IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

[Raz]

Davis Axelrod said the federal government is "too vast for President Obama to control".

Well, that's the whole point of real conservatives, isn't it? (Not the Neocon phonies who luuuuv Big Government.)

• May 14, 2013, 8:18 p.m. ET

James Bovard: A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting

One survey found that 75% of IRS respondents felt entitled to deceive or lie to Congress.

• By JAMES BOVARD
  
  Many Republicans are enraged over revelations in recent days that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative nonprofit groups with a campaign of audits and harassment. But of all the troubles now dogging the Obama administration—including the Benghazi fiasco and the Justice Department's snooping on the Associated Press—the IRS episode, however alarming, is also the least surprising. As David Burnham noted in "A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power" (1990), "In almost every administration since the IRS's inception the information and power of the tax agency have been mobilized for explicitly political purposes."
  
  President Franklin Roosevelt used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers who were opposed to the New Deal, including William Randolph Hearst and Moses Annenberg, publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Roosevelt also dropped the IRS hammer on political rivals such as the populist firebrand Huey Long and radio agitator Father Coughlin, and prominent Republicans such as former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.
  Perhaps Roosevelt's most pernicious tax skulduggery occurred in 1944. He spiked an IRS audit of illegal campaign contributions made by a government contractor to Congressman Lyndon Johnson, whose career might have been derailed if Texans had learned of the scandal.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  President John F. Kennedy raised the political exploitation of the IRS to an art form. Shortly after capturing the presidency, JFK denounced "the discordant voices of extremism" and derided people who distrust their leaders—President Obama didn't invent that particular rhetorical line. Shortly thereafter, JFK signaled at a news conference that he expected the IRS to be vigilant in policing the tax-exempt status of questionable (read: conservative) organizations.
  
  Within a few days of Kennedy's remarks, the IRS launched the Ideological Organizations Audit Project. It targeted right-leaning groups, including the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education. Kennedy also used the IRS to strong-arm companies into complying with "voluntary" price controls. Steel executives who defied the administration were singled out for audits.
  
  A 1976 report by the Senate Select Committee on Government Intelligence on the Kennedy program noted: "By directing tax audits at individuals and groups solely because of their political beliefs, the Ideological Organizations Audit Project established a precedent for a far more elaborate program of targeting 'dissidents.'"
  
  After Richard Nixon took office, his administration quickly created a Special Services Staff to mastermind what a memo called "all IRS activities involving ideological, militant, subversive, radical, and similar type organizations." More than 10,000 individuals and groups were targeted because of their political activism or slant between 1969 and 1973, including Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling (a left-wing critic of the Vietnam War) and the far-right John Birch Society.
  Related Video
  
  
  Best of the Web Today columnist James Taranto on how ProPublica and the Huffington Post
  helped the IRS target conservative groups. Photo: Getty Images
  
  
  
  
  The IRS was also given Nixon's enemies list to, in the words of White House counsel John Dean, "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies."
  
  The exposure of Nixon's IRS abuses during congressional hearings in 1973 and 1974 profoundly weakened him during the uproar after the Watergate hotel break-in. The second article of his 1974 impeachment charged him with endeavoring to obtain from the IRS "confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner."
  
  Congress enacted legislation to severely restrict political contacts between the White House and the IRS.
  
  In the following decades, the IRS regularly sparked outrage by abusing innocent taxpayers, but there was not much controversy about the agency's politicizing until Bill Clinton took office.
  
  In 1995, the White House and the Democratic National Committee produced a 331-page report entitled "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce" that attacked magazines, think tanks and other entities and individuals who had criticized President Clinton. In the subsequent years, many organizations mentioned in the White House report were hit by IRS audits. More than 20 conservative organizations—including the Heritage Foundation and the American Spectator magazine—and almost a dozen individual high-profile Clinton accusers, such as Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, were audited.
  
