Obama's IRS And The Tax Monster We've Created
GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary
By Don Feder
05/28/2013
It’s hard to say what was funnier – congressional testimony by Obama’s I-saw-nothing/I-know- nothing stooges or comments of late-night TV hosts.
Jay Leno: "A lot of critics are comparing President Obama to President Richard Nixon, which is unfair. Nixon’s unemployment rate was only 5%." Another host suggested that the way for the right to defeat ObamaCare was to declare it a conservative foundation and wait for the IRS to take it down.
Last week, we were treated to Theater of the Absurd performances by Acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller and Lois Lerner, formerly in charge of the IRS division that dealt with foundations.
Lerner did a short monologue, telling the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee: "I have not done anything wrong" but "I will not answer any questions or testify today." Taking the Fifth is just what you’d expect from someone who did nothing wrong – like the guys with organized-crime ties. Lerner also did nothing wrong when she ran the Enforcement Office at the Federal Election Commission and went to war with the Christian Coalition.
Miller managed to testify without actually saying anything. He wouldn’t reveal who in the IRS had targeted conservative groups (in an interview, Lerner called it the work of "front line people"). In testimony noteworthy for its evasiveness and mendacity, Miller said the two-year vendetta against the Tea Parties and conservative groups was "a foolish mistake" (like the Bataan Death March?) by "people trying to be more efficient."
In the name of efficiency, the IRS targeted somewhere between 300 and 500 Tea Party and right-leaning applicants for 501-c-3 tax-exempt status. Organizations were singled out for having "Tea Party," "pro-life" and "patriotic" in their name or saying they wanted to "make America a better place to live" – which surely marked them as a threat to national security which warranted extra scrutiny. If only we could get the more dubious Muslim groups in this country to add patriotic, pro-life and Tea Party to their names.
In an effort to operate more effectively, starting in 2010, the IRS took 27 months to rule on tax-exempt status of targeted groups – roughly three times the average. In that two-year period, 63% of Tea Party organizations ended up withdrawing their applications, severely limiting their funding.
Various applicants were asked to provide their membership lists, donor lists, names of volunteers, copies of speeches, minutes of meetings and handouts. Leaders were asked if they’d ever considered running for elective office. At least one pro-life group was asked to have its leaders sign a statement promising to never picket a Planned Parenthood clinic – making the IRS the enforcement arm of the abortion industry – another was asked about the content of their prayers. ("From the wrath of the Tax Man, spare us, ‘O Lord.")
It’s a wonder no one was asked if they’d ever had bad thoughts about the regime in power, or adhered to subversive doctrines found in documents like the U.S. Constitution and the Bible.
The foregoing is all blatantly illegal. The IRS also targeted conservative foundations that had c-3 status with audits and other forms of harassment. In some cases confidential information was leaked to left-wing groups. How’s that for efficiency?
No one knows who drew up the list of several hundred groups singled-out for special treatment, other than unidentified rogue agents in the IRS Cincinnati office (who watch nothing but CNN and read The Huffington Post religiously?).
Equal before the law isn’t equal before the Internal Revenue Service. It took just 9 months for groups with "progress" or "progressive" in their titles (code word for big-government worship) to have their applications approved, against two years for Tea Parties. It took the IRS less than a month to rubber-stamp the application of the Barack H. Obama Foundation and National Shrine.
The scapegoats in the Cincinnati office aren’t about to take the fall. One of them confidentially told The Washington Post: "Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive." Where the directive came from – how high up the rot goes – is anyone’s guess. Even if he or one of his aides never gave a direct order, President Obama set the tone for this extraordinary abuse of power.
Other presidents have used the IRS as their personal black-ops unit. FDR employed the agency to vex and intimidate newspaper publishers who opposed the New Deal. John F. Kennedy gave a speech shortly after the 1960 election decrying "discordant voices of extremism." With finely-tuned political antennae, a few months later, the IRS started something called the Ideological Organizations Audit Project, which tried to suppress such discordant voices of extremism as the Foundation for Economic Education and American Enterprise Institute – desperate and depraved characters, to be sure.
The Nixon White House sent the president’s enemies list to the IRS express delivery, with instructions for the agency to focus on "activities involving ideological, militant, subversive and similar type organizations." Here, leftist groups were in the crosshairs. John Dean explained that the objective was to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political opponents" – of whom the current occupant of the White House has no shortage, including the Tea Parties, right-to-lifers and those who cling to God and guns.
