It seems to me that if there are specific activities that the GOP in Congress dislike about certain regulatory agencies — the IRS, the EPA — that the rational and straightforward thing to do about them is change the laws that allow such activities. Don't like employee bonuses? Make them illegal. Don't care for a particular type of regulatory activity? Alter the law underneath which that stuff is regulated.
Simply hacking at the budget, ostensibly to "punish" the agencies, is not only more than a bit deceptive ("We don't want to repeal the law, just want to remove the ability to enforce it"), but implies a larger agenda ("Our supporters don't like taxes, so we're going to make it difficult to enforce tax laws; our supporters don't like Obamacare, so we're going to make it difficult to assess legal tax penalties around it; our supporters like both having non-profit status and being able to do whatever they want with it, so we're going to make it difficult to review and regulate non-profit activities.").
In other words, if you don't like government, sabotage it. If you want people to think that government doesn't work, don't let it work. "Starve the beast." It's likely to be ugly but effective, even if underhanded and cowardly. And it's a great sign of what the next two years is going to look like.
Republicans seek to cripple IRS
Confused taxpayers, jammed help lines and tax cheaters running rampant — the IRS for months has warned that drastic budget cuts will disable an already troubled agency. Republicans aren’t buying it. Instead, they’re biding their time until they seize control of both chambers next year, giving them majorities to financially gut the…
I don't think you'll find much sympathy for the IRS….on either side.
Changing the law won't do any good since the Obama Justice Department has their back. It is like they have a get out of jail free card in their pocket.
When you're breaking (though I'm sure they term it "bending") the laws that are already on the books, new/revised ones really won't matter much.
Sure, everyone loves to bash the IRS, because nobody likes paying taxes, and the IRS is the face of tax-paying. But "punishing" the IRS (or any agency) but cutting funding, even while they continue to perform a vital service, is either incredibly myopic or part of a bigger plan.
The items listed as why the IRS is being singled out are all relatively trivial, budget-wise. (Bonuses? Conferences? How much money are we talking about vs a $350m budget cut in this bill, on top of previous cuts?) This isn't about slapping of hands, and it's not about reform (either of which could be handled legislatively); this is about crippling the ability of the IRS to perform its actual job — enforcement of the tax code, audits of businesses and individuals who are suspected of cheating, etc. Which makes me ask, cui bono?
So what specific laws has the IRS clearly broken and avoided jail about, since it seems they are running so amok they need to be shut down?
A breakdown on the civil suits:
http://theweek.com/article/index/244402/did-the-irs-break-the-law-by-targeting-tea-partiers
The IRS didn't report loss of records:
http://www.wnd.com/2014/06/ex-irs-lawyer-agency-in-disarray/
The IRS gave confidential taxpayer info to the DOJ (apparently, that's against the law)
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/06/09/why-darrell-issa-is-saying-the-irs-broke-the-law/
Even Elijah Cummings thinks laws were broken:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/348377/top-dem-irs-%E2%80%98yes-laws-were-probably-broken%E2%80%99
+Dave Hill destruction of evidence is a felony.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/08/27/lois-lerner-blackberry-deliberately-destroyed-after-start-congressional-probe/
+Dave Hill The only vital service the IRS provides is collecting illegal taxation from the working class for the Federal Reserve and Elite 1% ruling class! You have a slave mentality. Wake up!
the laws already prohibit this activity. what good would changing the law do if they won't abide by the ones now on the books.
Tax exempt status has been abused in the past by soft money organizations, the IRS should be investigating these groups, e.g. http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/01/11930/12m-donation-freedomworks-laundered-through-shell-corporation-may-have-violated-f
In another case, one shell group was buying books published by another to pump up their NYT/Amazon best seller position.
Perhaps it's unfortunate that far more of these fake shells exist on the right within the Koch Hydra, compared to the left "Soros" network, which leads to perceptions of investigative bias, but conservatives should be familiar with this argument — cops aren't biased for locking up more black people, after all, black people commit more crime, right? Ergo, there's more conservative groups potentially abusing 501 (c)(3)/501 (c)(4) status, and thus they're likely to be far more investigations of right-wing groups than left wing groups.
The IRS needs to be abolished and turn the buildings into Walmarts!
http://fairtax.org/
Simple answer.
The federal income tax and IRS were originally created to tax the wealthy. That was its justification, its sole reason for being. Now look at these clownish liberals who wring their hands that the IRS is not getting enough funding to screw us "confused taxpayers".