  The Landmark Legal Foundation sued the IRS in 1997 after being audited. Its brief quoted an IRS official who had explained at an IRS meeting in San Francisco that audit requests from members of Congress or their staff had been shredded and also suggested how future requests from Capitol Hill could be camouflaged. The IRS told the court that it could not find 114 key files relating to possible political manipulation of audits of tax-exempt organizations.
  
  One potential bombshell of the Clinton era that went relatively unrecognized was an Associated Press report in 1999 that "officials in the Democratic White House and members of both parties in Congress have prompted hundreds of audits of political opponents in the 1990s," including "personal demands for audits from members of Congress."
  Audit requests from congressmen were marked "expedite" or "hot politically" and IRS officials were obliged to respond within 15 days. Permitting congressmen to secretly and effortlessly sic G-men on whomever they pleased epitomized official Washington's contempt for average Americans and fair play. But because the abuse was bipartisan, there was little enthusiasm on Capitol Hill for an investigation.
  
  The IRS has usually done an excellent job of stifling investigations of its practices. A 1991 survey of 800 IRS executives and managers by the nonprofit Josephson Institute of Ethics revealed that three out of four respondents felt entitled to deceive or lie when testifying before a congressional committee.
  
  The agency also has a long history of seeking to intimidate congressional critics: In 1925, Internal Revenue Commissioner David Blair personally delivered a demand for $10 million in back taxes to Michigan's Republican Sen. James Couzens—who had launched an investigation of the Bureau of Internal Revenue—as he stepped out of the Senate chamber. More recently, after Sen. Joe Montoya of New Mexico announced plans in 1972 to hold hearings on IRS abuses, the agency added his name to a list of tax protesters who were capable of violence against IRS agents.
  
  With the current IRS scandal, we may have seen only the tip of the iceberg. Thorough congressional investigations would no doubt help reveal the extent of the operation, and the criminal investigation announced by the Justice Department on Tuesday may prove fruitful as well. Regardless of what these inquiries uncover, though, we can be almost certain that IRS audits will remain irresistible political weapons.
  
  Mr. Bovard is the author, most recently, of the e-book memoir "Public Policy Hooligan."
  
  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...html#printMode
  
  
  Bovard also authored "The Bush Betrayal"
  
  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...g=jimbovard-20

[vt]

Re: IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...employees.html

[Woodsman]

Re: IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

I feel like Bovard is intentionally trying to muddy the waters here. Whenever the media starts using history to sell an ideological viewpoint, you can count on them shading and bending the facts. When it comes to the history of the Kennedy administration they obscure, fold, spindle and mutilate the facts.

It's my informed opinion that Bovard is grinding an ideological axe with his take on JFK and his administration's effort against right wing extremism and steel price manipulation. Why else would Bovard try to convince the reader that there's an equivalency between the extreme right wing of 1960 and modern conservatives and the Tea Party? Consider his statement:

"...JFK signaled at a news conference that he expected the IRS to be vigilant in policing the tax-exempt status of questionable (read: conservative) organizations."

Bovard wants us to believe that instead of confronting the rise of violent and seditious groups steeped in radical anticommunism, white supremacy and a grotesque pseudo-Christian theology, JFK/RFK were trying to suppress protected speech by mainstream persons and organizations. The facts of this history are altogether different than what Bovard presents. The right wing (as opposed to the conservatives and the GOP - which at the time was a center-right party with divergent ideological factions) was titularly lead by Robert Welch and the Birchers. The JBS was the respectable front of the extreme right, behind which stood a terrible cast of characters.

In the days before William Buckley wrote the far right out of the movement, responsible conservatives tolerated a fair number of psychos for the sake of political expediency. Even Buckley for a time looked to extreme right wingers like disgraced Army General and self-described white supremacist Edwin Walker as a potential movement leader. Walker - who would end his days a bachelor with two public lewdness charges to his name - was so ideologically extreme that even Dwight Eisenhower had to censure him. Then again, for people like Welch, that was only more evidence of Eisenhower's crypto-communism.

