Don't forget the DOJ
Posted on 05/20/2013 11:18:36 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
President Obama believes in the public sector. He thinks it should be made ever more expansive and entrusted with ever more complicated tasks. Its unions should be powerful. It should be hailed by all the great and good, and attract the nation’s best and brightest.
This is how the president portrays the public sector at a level of glittering generality. Then there’s the reality of all that government that is too big for him to monitor, the workings of which he learns about only when he reads the newspapers and watches TV. There’s the incompetence, the dishonesty and the self-justification. There’s the spectacular unfairness and the obtuseness, all exemplified in the Internal Revenue Service scandal.
The innocent explanation of the affair is that the IRS’s Cincinnati office was so poorly run it couldn’t manage to stop itself from discriminating against tea-party organizations applying for 501(c)(4) status — for years.
As it happens, the recent reporting on the Cincinnati office portrays a dreary backwater with all the élan of your local Department of Motor Vehicles. But not discriminating against organizations shouldn’t be overly difficult. It doesn’t require any technical expertise, just a modicum of fairness. The IRS couldn’t summon it.
According to Lois Lerner, the director of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt organizations division and the poster-bureaucrat for the scandal, there was a flood of applications for 501(c)(4)s that necessitated the “centralization” of the cases. The targeting of the tea-party groups wasn’t targeting at all, but an efficiency measure gone awry.
“They did it because they were working together,” Lerner says. “This was a streamlined way for them to refer to the cases.”
In fact, The Washington Post notes that the number of applications barely ticked up from 2009 to 2010....
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
I am very critical of a lot of the things the government in Hong Kong does. But they get the tax code right here.
Low rates (from 13% to 17%) with very few deductions but a fairly high minimum threshold. There are no employee deductions instead you write a check at the beginning of each tax year based on estimated income and any excess is refunded.
We actually pay more than we would in the US but the lack of intimidation, the clarity and simplicity of the law and the ease of obeying the law means we the taxes are less onerous. We don’t have to keep lots of receipts. There is no Capital Gains.
Excellent conclusion:President Obama has a dream of what the public sector represents. In his rhetoric, it is a shining expression of our togetherness. He might want to acquaint himself with the actual government over which he presides from such an Olympian distance, and adjust his enthusiasm accordingly.Or as “useful idiot" Russians used to say as they were given the bureaucratic runaround, “If only Comrade Stalin knew what was going on here.”
. . . but in fact he did know - because that was his system.
Well put.
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