Go ahead and defund most of it, such that they must concentrate all their resources on the wealthy and leave ordinary, hard-hit working people alone with what few dollars they have.
+David Sulewski lol!
one problem. they don't abide by the laws currently on the books. what good would changing the law do. they would just ignore it too.
+Peter Betts I disagree that federal taxes are illegal, so I guess we have a problem right there. I don't disagree that the tax system is manipulated in various ways by the 1% (or however we choose to label the oligarchs and plutocrats), but I disagree that the answer is to simply get rid of the whole system, because I think the rest of the populace has more to lose from it.
+Larry Olson The federal income tax (and its enforcement) were actually originally designed to fund the federal government by some means other than excise taxes, which freed the way for Prohibition. The wealthy, seeing their marginal tax rates climbing as high as they were, supported the repeal of Prohibition in order to get rid of the income tax; unfortunately, by the time that happened we were in the middle of the Great Depression and the FDR administration, and by the time WWII was over, the federal income tax was more than entrenched (and at wildly higher marginal rates than the wealthy suffer today).
Do you really think that if the IRS is crunched for money, that it is the wealthy who suffer? The audit rate is already heavily focused on the wealthy (and rightfully, given the ROI). Last year, folk filing with income under $200K were audited at less than 1%; those over $1MM in income were audited 11% of the time (http://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/red-flags-that-tempt-the-tax-auditor-1.aspx). All that cutting fundng does is reduce the number of audits made (benefiting the wealthy) as well as reducing tax help services (most often used by lower income taxpayers).
+Dave Hill lois lerner's nefarious conduct.
That's informational, +Dave Hill and appreciated, but the point I make is that Federal Income Tax was proposed, sold and implemented, as a tax on the wealthy, not the earnings of ordinary people.
No, I don't really think the IRS would be crunched for money that will be used to bring more revenue to the spenders. But things might be changed, in law or in practice, to return it to its original function, given that so much of the tax revenue does already come from the very well-off.
I don't believe in flat federal taxation anymore. I see the incredible corrupting influence that wealth carries into govt, and there is certainly nothing new about that. But it never gets better, the corruption itself seems to be expanding in very destructive ways for the ordinary citizenry. If we're going to be ruled by the wealth class, regardless of what we do and how we vote, lets just make the a-holes pay for every dollar of it.
+Mark Means The IRS "targeting conservative groups" as some sort of pernicious conspiracy on behalf of the Democrats (though it occured under a Bush appointee) was, at best, an overblown matter, indicating the vagueness of 501(c)(4) criteria (some of which is the fault of IRS interpretations of "social welfare" and how much politics is allowed under it), the rush of groups applying for same following the 2008 election, and the efforts of the IRS office in Cincinnati that was reviewing such applications to try and more quickly winnow out which ones to subject to greater scrutiny. Bottom line, during the period in question (2010-2011, I believe) of the 4,000 501(c)(4) applications, about 300 total cases were sent to Washington for greater scrutiny; 72 of those groups had the name "tea party," 13 had "patriot" and 11 had "9/12," with 200-odd cases listed as "other." Those included liberal/progressive groups. The main problem seems to have been automatically using those strings as triggers for greater scrutiny.
That the initial processes, or the IRS follow-up during investigations of them have been less than sterling I'll grant you. That they warrant identifying the IRS as some rogue organization that should be abolished or strangled with additional tax cuts (as though that will actually reduce such behavior) is far from clear.
_ The IRS didn't report loss of records:_ As an historian, destruction or other removal of federal records irks me greatly. And certainly it's the sort of thing that could be used to try and cover up nefarious goings on (http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20100903.html, http://harpers.org/blog/2008/01/the-emails-that-dick-cheney-deleted/). I suppose it depends on how one approaches the matter.
The IRS gave confidential taxpayer info to the DOJ (apparently, that's against the law): Aside from Darrell "I never saw Obama do anything I didn't want to launch an investigation into" Issa being a political hack of the highest order, there seems to be two elements here — the idea that this was a further part of the IRS Conspiracy against Conservatives, and that the millions of pages of information transmitted to the DoJ included confidential info protected by tax law.
The first element seems unfounded — no stories I have found (including the Blaze (!) one you link to) indicate that the targets of such discussions were just the Tea Party groups under referral. Further, Issa's comment that "At the very least, this information suggests that the IRS considered the political speech activities of nonprofits to be worthy of investigation by federal law-enforcement officials" is precisely correct — it is the "political speech activities of nonprofits" that is regulated under those non-profit terms. That the IRS was looking to see if violations of 501(c)(4) or 501(c)(3) activities were subject to federal law enforcement activity seems perfectly legit.