The right wing that Kennedy sought to quell was not the American Enterprise Institute or Young Americans for Freedom variety, but rather the strange and dangerous mutations the likes of the Klan, the Minutemen and Posse Comitatus. These people were dangerous and they meant business. By 1961 JFK had been subjected to hundreds of verified threats against his life, 37 from Texas alone. Of course, they'd get him in the end, and so I think it's ludicrous for Bovard to argue that JFK was trying to suppress legitimate political activity by mainstream conservatives. He was after the elements that wanted him dead. The work of the late John Andrew ("The Other Side of the Sixties") does a fair and even handed job of detailing the development of the Ideological Organizations Audit Project and especially the experience of YAF under its scrutiny. Andrew, good liberal that he was, is critical of what he considers to be shortcomings on the part of the JFK Justice department and IRS, but he nevertheless states that YAF escaped the more pernicious aspects of Kennedy's effort; again, an effort aimed at counteracting and opposing the growing power of a seditious and violent rightist movement.

YAF is a sacred cow in the minds of modern movement conservatives as it was the incubator for all the major players and institutions we know as conservative today. Maybe Bovard is just trying to score points for the home team, but he's distorting the facts of history. I'd let it pass, but then he does the same job on the Steel Crisis. I'll leave the details for you to discover in Don Gibson's excellent work "Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency" where he puts the responsibility for the steel crisis on the hamfisted antics of US Steel lead Roger M. Blough. After Kennedy had brokered an agreement between the steel companies and the steeworker union to limit wage increases in exchange for maintaining price stability, Hough reneged on the agreement at the 11th hour. JFK stood up to the steel executives, the Luce press (along with the WSJ editorial page) and the bankers behind them by using all of the legal tools available to him to reverse the steel cartel's decision to raise prices, including Justice Department investigations on price fixing, IRS investigations on questionable business deductions by individual steel company executives and directing government steel purchases away from US Steel and its confederates.

Having been accustomed to accommodating policy decisions throughout the Eisenhower administration, business executives were not at all accustomed to being on the receiving end of the hard ball and resented Kennedy's independence and dynamism. While the steel executives ultimately stood down, they never forgave JFK. Me, I think this was the initial genesis behind his murder, but that history is best discussed at places other than iTulip.

As I said, the media seem incapable of speaking objectively about JFK. Taken together, the distortions and omissions in Bovard's piece seriously diminishes its credibility. I think what we are seeing here is exactly as you say, Raz. It's an attempt to minimize the reality of what Justice and IRS have done by saying "everybody does it, so it's really no big deal." Maybe it isn't, but that's not what interests me now. If this is as Bovard insists, the normal and ordinary way business is done, then why the howls of protest against Obama? And why would Obama and Holder play along with it? Could we be experiencing a sleight of hand and subtle redirection with this limited hang out? From what, I wonder?

[don]

Re: IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

on cue the msm kicks in with a lame duck papering over of the dramatic further concentration of power in the executive branch . . .

An Onset of Woes Raises Questions on Obama Vision

By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — Thwarted on Capitol Hill, stymied in the Middle East and now beset by scandal, President Obama has reached a point just six months after a heady re-election where the second term he had hoped for has collided with the second term he actually has.

Mr. Obama emerged from a heated campaign last November with renewed confidence that he could shape the next four years with a vision of activist government as a force for good in American society. But the controversies of recent days have reinforced fears of an overreaching government while calling into question Mr. Obama’s ability to master his own presidency.

The challenges underscore a paradox about the 44th president. He presides over a government that to critics appears ever more intrusive, dictating health care choices, playing politics with the Internal Revenue Service and snooping into journalists’ phone records. Yet at times, Mr. Obama comes across as something of a bystander occupying the most powerful office in the world, buffeted by partisanship and forces beyond his control.

On Wednesday, announcing the departure of the acting director of the I.R.S., he portrayed himself as an onlooker to the scandal, albeit one with the power to force changes. “Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it,” he said.

He likewise had nothing to do with the Justice Department seizure of phone records of reporters for The Associated Press, aides say. The Benghazi dispute, he complains, is brazen politics, and the White House released e-mails Wednesday meant to show that the president’s close aides had little involvement in its most hotly debated aspect. He has no way to force Congress to pass even a modest gun-control bill, aides say, while the slaughter in Syria defies American capacity to intervene.

