Posted on 06/26/2014 6:47:49 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Heres a headline from Forbes that caught my eye:
You cant blame em. Workers in the private sector are also very concerned about getting dumped into Obamacares subsidized insurance exchanges as, one by one, employers are forced to give up providing health insurance for their employees.
Its possible that, like me, you are entertaining an un-Christian feeling of Schadenfreude about this happening to a large, widely loathed, and deeply politicized government agency.
But thing thing that should really arrest your attention about this headline, and the story it introduces, is contained in the first three words: IRS Employees Union.
The governments tax collecting agency is unionized? Think about that for a moment.
The union in question is the National Treasury Employees Union [2]. According to the web site of the NTEU [3], the mission of the union is to organize federal employees to work together to ensure that every federal employee is treated with dignity and respect. Thats a tall order, in part because there are so very many federal employees. The NTEUs web site includes a nifty interactive graphic that shows you just how many there are in each state: 279,622 in Texas, for example, 350,544 in California, 165,943 in New York, etc., etc. There are, in short, millions of them.
And what political party do you suppose they support? In the 2012 election cycle, 94% of its PAC contributions went to Democrats [4], 4% to Republicans. Thats only one year, of course. How about 2010? That year 98% of its contributions went to Democrats, 2% went to Republicans. 2008 was a bit more balanced: that year only 96% went to Democrats. As Andrew Stiles pointed out at National Review, the NTEU is a powerful, deeply partisan union whose boss has publicly disparaged the Tea Party and criticized the Republican party for having ties to it.
As the example of Lois Ill-take-the-Fifth [5] Lerner suggests, employees at the IRS support Democrat candidates by a huge margin. The agencys employees are heavily engaged in politics and lean considerably to the left, Stiles reports. Records show that IRS employees in 2012 donated more than twice as much to the Obama as to the Romney campaign. Nearly two-thirds of all employee contributions over the last three elections cycles have gone to Democrats.
There are some critics who, faced with the overwhelming evidence of partisan corruption at the IRS, advocate abolishing the agency. That is a happy thought, but probably utopian. A possibly more achievable goal would be to deunionize the IRS, a first step in a process that should aim at deunionizing all federal agencies. Public-sector unions, as Daniel DiSalvo has pointed out in Government Unions and the Bankrupting of America [6], are a prescription for political corruption. The unions help elect politicians who in turn help the unions. The result is corruption and fiscal incontinence.
We may take government unions for granted as an inconvenient fact of life. But there is nothing inevitable about them. As DiSalvo notes:
That powerful government unions exist at all is a striking political development. The prevailing attitude among policymakers across the political spectrum was downright hostile well into the 1950s. President Franklin Roosevelt, one of labors best friends, wrote in 1937 that: Meticulous attention should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government. . . . The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. Other champions of organized labor thought the same way. The first president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, believed it was impossible to bargain collectively with the government. Their reasoning was that the elected representatives of the people would be forced to share their governing authority with unelected union officials whom voters could not hold accountable.
As the public watches IRS officials, from Commissioner John Koskinen on down, prevaricate, stonewall, and lie [7] to Congress, a groundswell of outrage and disgust is rising. Doubtless the IRS, its union, and the Obama administration hopes that if it can only string out the hearings long enough, the outrage will falter and the disgust will die down. That is certainly possible.
Another possibility is that the outrage and disgust will continue to grow and an impatient public will demand reform. Deunionizing the IRS would be a good place to start.
So let's say it --
ABOLISH THE IRS.
REPEAL THE 16th AMENDMENT.
IMAGINE: The IRS on strike.
In the least, something needs to be done to ensure government employees take the same “medicine” us commoners take. The ideal would be to outlaw ALL public employee unions. Any of these is an insurmountable task.
Remember the rules for radicals.
Isolate the target.
Polarize it.
Ridicule it.
Demonize it.
RE: IMAGINE: The IRS on strike.
Now THAT I would support. Especially near April.
May it be so...
Terri Land is beating up on Gary Peters over his silence about the IRS targeting and noting that he’s taken almost $9,000 from the National Treasury Employees Union.
Unions in general serve mainly to protect the incompetent, whether it’s teachers, nurses, cops or IRS agents. It’s nearly impossible to fire a union employee, and they know it, so it erodes the work ethic.
All public employee unions should be outlawed.
Indeed.
Repeal the 16th amendment and fund the necessary functions of government with a tax that everyone pays at the same marginal rate.
Even if the 16th Amendment is repealed, we will need a revenue collection agency.
Also repealing the 16th Amendment will not change anything. The courts will simply reinterpret the constitution to allow the Federal Government under the tax clause and the commerce clause to do any damn thing it wants to do in regard to collection of revenue.
The 16th Amendment was passed during a period in which the courts were actually interpreting the Constitution in accordance with the original intent.
Today, not so much.
REPEAL THE 16th AMENDMENT.
Unaccountable bureaucrats (socialists) at best, weaponized GE$TAPO for socialists at worst.
BIG GOVERNMENT IS CRONY SOCIALISM
It largely is the solution, there will be no taming of the IRS. There is no one who wishes to tame the IRS who is in a postion to do so.
They like it just fine as it is, an agency that intimidates at the end of a barrel of a rifle pointed at the subjugated serfs.
Rescind EO 10988!
Then, limit federal bureaucrats to a 10 year limit of service.
ping
The agency tasked to enforce Obamacare wants to be immune from it.
Americas Bureaucracies have become the primary place of employment for Democrats. I bet you that over 90% of workers in these Bureaucracies are democrat underlings and ALL the managerial staff are democrats... the question is, how to fix this problem?
My Solution:
1. Drastically reduce funding for all bureaucracies.
2. De-Unionize all bureaucracies.
3. De-Institutionalize bureaucracies by use of a type of Affirmative Action for hiring which says that no more than a certain percentage of employees can come from a certain political persuasion, regardless of race, religion or creed.
4. De-Link all bureaucracies from politics and political pressure by making them totally open to the public via an information clearing house. All communications within and between bureaucracies are to be made public, unless determined to be of national security interests. How, simple; each bureaucracy shall include in its webpage a tab for realtime and archived communications. No more filing for freedom of information from a federal court.
Abolish, Amen.
And this criminal organization is in charge of administering CommieCare?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.