IRS Scandal – Don't Lose Sight Of The Big Picture
A speech to the Tea Party Unity Summit at the Capitol Visitors Center, Washington, D.C.
May 30, 2013
By Don Feder
If you think the Empire of Japan had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor, that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, that amnesties don’t encourage illegal immigration, and if you were shocked, shocked!, to learn that gambling was going on at Rick’s American Club in "Casablanca" – then you probably believe that the White House was in no way connected to the current IRS scandal.
Last week, Acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller and Lois Lerner, formerly in charge of the IRS division that deals with foundations, testified before Congress.
Lerner told the House Oversight Committee: "I have not done anything wrong" but "I will not answer any questions or testify today." Taking the Fifth Amendment is just what you’d expect from someone who did nothing wrong – like the guys with organized-crime ties. Apparently, Lerner also did nothing wrong when she ran the enforcement office at the Federal Election Commission and went after the Christian Coalition with a vengeance.
Miller managed to testify without actually saying anything. He wouldn’t reveal who in the IRS had targeted conservative foundations (In an earlier interview, Lerner called it the work of "front line people"). In his testimony, Miller said the two-year vendetta against the Tea Parties and conservative groups was – are you ready for this? – "a foolish mistake" by "people trying to be more efficient."
In the name of efficiency, the IRS targeted somewhere between 300 and 500 Tea Party and conservative applicants for 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." This clearly 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 the tax-exempt status of targeted groups – roughly three times the average. In that period, 63% of Tea Party organizations ended up withdrawing their applications in frustration, 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. At least one pro-life group was asked to have its leaders sign a pledge to never picket a Planned Parenthood clinic – making the IRS the enforcement arm of the abortion industry – another was asked about the content of members’ prayers.
It’s a wonder no one was asked if they’d ever had bad thoughts about the federal government, or adhered to the subversive doctrines found in documents like the U.S. Constitution and the Bible.
The IRS also targeted conservative foundations that already had C-3 status with audits and other forms of harassment. In some cases, it dragged in the FBI, OSHA and other federal agencies. Confidential information in C-3 applications was leaked to left-wing groups.
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 words for big government worship – to have their applications approved, against over two years for Tea Parties. By the way, it took the IRS less than a month to rubber-stamp the application of the Barack H. Obama Foundation – and National Shrine.
No one will admit to knowing who drew up the list of groups singled-out for special treatment, other than unidentified rogue agents in the IRS Cincinnati office
The scapegoats in said 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."
This confirms common sense. Does anyone really believe that low-level functionaries in a field office would devise a scheme so far-reaching, insidious and risky?
I would submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that this administration knew exactly what it was doing when it put Lois Lerner in charge of tax-exempt organizations at the IRS. Based on past performance, it knew she’d do everything in her considerable power to sabotage the conservative movement and Tea Parties going into the 2012 election. There didn’t have to be a direct order.
Still, the president set the tone for this extraordinary abuse of power.
It is an astounding coincidence that the Tea Parties – which were Obama’s most effective critics in his first term – dominated the list of groups targeted by the IRS. In 2010 (the same year the IRS drew up its hit list), the president told Hispanics that they had to "punish our enemies" and "reward our friends." Such signals aren’t lost on ambitious bureaucrats.
The president is the most prominent 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 intimidating than an IRS audit?
The confidential information someone in the IRS leaked to leftist groups brings to mind the illegal disclosures which knocked out Obama opponents in the 2004 Illinois Senate campaign. In that contest – a steeping stone to the White House – 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. To this day, no one knows the source of those well-timed leaks. But we can guess.
Not to worry. The president has called the IRS targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups "outrageous and there’s no place for it," and he’s going to get to the bottom of it – just as soon as he figures out what happened at Fort Hood, Benghazi and the Boston Marathon.
It was recently disclosed that in 2010 and 2011, Miller’s predecessor, then IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, visited the White House 118 times – once a week for two years. Would anyone care to guess how many times Mike Everson, IRS Commissioner under George W. Bush, went to the White House from 2004 to 2007? Once. Nothing suspicious here.
In all of this, we must never lose site of the big picture. Regimes come and go. What doesn’t is our tax system, which grows more complex, onerous and oppressive every year. As time goes by, the Tax Monster we’ve created – over the course of a century – causes more chaos, wastes more 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, annually.
• There are 3,951,104 words in the current Tax Code, twice the number in the King James Bible, more than in the complete 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) the cost of compliance is the equivalent of 15% to 18% of their annual revenue – money which could be used to generate desperately needed new jobs.
• 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 the movie "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 of the year for you to earn enough 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% earn 17% of income but pay 37% of federal income taxes. The top 5% earn 32% and pay 59%. The bottom 50% – otherwise known as Obama voters – earn 13.5% of total income but pay an insignificant 2.3% of taxes. It makes perfect sense to take money from investors and entrepreneurs and give it to Washington, which will use it so wisely – to build bridges to nowhere, provide subsidized housing to illegal immigrants and buy $1,000 toilet seats.
• The federal income tax is structured in such a way as to virtually guarantee a huge bloc of votes for increasing benefits, and raising the taxes to pay for them.
Expose Obama? Of course. Reform the IRS? Absolutely. But don’t lose sight of the big picture – We’ve created a tax system that’s destroying the economy, turning the middle class into serfs and creating irresistible opportunities for political abuse. This all must end.
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