All of which raises the question of how a president with grand ambitions and shrinking horizons can use his office.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/16/us...gewanted=print

[Raz]

Re: IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

I feel like Bovard is intentionally trying to muddy the waters here. Whenever the media starts using history to sell an ideological viewpoint, you can count on them shading and bending the facts. When it comes to the history of the Kennedy administration they obscure, fold, spindle and mutilate the facts.

Well of course they do. It would have helped if I'd mentioned that Bovard is a Libertarian. Now I'm definitely "Libertarian" as opposed to "Totalitarian", and I hope you are as well. But Libertarianism in actual practice doesn't work for me; it's too close a cousin to anarchism.

I have great respect for you, Woodsman, and I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but it would help me if you'd single out some part of Leftist spin and "shading and bending of facts"; it would allow me to more easily see your ability to cast off idealogical blinders - and I have them, too - so please don't take this as an attack or a questioning of your integrity; it most certainly is not.

I'm a Paleoconservative who believes we must have an economy that works for everyone who's willing to work, that foreign entanglements essentially cede a big chunk of our nation's sovereignty and should be avoided except for those manifest cases where the VITAL national interests of the United States are clearly threatened (as in closing the Straights of Hormuz), and that to maintain this republic and avoid another civil war the Federal Government must be DOWNSIZED and the 10th Amendment restored, that is, the de facto Unitary System whose growth the Left and the Courts (through the universal application of the Commerce Clause) have fueled must give way to the Federal System of government the Founders intended.

And no, I don't dismiss the poor, the sick and the disabled; but I don't believe that "needs" can always be equated with "rights".

It's my informed opinion that Bovard is grinding an ideological axe with his take on JFK and his administration's effort against right wing extremism and steel price manipulation. Why else would Bovard try to convince the reader that there's an equivalency between the extreme right wing of 1960 and modern conservatives and the Tea Party? Consider his statement:

"...JFK signaled at a news conference that he expected the IRS to be vigilant in policing the tax-exempt status of questionable (read: conservative) organizations."

Bovard wants us to believe that instead of confronting the rise of violent and seditious groups steeped in radical anticommunism, white supremacy and a grotesque pseudo-Christian theology, JFK/RFK were trying to suppress protected speech by mainstream persons and organizations. The facts of this history are altogether different than what Bovard presents. The right wing (as opposed to the conservatives and the GOP - which at the time was a center-right party with divergent ideological factions) was titularly lead by Robert Welch and the Birchers. The JBS was the respectable front of the extreme right, behind which stood a terrible cast of characters.

I can't agree with you here. I don't doubt that Bovard paints with a wide brush (and he also colored Nixon, didn't he?) the point I took is that we are seeing what we've seen for more than seventy years: the abuse of its expanding power by the Executive Branch of government and the steady erosion of the Rule of Law by the Rule of Men. Clinton is a case in point and the poster child was certainly Richard Nixon.

In the days before William Buckley wrote the far right out of the movement, responsible conservatives tolerated a fair number of psychos for the sake of political expediency. Even Buckley for a time looked to extreme right wingers like disgraced Army General and self-described white supremacist Edwin Walker as a potential movement leader. Walker - who would end his days a bachelor with two public lewdness charges to his name - was so ideologically extreme that even Dwight Eisenhower had to censure him. Then again, for people like Welch, that was only more evidence of Eisenhower's crypto-communism.

