Free Republic

Tucked within the Democrats $3.5 trillion tax-and-spend plan is the largest expansion of the Internal Revenue Service in history. If the Left prevails, the agency will hire 87,000 new agents, more than double its current workforce, and receive $80 billion in new funding to audit and harass taxpayers including American families and small businesses. The left claims that additional IRS funding would help close the so-called “tax gap” by making wealthy people pay the taxes they allegedly don’t pay. In reality, the wealthy and large corporations already have armies of lawyers and accountants that ensure they legally take advantage of...

Upon hearing that former President Barack Obama recently boasted that he had a scandal-free administration, my first thought after regaining my faculties was: How can I possibly cram all the evidence refuting this in a little bitty column? Then I read that what he actually said was, "We didn't have a scandal that embarrassed us." At first blush, that sounds better, right? Because I assume he doesn't mean he's incapable of being embarrassed. After a little more thought, though, it occurred to me that this construction just highlights the real reason he has apparently deluded himself into thinking he served...

Another day and another complaint by the IRS that they won’t have enough money to administer the tax code properly. Boohoo. Maybe they should have thought about that before Lois Lerner came before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and decided to invoke her right not to incriminate herself. Repeatedly. Its one thing when a Mafia don does that. But come on: The IRS? Or perhaps they should have thought of it before they lost the emails that they said died because of a hard drive failure. This time the crier for the IRS is CNNMoney, which complains that...

I was intrigued by an article posted by Dan Mitchell from Cato here over the weekend that in part said that how Republicans treat reform at the Joint Committee on Taxation (and the CBO) as a kind of an IQ test. As Mitchell notes “when JCT does revenue estimates, the bureaucrats grease the skids for anti-growth tax policy by overstating revenue losses from lower tax rates and overstating revenue gains from higher tax rates.”And indeed they do. In fact, both the CBO and the JTC act as giant Ways and Means committees for higher taxes and bigger government. But that’s...

I was intrigued by an article posted by Dan Mitchell from Cato here over the weekend that in part said that how Republicans treat reform at the Joint Committee on Taxation (and the CBO) as a kind of an IQ test. As Mitchell notes “when JCT does revenue estimates, the bureaucrats grease the skids for anti-growth tax policy by overstating revenue losses from lower tax rates and overstating revenue gains from higher tax rates.”And indeed they do. In fact, both the CBO and the JTC act as giant Ways and Means committees for higher taxes and bigger government. But that’s...

You might think that with the scandal surrounding the IRS and the resulting budget cuts that have hampered their activities that the organization might become more aware of its procedures and adjust them to appear more customer friendly. If what happened this past week is any indication then they are still living somewhere in the ozone. Most Americans think of April 15th as the final day for filing their personal income tax return. That is so for most people, but a large part of the population files an extension that allows them to file their return by October 15th as...

At 74,000 pages, the IRS code is a mind-boggling ode to lobbying, pork-barrel spending and graft. These are the only good things that I can say about the IRS. Ode may be too friendly a word, however. Let’s instead call it an incantation for our country. Because the code holds a country in thrall like the winged monkeys in Dorothy’s Oz were held. And until the witch is dead, we monkeys must do her bidding. Politicians, economists and ordinary citizens can’t follow the tax code, which has tripped up cabinet nominees, majority leaders and others who ought to know...

At 74,000 pages, the IRS code is a mind-boggling ode to lobbying, pork-barrel spending and graft. These are the only good things that I can say about the IRS. Ode may be too friendly a word, however. Let’s instead call it an incantation for our country. Because the code holds a country in thrall like the winged monkeys in Dorothy’s Oz were held. And until the witch is dead, we monkeys must do her bidding. Politicians, economists and ordinary citizens can’t follow the tax code, which has tripped up cabinet nominees, majority leaders and others who ought to know...

The summer of 2014 will go down in history as the season when America fell apart. Let’s take a tour of the disasters. Germany in 2008 enthusiastically hosted candidate Barack Obama for his so-called Victory Column speech. Now, Germans suddenly sound as if they are near-enemies of the U.S. Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly was furious that her cell phone was tapped by American intelligence agents. She just kicked the top CIA official out of Germany, further enraged that the U.S. had recruited at least one German official to provide intelligence on the German government. Polls show that Germans find Vladimir...

  In the latest of a string of "coincidental" events involving skullduggery from the left, the IRS has reported that Lois Lerner's computer crashed back in 2011, the drive itself subsequently life-cycled out and thus causing the "permanent loss" of potentially incriminating emails involving her (and other government cooperatives) in the bureaus alleged intimidation and harassment of individual citizens. This has rightfully outraged a vast majority of the American public, with 76% of Americans agreeing that a Special Prosecutor should be appointed to investigate the situation according to a Quinnipiac poll conducted before news of the missing emails broke. The...