I'm not at all happy if documents subject to confidentiality were included in the data dump to DoJ. What exactly that looks like amongst those "millions of pages" I'm curious to find out.
Even Elijah Cummings thinks laws were broken: Speaking out within days of the scandal having broken, before the actual nature of what happened had been more clearly examined, yeah. Pretty much everyone was throwing the IRS under the bus at that point.
The articles I'd offer up on the matter, focused on the actual activites of the Exempt Organizations group, include:
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jun/22/donna-brazile/donna-brazile-no-conspiracy-here-irs-targeted-libe/
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/08/how_the_media_outrageously_blew_the_irs_scandal_a_full_accounting/
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/article/2014/apr/18/is-the-irs-scandal-the-next-watergate/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jun/19/mike-rogers/rep-mike-rogers-says-irs-scandal-clearly-showed-so/
(Apologies for holding off on replying for a few days. I knew that research was going to be involved, and this has been a particularly hectic weekend.)
+Nick Collins The "Fair Tax" is tempting; my concerns are a consumption tax tends to affect the less well off (who spend more of their income on things they must buy); there are ways around that, but that immediately starts introducing exceptions and "loopholes."
While it's clear that the federal tax code is wildly complicated, those complications all tend to come from a variety of reasons, and a lot of them are generally acknowledged as good things.
Regardless, that's a bigger question than "Does it make sense to cut funding to the IRS?" Such cuts are not going to make a Fair Tax come about.
+Larry Olson I would be more than happy to see the marginal tax rates on the wealthy rise back to the days of Reagan, if not Nixon, if not Eisenhower.
+Dave Hill the liberal groups you mention were flagged. but, unlike the conservative ones, the liberal ones were approved.
+Dave Hill why would you like the marginal rates on the wealthy t rise?
+Dave Hill Can you elaborate on how the IRS is a good thing in anyway? Remember the Federal Reserve prints money out of nothing, and makes money and gains power off of it. The IRS is just a collector for the Fed Reserve, kinda of like Luca Brasi in the Godfather.
+tommy northam Because they profit most in the long run from a strong nation (both in general and as the basis for their wealth), and, as has been demonstrated (in the 40s, 50s, and 60s), high marginal rates on the most wealthy are not associated with economic problems and, in fact, the government spending that can result from same benefits the nation as a whole.
(And I say this as someone whose taxes would almost certainly go up if the upper bracket saw their rates increased.)
+Peter Betts The IRS facilitates and enforces federal tax law. If we don't like the law and want something else in its place, the proper debate is not over whether to fund the IRS, but over what to replace federal tax law with.
+Dave Hill one of your numerous errors is that the money raised and spent benefits the nation as a whole. an argument can be made that it hurts the nation as a whole. if the federal government actually abided by the restrictions our constitution places on it we would all be better off. also, any money confiscated from citizens cannot be spent by them, though the government can spend it after deducting for waste.
When you have racked over and watched the govt for many years, it finally becomes clear that the only way to stop them from harming all of us financially is to deny them revenue. Talking about curbing spending, even passing legislation in that direction, gets you little or nothing.
So long as the big revenue stream exists, they will, all of them on both sides, find a way to spend it all and borrow even more. It's like an allowance for a child who drinks and drugs – You have to stop the money stream, just cut it off at the source, only then do they begin thinking differently.
+tommy northam I suspect, given your premises (that government spending hurts the nation as a whole, that the federal government violates the constitution in much of its spending, that taxation is confiscation) are such that further discussion would be unhelpful.
+Dave Hill if you don't believe that much of the federal government's spending is unconstitutional you must believe the 10th amendment has been repealed.
+Larry Olson So, deny revenue, and what spending is done will be just what you think is appropriate. Hmmm. Not quite sure how that works. To use your analogy, it's like suggesting that cutting your kid's allowance will mean he spends his money only on good things.
+Dave Hill if you cut their allowance they sure can't spend as much in the wrong way.
I understand your thinking +Dave Hill . But you have to compare proposals with experience. They just won't cut real spending if they have other options available. They can talk a good promise, you can threaten elections, and in the end your cuts only amount to slower growth for a year or so.
When do nations cut back spending? When their revenue runs out. Britain has done this a few times in recent decades. The eyes widen, the sphincters tighten, and they immediately order priorities with the smaller revenue that remains.
It's unfortunate that people in public life are so feckless and need to be stopped the way an addict is stopped. But experience shows that that is typically the case.