It has incompetent employees.Posted on 05/28/2013 6:14:19 AM PDT by Kaslin
Did President Obama and his team of Chicago cronies deliberately target the Tea Party in hopes of thwarting free speech and political participation?
Was this part of a campaign to win the 2012 election by suppressing Republican votes?
Perhaps, but I’ve warned that it’s never a good idea to assume top-down conspiracies when corruption, incompetence, politics, ideology, greed, and self-interest are better explanations for what happens in Washington.
Writing for the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney has a much more sober and realistic explanation of what happened at the IRS.
If you take a group of Democrats who are also unionized government employees, and put them in charge of policing political speech, it doesn’t matter how professional and well-intentioned they are. The result will be much like the debacle in the Cincinnati office of the IRS. …there’s no reason to even posit evil intent by the IRS officials who formulated, approved or executed the inappropriate guidelines for picking groups to scrutinize most closely. …The public servants figuring out which groups qualified for 501(c)4 “social welfare” non-profit status were mostly Democrats surrounded by mostly Democrats. …In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President Obama or liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown. This is an environment where even those trying to be fair could develop a disproportionate distrust of the Tea Party. One IRS worker — a member of NTEU and contributor to its PAC, which gives 96 percent of its money to Democratic candidates — explained it this way: “The reason NTEU mostly supports Democratic candidates for office is because Democratic candidates are mostly more supportive of civil servants/government employees.”
Tim concludes with a wise observation.
As long as we have a civil service workforce that leans Left, and as long as we have an income tax system that requires the IRS to police political speech, conservative groups can always expect special IRS scrutiny.
And my colleague Doug Bandow, in an article for the American Spectator, adds his sage analysis.
The real issue is the expansive, expensive bureaucratic state and its inherent threat to any system of limited government, rule of law, and individual liberty. …the broader the government’s authority, the greater its need for revenue, the wider its enforcement power, the more expansive the bureaucracy’s discretion, the increasingly important the battle for political control, and the more bitter the partisan fight, the more likely government officials will abuse their positions, violate rules, laws, and Constitution, and sacrifice people’s liberties. The blame falls squarely on Congress, not the IRS.
I actually think he is letting the IRS off the hook too easily.
It has incompetent employees.But Doug’s overall point obviously is true.
…the denizens of Capitol Hill also have created a tax code marked by outrageous complexity, special interest electioneering, and systematic social engineering. Legislators have intentionally created avenues for tax avoidance to win votes, and then complained about widespread tax avoidance to win votes.
So what’s the answer?
The most obvious response to the scandal — beyond punishing anyone who violated the law — is tax reform. Implement a flat tax and you’d still have an IRS, but the income tax would be less complex, there would be fewer “preferences” for the agency to police, and rates would be lower, leaving taxpayers with less incentive for aggressive tax avoidance. …Failing to address the broader underlying factors also would merely set the stage for a repeat performance in some form a few years hence. …More fundamentally, government, and especially the national government, should do less. Efficient social engineering may be slightly better than inefficient social engineering, but no social engineering would be far better.
Amen. Let’s rip out the internal revenue code and replace it with a simple and fair flat tax.
But here’s the challenge. We know the solution, but it will be almost impossible to implement good policy unless we figure out some way to restrain the spending side of the fiscal ledger.
At the risk of over-simplifying, we will never get tax reform unless we figure out how to implement entitlement reform.
Don't folks check these things first?
A better solution would be to repeal the 16th amendment.
The real answer is because they COULD,
and because there is no justice or accountability.
You’re not going to fix the problem anymore. Wishful thinking.
Prosecuting the criminals who did this (to the full extent of the law-including incarceration) would be giant step in the right direction.
I was at a graduation party Sunday and ended up talking with another friend of the family. I see him periodically since we’ve known this family for decades and go to some of their parties. We got to talking about music since my son is a musician and has played with Pete Seeger’s grandson for example. This friend of a friend was stunned that I was not totally green/anti-war. I mean, we were sitting in the middle of an upper class mid-western suburb in Kansas! How could I be a conservative? It took him a while to grasp that someone at that party was a conservative Catholic. So I think that these people in the IRS assume that everyone is like them. I’m sure that they don’t have any friends and maybe not even any relatives who are different than they are. They totally believe that Tea Partiers are evil and a danger to the country and that everything they do is hard right political speech.
We had an interesting conversation. Heads up, the latest (at least in Kansas) narrative is that the progressives are “post-tribel” and that Republicans are tribal/Calvinists who are still fighting the Civil War.
Having a flat income tax will not resolve the issue as there will still be the need to tax exemptions for organizations and so still the possibility of corruption.
Contributions to 501(c4) organizations are not deductible. The reason an exemption for the organization is necessary is that taxes have been paid by the contributors on the money already and it would be very unfair for someone collecting contributions for a common use, even a political purpose, from have to pay taxes again on the contribution as if it were income. In fact it would pretty much make it impossible to create organizations for common purpose because of the tax hell imposed on the individuals involved.
Only replacing the income tax will fix it because only then you will be free to give and get money to and from anyone without any restriction.
We might be reminded of President George Washington's "Farewell Address" warnings, as excerpted below:
"This Government, the offspring of our own choice, uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its powers, uniting security with energy, and containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has a just claim to your confidence and your support. Respect for its authority, compliance with its laws, acquiescence in its measures, are duties enjoined by the fundamental maxims of true liberty. The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the constitution which at any time exists till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government."All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction; to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community, and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans, digested by common councils and modified by mutual interests.
"However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
"Toward the preservation of your Government and the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite not only that you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts. One method of assault may be to effect in the forms of the Constitution alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown." - (Excerpt - Geo. Washington's Farewell Address)
The IRS was allowed to attack the Tea party because both the Democrats AND Republican can not abide grassroots movements. This is why both the Tea party and Occupy Wall Street had to be marginalized by planting and highlighting whack jobs.
If you could strip away the 5% hard core commies and their shock troops the bongo bangers and flag $#itters, from the OWS crowd, and the “Every Sperm is Sacred, all must kneel before God” element of the Tea Party, we could arrive at a common movement that would energize perhaps 70% of the population, and restore representative government at the expense of the current duopoly which clings to power by printing money and building a police state.
Just MHO
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Fix the problem? Line up the former and current Secretary of the Treasury and the head of the IRS on a public stage and neuter them in front of the cheering crowd. Let the second level know that they are next unless they resign immediately.
FUBO, FAD, down with the democrat party
Some of the highest-level perps are not men.
Your suggestion won't work.
Related trivia...
Ask an erudite acquaintance what the Azted word for avocado, ahuacatl really means.
Easiest fix:
1) Remove, gut and burn the 16th Amend. (& 17th Amend.)
2) Outlaw 3rd party payer (IE: SS/FICA, Health Insurance, etc.)
3) Bill the States, based on population, for the debt
4) Fed to State to Biz to Buyer
That's my New Federalism - let Obama beg Scott Walker and Rick Perry for the rest of his money, rather than the other way around. :)
My only quibble is that the exact quote wasn't used. Parsing words (in the worst duplicitous way) is the Clinton tour de force!
"What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again." – The Obammer isn't the only doofus with unintended "hoof-in-mouth disease..."
Not all men, so! A public venue is still the best way to get the word across. OK, OK, instead of that, for the women involved, the block and axe.
New Federalism... Interesting
OK; take away their credit cards and hairdressers and bar them from ever getting another.
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