The right wing that Kennedy sought to quell was not the American Enterprise Institute or Young Americans for Freedom variety, but rather the strange and dangerous mutations the likes of the Klan, the Minutemen and Posse Comitatus. These people were dangerous and they meant business. By 1961 JFK had been subjected to hundreds of verified threats against his life, 37 from Texas alone. Of course, they'd get him in the end, and so I think it's ludicrous for Bovard to argue that JFK was trying to suppress legitimate political activity by mainstream conservatives. He was after the elements that wanted him dead. The work of the late John Andrew ("The Other Side of the Sixties") does a fair and even handed job of detailing the development of the Ideological Organizations Audit Project and especially the experience of YAF under its scrutiny. Andrew, good liberal that he was, is critical of what he considers to be shortcomings on the part of the JFK Justice department and IRS, but he nevertheless states that YAF escaped the more pernicious aspects of Kennedy's effort; again, an effort aimed at counteracting and opposing the growing power of a seditious and violent rightist movement.

Good points, but I never saw the huge threat of the Birchers that you see. They might have caused a problem like that of the Ayers and Dorn types but they never seriously threatened the functioning of the Federal Government of the United States. FDR might well have faced something more serious.

And I don't believe I'm wearing ideological blinders when I say that the Communist infiltration of our government during the 1930s and 40s posted a FAR greater threat than anything the John Birch Society ever did.

YAF is a sacred cow in the minds of modern movement conservatives as it was the incubator for all the major players and institutions we know as conservative today. Maybe Bovard is just trying to score points for the home team, but he's distorting the facts of history. I'd let it pass, but then he does the same job on the Steel Crisis. I'll leave the details for you to discover in Don Gibson's excellent work "Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency" where he puts the responsibility for the steel crisis on the hamfisted antics of US Steel lead Roger M. Blough. After Kennedy had brokered an agreement between the steel companies and the steeworker union to limit wage increases in exchange for maintaining price stability, Blough reneged on the agreement at the 11th hour. JFK stood up to the steel executives, the Luce press (along with the WSJ editorial page) and the bankers behind them by using all of the legal tools available to him to reverse the steel cartel's decision to raise prices, including Justice Department investigations on price fixing, IRS investigations on questionable business deductions by individual steel company executives and directing government steel purchases away from US Steel and its confederates.

Having been accustomed to accommodating policy decisions throughout the Eisenhower administration, business executives were not at all accustomed to being on the receiving end of the hard ball and resented Kennedy's independence and dynamism. While the steel executives ultimately stood down, they never forgave JFK. Me, I think this was the initial genesis behind his murder, but that history is best discussed at places other than iTulip.

As I said, the media seem incapable of speaking objectively about JFK. Taken together, the distortions and omissions in Bovard's piece seriously diminishes its credibility. I think what we are seeing here is exactly as you say, Raz. It's an attempt to minimize the reality of what Justice and IRS have done by saying "everybody does it, so it's really no big deal." Maybe it isn't, but that's not what interests me now. If this is as Bovard insists, the normal and ordinary way business is done, then why the howls of protest against Obama? And why would Obama and Holder play along with it? Could we be experiencing a sleight of hand and subtle redirection with this limited hang out? From what, I wonder?

You're absolutely right about Roger Blough, and I agree that Bovard "overlooked facts". But I don't see the erosion of credibilty that you do because I don't believe he's writing a hit piece on JFK.

If the taxpayers truly believe that the IRS operates politically and not fairly then it brings into question EVERY PART of Federal legitimacy.
Chris Matthews made this very point last night and said this could be a disaster for Democrats in the upcoming Mid-Terms.

I believe the reason there are howls of protest against Obama is due to the loss of monopoly on news dissemination by the Cronkites, Rathers and Brokaws. They know that it can no longer be stashed away on page eighteen, especially when both houses of Congress no longer have Democratic majorities that exceed 63% as they did throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

[LorenS]

Re: IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

The tax law, as written, is discriminatory. It's so long and complex it's also manifestly designed to be abused.

Any serious tax reform needs to start with a clean slate. An adequate income tax could be contained on no more than 10 pages of single spaced letter sized paper in 12 point font. I have no problem with a moderately graduated income tax. The well to do expect more services than can be accommodated by a flat tax. In no case should an income tax be more than 40%. People should get the majority share of the fruit of their labor.

The major kink in income tax is capital gains. Inflation is not a gain and yet some people make the majority of their income selling stuff for more than they got for it.

