Posted on 05/17/2009 9:57:41 PM PDT by reaganaut1
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At his Arizona State University commencement speech last Wednesday, Mr. Obama noted that ASU had refused to grant him an honorary degree, citing his lack of experience, and the controversy this had caused. He then demonstrated ASU's point by remarking, "I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS."
Just a joke about the power of the presidency. Made by Jay Leno it might have been funny. But as told by Mr. Obama, the actual president of the United States, it's hard to see the humor. Surely he's aware that other presidents, most notably Richard Nixon, have abused the power of the Internal Revenue Service to harass their political opponents. But that abuse generated a powerful backlash and with good reason. Should the IRS come to be seen as just a bunch of enforcers for whoever is in political power, the result would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the tax system.
Our income-tax system is based on voluntary compliance and honest reporting by citizens. It couldn't possibly function if most people decided to cheat. Sure, the system is backed up by the dreaded IRS audit. But the threat is, while not exactly hollow, limited: The IRS can't audit more than a tiny fraction of taxpayers. If Americans started acting like Italians, who famously see tax evasion as a national pastime, the system would collapse.
One reason why Americans don't act like Italians is that they see the income-tax system as basically fair in execution.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The "fairness" of the tax system depends on whether a broad base of people pay at least some tax, rather than people defined as "rich" paying the entire cost of a government that provides services to everyone.
I'm sure all the people that have lost their jobs due to your incompetence are laughing right along with you, JERK.
It was a “joke” but really a threat. The WSJ mentiosn Italians? They have dealt with taxation for 2,000 years so they know how taxes are theft. The nice thing about Italy is they do not elect Muslims to run their country.
Get them that Reepublicans in an audit, Rahm. I want my money for all this tax, er, stimulus.
Considering he has threatened others before, he shouldn’t “joke” about this. That’s assuming it was a joke. I don’t trust this fraud.
Classless thug.
Actually Nixon only threatened to audit his detractors, Clinton actually did it to the women who he sexually assaulted.
IIRC, every prominent conservative was audited a number of times during the Clinton years.
Rush, Bill O’Reilly, Joseph Farah, Larry Klayman,
Bill O’Reilly of Fox News was audited three years in a row
Also hit was David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture
the popular website FrontPageMagazine.com. Hillary’s IRS targeted the National Review, the Heritage Foundation and R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr’s American Spectator magazine.
IRS Commissioner Margaret Milner Richardson – a friend of Hillary who had worked on the Clinton campaign – quietly resigned in February 1997. And that was it. The political audits continued under her successor.
“We felt the full wrath of government persecution,” says Farah. “We were darned lucky there was a Wall Street Journal that was willing to allow us to have a little say. Had it not been for the Wall Street Journal, virtually nothing would have been said or published about this in the United States.”
In 1996, Farah received strange phone calls from two journalists, one from the Philadelphia Inquirer and the other from The New York Times. The New York Times reporter was none other than Philip Weiss. Farah recalls, “They would say, “We have this report from the White House, and you’re all over the thing. What do you have to say about it?’ And I would say, ‘Well, I don’t know anything about this report. Can I see it?’ And neither one of them were willing to give me a copy.”
Farah ultimately obtained the report from Mark Levin of the Landmark Legal Foundation. Levin had somehow managed to get a photocopy from the Democratic National Committee. It was, of course, The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, now swollen to 331 pages.
Christopher Lehane wrote and compiled The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce at Mark Fabiani’s behest. Both men worked for Hillary’s Shadow Counsel’s Office. In the October 1998 American Spectator, Daniel E. Troy alleged that “Hillary Clinton … championed the report.”
The worthless bastard is quite nasty to those who dare defy him in public.
Clinton had the sort of sense of humor that illustrated just how much of an insensitive hyprocrite he is. Obama just comes off as a kleptocrat thug.
He shouldn’t make jokes like that.
He really shouldn’t.
But he’s not going to listen to me, and that’s something that makes me smile. :)
he presumes everyone shares his sense of humor
Given he’s chatting up a bunch of mind numbed pot smoking 20 somethings, his humor is so fitting.
Grownups don’t speak such trash.
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