Tag Archives: ethics

The IRS as Political Tool

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It’s not the tax collection agency it’s made out to be. We all recall, for instance, the IRS’ Lois Lerner-run Exempt Organizations Unit targeting Conservative tax-exempt organizations, slow-walking or outright denying those organizations tax-exempt status purely for political reasons, without consideration of how well they met statutory criteria for the status.

It’s also been well-publicized that the IRS has been funded for next year to hire 87,000 agents for the ostensible purpose of increasing audits of the Evil Rich, and the agency is buying ammunition and hiring agents who are willing to use lethal force in the course of their “duties.”

This is not unique to the Progressive-Democrat administrations of ex-President Barack Obama and current President Joe Biden. As far back as Lyndon Johnson’s (D) and Richard Nixon’s (R) administrations, the IRS was used to interfere with government-disapproved organizations and citizens.

Today’s IRS is just as bad across a range of…matters.

  • The IRS has disproportionately audited poorer Americans in recent years
  • IRS auditing of wealthier Americans has been declining
  • Nonpartisan projections have found increased audits under the Biden plan will heavily impact middle- and working-class Americans
  • IRS customer service has been declining, and was rated “horrendous” by its own internal watchdog
  • IRS employees have egregiously leaked or failed to protect the privacy of taxpayers’ data
  • Amid backlogs and leaks, IRS paid tax relief to dead taxpayer, prisoners on death row

The solution to this isn’t more legislation for the IRS to ignore, with or without the tacit approval of the administration then in power. IRS history and current behavior means the agency needs to be vastly shrunk.

But shrinking the IRS would be difficult as a practical matter with the current byzantine and heavily biased against some economic strata Federal tax code. IRS size and performance, then, is an argument for greatly simplifying our tax code.

Eliminate the business revenue-centric taxes. Businesses don’t pay much of those taxes, anyway; their customers pay the taxes in the form of higher prices and reduced innovation rates, and business employees and potential employees pay the taxes in the form of slower wage increases and lessened hirings.

Eliminate the personal income tax as currently constructed and have only a single, flat tax rate charged on all income from any source. Do away with subsidies, credits, exemptions, social engineering gerrymandering altogether. The new 1040 could be reduced to the current taxpayer identifying information, a line for totting up all income and reporting the total, a line for calculating the [10%] tax on that total as the total tax due, and a line for the taxpayer’s [sic] signature.

That could fit on a postcard, but with the personally identifying and income data present, I wouldn’t recommend anything less than a sealed envelope. Such a tax regime, though, would allow an IRS-like function to exist with about 14 employees (I exaggerate, but not by much).

Tough to be a political tool with that reduced function and personnel complement, too.

“Misunderstanding” of the Left

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A number of credit card companies, on the demand of the Federal government as washed through the International Standards Organization, are going to start explicitly listing gun sales by lawful gun stores to individual average Americans. Among those credit card companies are Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx.

The Federal government now is going to track us average Americans and build a database of who among us has a firearm.

For what purpose?

…gun control advocates who argue that a separate category for gun store sales will help track suspicious quantities of firearm sales that could potentially lead to a mass shooting.

Because buying a firearm is ipso facto suspicious under the ideology of the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party. But wait—suspicious quantities—what’s wrong with that? This is the camel’s nose. It won’t be long before the Feds decide that one is a suspicious number of firearms to buy. And then one is a suspicious number of firearms to own.

The concern of us average Americans is justified by this misleading claim by New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) as he demonstrates his “misunderstanding” of the tracking.

When you buy an airline ticket or pay for your groceries, your credit card company has a special code for those retailers. It’s just common sense that we have the same policies in place for gun and ammunition stores[.]

Buying “guns and ammunition” is an explicitly protected activity under our Constitution. Buying firearms—keeping and bearing Arms—is an entirely unique activity for us average Americans, quite apart from the ordinary, day to day, activity of grocery buying, or the process of buying a travel ticket. There is no reason to track Americans going about our Constitutionally protected behaviors.

Other than identifying who has firearms for further Progressive-Democrat “control.” This is another effort of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s desired surveillance state.

The Climate King

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King Charles III, who ascended the British throne in the aftermath of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II’s, unfortunate death, is a zealous climate activist.

He said less than a year ago in a speech in front of the UN COP26,

The scale and scope of the threat we face call for a global systems level solution based on radically transforming our current fossil fuel based economy to one that is genuinely renewable and sustainable[.]

Global systems level.

I have a couple questions.

When was the last time Prince Charles traveled to India or to the People’s Republic of China to…encourage…them to join this global system of his?

What was Prince Charles’ plan for helping the Third World to transition to this genuinely renewable and sustainable energy-based economy? Besides throwing other nation’s money at them, I mean.

What’s the schedule for King Charles’ trips to India and to the People’s Republic of China to encourage them to join this global system of his?

What is King Charles’ plan for helping the Third World to transition to this genuinely renewable and sustainable energy-based economy? Besides throwing other nation’s money at them, I mean.

And: is the scale and scope of the threat we face sufficiently dire that he will break with British royal tradition of being studiously apolitical and continue to espouse his climate activism?

This against the backdrop of the day-to-day, seasonal, and weather-driven extreme variability of the availability of solar- and wind-based energy, especially compared with the steady-state availability of fossil-fuel-based energy as new oil and natural gas wells come on line to replace depleting wells (which take years to deplete) and as new coal mines come on line to replace playing out mines (which take years to play out).

Never mind the larger backdrop of why we should care about atmospheric CO2, given the several epochs in our planetary history when temperatures were much higher than today, and life was lush, and the several epochs in our planetary history when atmospheric CO2 was much higher than today, and life was lush, and the fact that those two sets of epochs do not at all correlate with each other.

Never mind, either, that today, 11,000+ years after the last Ice Age, we’re still cooler than the geologic trend line of planetary warming, a trend driven by the fact that the sun is warming, and has been since it first fired up.

Surveillance State, Part 2

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Another one from New York. It seems that US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s Stand for America PAC, a 501(c)(4) organization with a legally protected list of donors has had that list released by the NY AG’s Charities Bureau to Politico, which then proceeded to publish that list.

The Charities Bureau is an arm of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ (the same one who “consulted” with then-FBI Director James Comey to suppress any hint of investigation of Hillary Clinton’s classified email handling ‘way back in 2016) Attorney General office.

Never mind that the leak was illegal. Never mind that the Supreme Court in Prosperity Foundation v Bonta—just a year ago—had ruled that the California AG’s blanket demand that all charities disclose donor information was unconstitutional.

Letitia James, a Progressive-Democrat through and through, cares not a fig for any law that’s inconvenient to her. She’s going to collect non-Progressive-Democrat data and release it whenever she takes a notion to.

Anathema

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In response to President Joe Biden’s (D) constant accusations of half of Americans being “semi-fascists” and “threats to our democracy,” Fox News‘ Mark Meredith asked Biden’s Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre what percentage of the 74 million people who voted for Trump in the 2020 election the White House regarded as extremists. Jean-Pierre’s answer (keeping in mind that a Press Secretary speaks the President’s words, not her own):

I’m talking about specifically MAGA office holders. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about MAGA office holders who have put forth an agenda that is extreme.

Because wanting to Make America Great Again is extreme. This is what Biden and his Progressive-Democrat Party are so angry, so threatening about. A strong America is anathema to them.