Tag Archives: government

Progressive Law

Posted on by
Reply

President Barack Obama has sent his chief cleric on this subject, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, to the press to insist that Obamacare is “the law of the land,” and that we should all just shut up about it.  Over at Reason.com, Peter Suderman showed us what “the law” is to Progressives in an article last Wednesday (and no, that’s not one of Obama’s cigarettes in Sebelius’ hand in the lead image.  Look more closely: it’s a pen).

  • selectively enforced provisions
    • delayed employer mandate, threatening to veto legislative authority to delay it—and the Individual Mandate
    • delayed out of pocket cost caps—stealthily, the announcement buried last winter in a plethora of rules documentation
    • delayed verification requirements concerning income and health status for state-based exchanges
  • lobbied OPM to rule that Congressional employees could use Federal employer health benefit contributions to purchase of exchange-based coverage, knowing OPM has no such authority.  (In truth, Congress—both parties—are complicit in this particular lawlessness.)
  • supported IRS ruling that insurance subsidies—available by the law-as-passed only in state-created exchanges—are to be allowed in the 34 exchanges run by the Federal government.

Can we afford three more years of Progressive law, after this and the preceding five, or so, years of it?  Can we afford even one more year?  Primaries and the mid-terms approach.

Another Phony Scandal

Posted on by
Reply

The Justice Department and FBI have quietly acknowledged they grossly overstated the scope of a mortgage fraud crackdown, which the administration heralded with much fanfare a few weeks before last year’s presidential election.

Attorney General Eric Holder and other law enforcement officials claimed in early October that the initiative charged 530 criminal defendants on behalf of 73,000 victims who suffered over $1 billion in losses.  The so-called Distressed Homeowner Initiative, which targeted fraud schemes against distressed homeowners, was highlighted in a press release and press conference at the time…”a groundbreaking, year-long mortgage fraud enforcement effort.”

The real numbers, it turns out, were far smaller.  The feds now admit that the number of criminal defendants charged was more like 107, not 530. The number of victims was 17,185…roughly one fourth the size of the original headcount. And the losses totaled $95 million[,] not $1 billion….

Once again, a dishonest Attorney General is caught out in his lies.  Once again, a dishonest Attorney General is caught out, not only in his failure to do his duty, but in a violation of his oath of office.

Why is Holder still in place?  On what is Congress waiting?  Oh, wait….

An Example

Posted on by
Reply

…of why Progressives and private pocketbooks—or public pocketbooks—are a bad mix.  This is former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, in the San Francisco Chronicle, on why public works projects are—deliberately—under costed when they’re foisted off onto the public, us folks who must pay for these things.

News that the Transbay Terminal is something like $300 million over budget should not come as a shock to anyone.

We always knew the initial estimate was way under the real cost.  Just like we never had a real cost for the Central Subway or the Bay Bridge or any other massive construction project.  So get off it.

In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment.  If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved.

The idea is to get going.  Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.

It just doesn’t get much more cynical than that.

 

h/t The Wall Street Journal

The IRS Sends a Letter

Posted on by
Reply

Thousands of small-business owners have received letters from the Internal Revenue Service questioning whether they are underreporting their business income….

Tax officials say the letters don’t constitute an audit and instead are simply a request for more information.

Sure.  Except that they’re not “requests.”

One typical letter to a small-business owner is headlined, “Notification of Possible Income Underreporting.”  It begins, “Your gross receipts may be underreported.”

The letter instructs the owner to complete a form “to explain why the portion of your gross receipts from non-card payments appears unusually low.”  It says the business owner must respond within 30 days.

No.  Tell me what crime you’re claiming I’m committing or at risk of committing.  Then we can talk about my business model, my decision to emphasize card transactions in my business.  And 30 days is a short deadline for small businesses to investigate their records of individual transactions over the year supposed to be in question.  While you’re about it, explain to me why I’m obligated to do cash transactions at a rate that suits your whim.  Cash imposes additional costs on me, including more accounting effort (card transactions automatically generate their own audit trail for my internal, business use) and greater security costs from having all that cash on hand.

And there’s this example of IRS disingenuousness:

Peter Fleming, a small-business accountant in Carnegie, PA, said a client with a gift and souvenir shop received a letter from the IRS in December saying the revenue she claimed in tax returns the previous year was lower than sales reported in merchant card and third-party payments data.  The retailer reported gross receipts of $243,462, versus $249,994 in the payment data, according to the IRS.  The letter told her to ensure she was “fully reporting receipts from all sources” and gave her 30 days to respond.  Mr Fleming said the discrepancy was because payments data included sales tax, which wasn’t included in revenue claimed in tax returns.  For small retailers, “Sales tax is a liability and is not reported as revenue,” Mr Fleming said.

Of course, the IRS knew a priori this discrepancy was sales tax; the IRS has lots of access to state and community sales tax rates and records.

And a final bit of IRS cynicism:

The IRS has told accountants that a principal aim of its program is to verify the quality of the card-transaction data the agency is getting.

Clearly not.  I if this were true, the IRS would have said so in its dunning letters to those 20,000 small businesses.

Free Speech

Posted on by
Reply

Much has been made of President Barack Obama and his colleagues’ assault on free speech through his IRS and apparently through his FEC and SEC.  It’s important to understand that, reprehensible and dangerous to America as these assaults are today, Obama and his are simply channeling one of their Progressive forebears.

Here’s President Woodrow Wilson on the usefulness of government censorship, during another war in which the US was, at the time, participating only peripherally.  He wrote this letter to Congressman Edwin Webb in May 1917.

My dear Mr. Webb:

I have been very much surprised to find several of the public prints stating that the administration had abandoned the position which it so distinctly took, and still holds, that authority to exercise censorship over the Press to the extent that that censorship is embodied in the recent action of the House of Representatives is absolutely necessary to the public safety.  It, of course, has not been abandoned, because the reasons still exist why such authority is necessary for the protection of the nation.

I have every confidence that the great majority of the newspapers of the country will observe a patriotic reticence about everything whose publication could be of injury, but in every country there are some persons in a position to do mischief in this field who can not be relied upon and whose interests or desires will lead to actions on their part highly dangerous to the nation in the midst of a war.  I want to say again that it seems to me imperative that powers of this sort should be granted.

Cordially and sincerely yours,

WOODROW WILSON

The “recent action of the House” concerned a provision for explicit Federal government censorship of the press that Wilson had demanded be included in The Espionage Act of 1917, then under debate in both houses of Congress.  In the event, the Act was passed in June without the provision (the Senate having removed it by a one-vote margin) and signed into law by Wilson, even though he continued to protest the necessity of the “right” to commit censorship.

Authority to exercise censorship over the press is absolutely necessary to the public safety.

While Wilson didn’t get that power of censorship in the Espionage Act, he did get it in the Sedition Act of 1918:

Whoever…shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States…shall be punished….

The added invention of the Obama claque is that “some persons in a position to do mischief” are conservative persons who criticize the Obama administration.  Such criticisms are viewed by today’s Progressives as “disloyal” and “scurrilous.”  And plainly “abusive.”

Hmm….