---snip--- Further, emails are universally backed up in some other medium, often electronic tape, for long-term storage. Thus, even if an email server is destroyed, or all emails are deleted from a server after a specified length of time, the emails are still recoverable from back-up storage media. The DOJ lawyer whom Scott quoted this morning was correct about this. The IRS, like virtually every other business or government entity, uses such a system. The Agency’s manual on “Managing Electronic Records” has been made public; you can read it here. A few relevant excerpts:

Hello. I am member of Mozilla's development team and these postings here lately force me now to react. Let me first clarify one thing. I do that because someone has finally to speak out some things... Things which should clearly brought out to the public.... First, the incident about our short time CEO Eich..... many of us do NOT agree with what has happened. There has been a massive amount of pressure inside and outside of Mozilla which brought him to resign from his post. About the ads in the new tab page... Our reasoning for this is to make...

Jim Jordan wants to know what the White House knew about the IRS targeting scandal, and when they knew it-- as if we didn’t know. The conservative Representative from Ohio has penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the activities of the IRS and, more specifically Lois Lerner, the former IRS official who is at the center of the controversy. Jordan essentially is saying where there is smoke there is fire, and oh yeah, where there’s fire, there is fire too. “Emails and testimony that we confronted Ms. Lerner with showed her...

As the Tea Party celebrates its five-year anniversary, many commentators are asking whether the grassroots anti–Big Government movement is still relevant. In some ways, this seems a silly question. The Tea Party has been enormously successful in changing the terms of the national debate on issues such as debt and spending. And, while its favored candidates have suffered some high-profile defeats, it has also won important victories. The Republican midterm sweep of 2010 would not have been possible without its energy and enthusiasm. Yet it’s also true that the Tea Party’s clout is waning. According to the most recent Gallup...

But There’s Not a Smidgen of Corruption. Today Former IRS official took the Fifth Amendment again during a House hearing on the IRS targeting scandal.

As an enthusiastic fan of Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), I am sorry that an ongoing project prevented me from participating in PJM’s Cruz symposium. But this relevant news just came over the transom, so I thought I’d at least pass it along. As I’ve previously noted, Obama administration officials have been working the codify in federal law the IRS harassment and obstruction of conservative organizations that President Obama and Attorney General Holder claimed to find “intolerable,” “inexcusable,” “outrageous,” and “unacceptable” back when the scandal first came to light. As usual, it has been Senator Cruz leading the charge to try...

Obama Aides: He Didn't Know Extent of NSA Surveillance "I think it was disturbing to most people, and I think he found it disturbing.” President Obama doesn’t merely claim ignorance of the IRS’ targeting of politically conservative groups or the Department of Justice’s targeting of journalists: according to The New York Times, Obama was also ignorant of the extent of NSA surveillance. According to the Times, “aides said Mr. Obama was surprised to learn after leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, just how far the surveillance had gone.” David Plouffe, Obama’s advisor, said, “Things seem...

Imagine that you run a grocery store with your daughter, a store you have owned for thirty years. Imagine that just last year the IRS found no violations in an audit of your store. Now imagine that, despite continuing your sound business practices, you awake one day to find the IRS has seized your entire bank account. The IRS has used a technique called civil forfeiture against you and you find your Constitutional guarantee of innocence until proven guilty has been completely reversed. That is the nightmare that Terry Dehko and his daughter Sandy Thomas found themselves in on January...

Well they finished that pretty quickly. It took the White House practically no time to hunt down the offender/terrorist/extortionist/arsonist inside the Obama Compound who was outing the administration via snarky tweets. “President Obama's staff has unmasked and fired a national security official who tweeted critical comments under a pseudonym,” says USAToday. “Jofi Joseph, tweeting under the handle @natsecwonk, once wrote: ‘I'm a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me.’ Other Obama staff members and officials — including Secretary of State John Kerry and former National Security adviser Tom Donilon...

Most liberals who rail against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United case probably don’t realize they’re useful pawns for a sinister cause. These earnest chanters of slogans and sporters of bumper stickers say they want to overturn the case or amend the Constitution to “get big money out of politics.” They think they’re just fighting for clean government. In reality, they’re cheerleading for the Obama administration to wage a broader battle in the long war to intimidate and silence conservative America. Like a horror movie’s teasing scenes, where campers laugh, oblivious to the monster in the shadows, this report is more...