Because, y'know, why not?
(Note this is an actual real live picture of an actual real live tax preparer service in my neighborhood.. nothing photoshopped, nothing faked!)
So it appears in the battle of whether or not Matt Drudge is a total looney bird for claiming that he paid this Obamacare #LibertyTax already - or not - in typical right-wing fashion Drudge and Brietbart.com have Declared Victory because - they do that.
http://www.breitbart.com/...
“Dude, there's no penalty until next yr,” Sahil Kapur of the leftwing Talking Points Memo tweeted.
Kapur’s colleague at TPM Dylan Scott wrote a full story with a headline alleging Drudge was “probably lying.”
“Americans don't pay a penalty for not having health insurance until they file their 2014 taxes -- in 2015,” Scott wrote. “So either Drudge is lying or he paid a huge penalty a year earlier than he needed to.”
“Penalty isn't collected until 2015,” Sam Baker of National Journal tweeted at Drudge.
The Huffington Post’s Jeffrey Young wrote a full article in which he described Drudge’s tweet as “weird” and a “little head-scratching” because the Obamacare tax does not kick in until the 2014 tax year.
Drudge indicated in his followup tweets that since he is self-employed as the proprietor of The Drudge Report, he files as a small business. According to the IRS’s website for self-employed individuals, they are required to pay taxes quarterly.
“As a self-employed individual, generally you are required to file an annual return and pay estimated tax quarterly,” the IRS website reads.
So, when they file and pay those 2014 first quarter taxes, such individuals have to pay the Obamacare Individual Mandate tax if they opted to not have health insurance—like Drudge just did.
Additionally, the IRS form (1040-ES) for estimating quarterly taxes specifically recommends adding the mandate penalty to line 12 for "other taxes" -- to pay before the first quarterly deadline of April 15.
“It is true that thousands of small businesses will be forced to pay Obamacare taxes quarterly in 2014,” a Senate Budget Committee aide told Breitbart News on Friday afternoon.
Oh well, i guess that settles it then. The ObamaCare Fanbase are just a bunch of dunces who don't know what's in the law and just don't understand how much it truly truly
hurts small business. oh. the. Humanity.
Drudge already had to pay 1/4th of the TAX PENALTY, and man that must be massively painful. I mean, he could have gone out and got himself Health Insurance, or he could have gotten Health Insurance for his company and gained a 50% tax credit for it, but NO-- he choose to take a stand, and not do that. He's gonna pay the Liberty Tax.
Wait, how much was the tax credit for again?
For tax years 2010 through 2013, the maximum credit is 35 percent of premiums paid for small business employers and 25 percent of premiums paid for small tax-exempt employers such as charities.
For tax years beginning in 2014 or later, there will be changes to the credit:
- The maximum credit will increase to 50 percent of premiums paid for small business employers and 35 percent of premiums paid for small tax-exempt employers.
- To be eligible for the credit, a small employer must pay premiums on behalf of employees enrolled in a qualified health plan offered through a Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) Marketplace.
- The credit will be available to eligible employers for two consecutive taxable years.
Here’s what this means for you. If you pay $50,000 a year toward workers’ health care premiums — and if you qualify for a 15 percent credit, you save... $7,500. If you save $7,500 a year from tax year 2010 through 2013, that’s total savings of $30,000. If, in 2014, you qualify for a slightly larger credit, say 20 percent, your savings go from $7,500 a year to $10,000 a year.
So you mean that if Matt Drudge had chosen to get healthcare for his company, rather than NOT out of SPITE, he would save
Thousands on the cost depending on how many employees he had up to 25.
But instead of doing that, and gaining a half off for himself and his employees at the Drudge Report he choose to Go Rogue and deny coverage to himself and, apparently, all of them as well.
Mon Mar 31, 2014 at 12:07 AM PT: I actuallly didn't mean to publish this when I did because it wasn't complete. I took a look at the 1040-ES and noticed that it doesn't mention anywhere on the form a need to include "medical insurance payments" other than as a claim for tax deductions. As reported by the Talkingpointsmemo the IRS hasn't yet supplied any tax tables for people like Drudge to use in his quarterly estimates for the ACA Tax Penatly. Since the penalty is based on the number of months during the year that one goes without care with a maximum amount of either 1% of your income minus $10,150 or the national average costs of a Bronze Plan (~$3,550), which ever is lower, the most Drudge should have sent is $1,183 for the first quarter. The IRS doesn't require this, it's an option he can partake if he files his taxes quarterly - or else pay the $3k at the end of the year.