passwords provide the first line of defense against unauthorized access to your computer. The stronger your password, the more protected your computer will be from hackers and malicious software.

What is the password?

A password is a secret word or string of characters that is used for authentication, to prove identity or gain access to a resource (example: an access code is a type of password).

Despite the name, there is no need for passwords to be actual words; indeed passwords which are not actual words may be harder to guess, a desirable property. Some passwords are formed from multiple words and may more accurately be called a passphrase. The term passcode is sometimes used when the secret information is purely numeric, such as the personal identification number (PIN) commonly used for ATM access. Passwords are generally short enough to be easily memorized and typed. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password)

Let’s see what some of the biggest company in the market recommend protecting your personal data.

Protecting Online Identity. How to Create Strong Passwords?

How to create strong passwords?

A strong password is an important protection to help you have safer online transactions.

Ways to create a long, complex password:

• Length. Make your passwords long with eight or more characters.
• Complexity. Include letters, punctuation, symbols, and numbers. Use the entire keyboard, not just the letters and characters you use or see most often. The greater the variety of characters in your password, the better. However, password hacking software automatically checks for common letter-to-symbol conversions, such as changing “and” to “&” or “to” to “2.”
• Variation. To keep strong passwords effective, change them often. Set an automatic reminder for yourself to change your passwords on your email, banking, and credit card websites about every three months.
• Variety. Don’t use the same password for everything. Cybercriminals steal passwords on websites that have very little security, and then they use that same password and user name in more secure environments, such as banking websites.

Some or all above might help protect your online transactions.

Suggestions that might help you remember it easily:

Avoid common password pitfalls

Cyber criminals use sophisticated tools that can rapidly decipher passwords.

Avoid creating passwords that use:

• Dictionary words in any language.
• Words spelled backwards, common misspellings, and abbreviations.
• Sequences or repeated characters. Examples: 12345678, 222222, abcdefg, or adjacent letters on your keyboard (qwerty).
• Personal information. Your name, birthday, driver’s license, passport number, or similar information.

Tips for creating a strong password from Microsoft.
(http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Tips-for-creating-a-strong-password)

You should make sure you have strong passwords for all accounts on your computer. If you’re using a corporate network, your network administrator might require you to use a strong password.

What makes a password strong (or weak)?

A strong password:

• Is at least eight characters long.
• Does not contain your user name, real name, or company name.
• Does not contain a complete word.
• Is significantly different from previous passwords.
• Contains characters from each of the following four categories:

A password might meet all the criteria above and still be a weak password.

How to choose a strong password – simple tips for better security

Password best practices, created by NASA:

It should contain at least eight characters

It should contain a mix of four different types of characters – upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters such as !@#$%^&*,;” If there is only one letter or special character, it should not be either the first or last character in the password.

It should not be a name, a slang word, or any word in the dictionary. It should not include any part of your name or your e-mail address.

Following that advice, of course, means you’ll create a password that will be impossible, unless you try a trick credited to security guru Bruce Schneir: Turn a sentence into a password.

For example, “Now I lay me down to sleep” might become nilmDOWN2s, a 10-character password that won’t be found in any dictionary.

Can’t remember that password?

Schneir says it’s OK to write it down and put it in your wallet, or better yet keep a hint in your wallet.

Just don’t also include a list of the sites and services that password works with.

Try to use a different password on every service, but if you can’t do that, at least develop a set of passwords that you use at different sites.

Password tips from Google.

(https://accounts.google.com/PasswordHelp)

Tips for creating a secure password:

• Include punctuation marks and/or numbers.
• Mix capital and lowercase letters.
• Include similar looking substitutions, such as the number zero for the letter ‘O’ or ‘$’ for the letter ‘S’.
• Create a unique acronym.
• Include phonetic replacements, such as ‘Luv 2 Laf’ for ‘Love to Laugh’.

Things to avoid:

• Don’t reuse passwords for multiple important accounts, such as Gmail and online banking.
• Don’t use a password that is listed as an example of how to pick a good password.
• Don’t use a password that contains personal information (name, birth date, etc.)
• Don’t use words or acronyms that can be found in a dictionary.
• Don’t use keyboard patterns (asdf) or sequential numbers (1234).
• Don’t make your password all numbers, uppercase letters or lowercase letters.
• Don’t use repeating characters (aa11).

Tips for keeping your password secure:

• Never tell your password to anyone (this includes significant others, roommates, parrots, etc.).
• Never write your password down.
• Never send your password by email.
• Periodically test your current password and change it to a new one.

As you see some of the rules and tips repeat and this make sense.  If it harder to guess it harder to break it.

Complex passwords combining letters and numbers, such as passw0rd (with the “o” replaced by a zero), abc123 or/and Hello2U! meets complexity rule but very easy to guess and therefore unsecure.  H3ll0 2 U! is a stronger alternative because it replaces some of the letters in the complete word with numbers and also includes spaces.

Professional Networking Sites, Social Media Sites and Social Bookmarking Sites

“Worst Passwords” of 2011 Revealed 30 Most popular week passwords:

1. password

2. 123456

3.12345678

4. qwerty

5. abc123

6. monkey

7. 1234567

8. letmein

9. trustno1

10. dragon

11. baseball

12. 111111

13. iloveyou

14. master

15. sunshine

16. ashley

17. bailey

18. passw0rd

19. shadow

20. 123123

21. 654321

22. superman

23. qazwsx

24. michael

25. football

26. iloveyou

27. princess

28. rockyou

29. abc123

30. and of course all time favorite bad word and its variations ex: f***you (sorry but it is very common and not secure)

…

References and Related reading:

How do I recover my Joomla admin password? Reset Joomla Administrator Password

Suggested by Microsoft:  6 rules for safer financial transactions online.

How to test password?  Test the strength of your passwords

Password Analysis Military Password Analysis

American Express:  Strong Credit, Weak Passwords

How to protect your Identities: Top 5 Ways People Get Their Identities Stolen

What does password mean? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password)

Ten Windows Password Myths

Related articles

• How Do I Create a Strong Password? (webroot.com)
• Password Protection: Creating Secure Passwords for a Safer Online Experience (ally.com)
• How to Protect Your Financial Identity Online (ally.com)
• How Can I Protect Myself from Identity Theft Online? (webroot.com)