The Clinton administration followed suit, on a more modest scale. Besides the Heritage Foundation and American Spectator magazine, Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones were audited.
Which brings us to Yes We Can – turn the thumbscrews on the opposition. It is an astounding coincidence, nothing short of miraculous, that the Tea Parties – which were Obama’s most trenchant critics in his first term – dominated groups targeted by the IRS. In 2010 (the same year the IRS drew up its notorious list), the president told a Spanish- language Univision audience that they had to "punish our enemies" and "reward our friends." Again, such signals aren’t wasted on ambitious bureaucrats.
The president is the most famous disciple of neo-Marxist tactician Saul Alinsky. In his handbook, "Rules for Radicals" Alinsky advised maintaining "constant pressure on the opposition," also to "look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty." Other than being interviewed by the Spanish Inquisition while stretched out on the rack, what’s more terrifying than an IRS audit?
The confidential information someone in the IRS leaked to leftie groups brings to mind other fortuitous disclosures which knocked out Obama opponents in the 2004 Illinois Senate campaign. The press somehow got ahold of sealed divorce and custody records – in one case alleging spousal abuse, in the other weird sex practices – which eliminated Obama’s principal opponents in both the primary and general-election contests. Rogue agents in the Cincinnati IRS office were hard at work even back then.
Not to worry. The president has called the targeting of conservative groups (for whom he has deep respect and affection) "outrageous and there’s no place for it," and he’ll get to the bottom of it – just as soon as he figures out what happened at Fort Hood, Benghazi and the Boston Marathon.
Thug-ocracies come and go. What remains, and grows every year, is the Tax Monster we’ve constructed over the past century – a Godzilla-like entity that creates chaos, wastes resources, retards growth and serves as a potent weapon to use against enemies.
• The National Taxpayers Union estimates that the federal income tax costs the economy $240.8 billion annually. For 2013, the IRS budget alone is $13.6 billion.
• Completing 234 million tax forms consumes 6.7 billion hours a year, the equivalent of 3.35 million people working 40-hour weeks, with two weeks vacation.
• There are 3,951,104 words in the current Tax Code, twice the number in the King James Bible, more than the collected works of Shakespeare. The Code is supplemented by 20 volumes of rules and regulations, running 14,000 pages.
• For small businesses (with earnings of $50,000 to $100,000) – run by guys lefties like Obama tell us they adore – the cost of compliance is the equivalent of 15% to 18% of all revenue. These are the businesses that create most new jobs – 70% for firms with fewer than 500 employees. And now you know why Obama has presided over the longest period of sustained unemployment since the end of the Great Depression.
• While estimates vary, the IRS has around 100,000 employees. Under Obamacare, besides normal growth, its ranks will swell by 16,500 over the next decade. In the words of Wednesday Adams in "Adams Family Values" – "Be afraid. Be very afraid."
• Tax Freedom Day falls on April 18th this year. On average, it took the first 108 days to pay your federal, state and local taxes. Of course, if you’re lucky enough to live in a progressive paradise like New York or New Jersey, your servitude extended to May 6th and May 4th respectively.
• The progressive income tax punishes the most productive. The top 1% – bete noir of the Occupiers – earn 16.9% of income but pay 36.7% of federal income taxes. The top 5% earn 31.7% and pay 58.7%. The bottom 50% – otherwise known as Obama voters – earn 13.5% of total Adjusted Gross Income but pay an insignificant 2.3% of taxes. The income tax is structured so as to guarantee a majority of votes for increasing benefits, and raising taxes on the rest of the nation. And it makes sense to take more money from venture capitalists and give it to Washington, which will use it so wisely.
Along with the national debt, our tax system is an infernal device for creating a nation of serfs. It’s spawned whole industries dependent on it for their existence, including tax-preparers, tax accountants, tax lawyers, lobbyists and the piggies grunting at the government trough – among them groups like ACORN and Planned Parenthood, which are snout-deep in federal fodder and virtually audit-proof.
Democratic and Republican politicians have gotten so used to the Tax Monster that they can’t imagine life without it. John Marshall said "The power to tax is the power to destroy." And not just tax, but audit, harass, intimidate and tie up in knots.
If Marshall’s adage is true, the ability to grant tax-breaks and subsidies for the favored (like so-called green energy firms) is life-giving. Holding life and death in their hands -- what could possibly suit a politician more?
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