[Raz]

Re: IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

The tax law, as written, is discriminatory. It's so long and complex it's also manifestly designed to be abused.

Any serious tax reform needs to start with a clean slate. An adequate income tax could be contained on no more than 10 pages of single spaced letter sized paper in 12 point font. I have no problem with a moderately graduated income tax. The well to do expect more services than can be accommodated by a flat tax. In no case should an income tax be more than 40%. People should get the majority share of the fruit of their labor.

I agree. Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society and are absolutely necessary for the maintenance of infrastructue, education, fire protection, defence, law enforcement, etc. I'm tired of the Republican mantra that "tax cuts cure cancer".

At the same time I believe that anytime the total tax burden exceeds 50% it is becoming confiscation instead of taxation.

The major kink in income tax is capital gains. Inflation is not a gain and yet some people make the majority of their income selling stuff for more than they got for it.

At a 15% or 20% rate I don't think it's the "major kink". (The average wage-earner who uses the standard deduction is being hosed.)
But increasing the capital gains rate to equality with "earned income" most certainly is, for two reasons:

(1) inflation causes ficticious gains that are then taxed, and (2) the money invested for capital gain has already been taxed at least once.

[vinoveri]

Re: IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

But increasing the capital gains rate to equality with "earned income" most certainly is, for two reasons:

(1) inflation causes ficticious gains that are then taxed, and (2) the money invested for capital gain has already been taxed at least once.

I've commented on this before; all "capital" is not the same under a fiat debt-based monetary system. While I agree that both (1) and (2) above do occur, they are by no means unique or exclusive results/precursors to capital gains. Borrowing "fiat money" and earning a guaranteed spread (in the case of buying T-bonds) or a speculative windfall (stocks, commodities) are the type of capital gains that should be taxed heavily (at least that of ordinary income). There should be a way to track the origin of "capital" invested: 1) earned income that has already been taxed and is put at risk OR 2) borrowed money or reinvested passive income where there is essentially no/little risk. Tax (1) at 0% and tax (2) at 50%. This issue with "fiat capital gains" based on leveraging capital that has not been earned and for which there is very little risk (note bailouts that have occurred - socializing the losses and all that) that has been doled out from a top-down central-planning monetary authority to those most connected is anathema to free markets and the rationale that no one will risk "capital" w/o low tax rates is just nonsense . Give me unlimited free money to roll the dice in the casino and I'll gladly pay you 50% of whatever I win.

[Raz]

Re: IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

I've commented on this before; all "capital" is not the same under a fiat debt-based monetary system. While I agree that both (1) and (2) above do occur, they are by no means unique or exclusive results/precursors to capital gains. Borrowing "fiat money" and earning a guaranteed spread (in the case of buying T-bonds) or a speculative windfall (stocks, commodities) are the type of capital gains that should be taxed heavily (at least that of ordinary income).

There should be a way to track the origin of "capital" invested: 1) earned income that has already been taxed and is put at risk OR 2) borrowed money or reinvested passive income where there is essentially no/little risk. Tax (1) at 0% and tax (2) at 50%. This issue with "fiat capital gains" based on leveraging capital that has not been earned and for which there is very little risk (note bailouts that have occurred - socializing the losses and all that) that has been doled out from a top-down central-planning monetary authority to those most connected is anathema to free markets and the rationale that no one will risk "capital" w/o low tax rates is just nonsense . Give me unlimited free money to roll the dice in the casino and I'll gladly pay you 50% of whatever I win.

Excellent points. You'll get no disagreement from me.

And neither will you or I live long enough to see any such equitable system put into place.

I hope we do, but I doubt it.

[lektrode]

Re: IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

I've commented on this before; all "capital" is not the same under a fiat debt-based monetary system. While I agree that both (1) and (2) above do occur, they are by no means unique or exclusive results/precursors to capital gains. Borrowing "fiat money" and earning a guaranteed spread (in the case of buying T-bonds) or a speculative windfall (stocks, commodities) are the type of capital gains that should be taxed heavily (at least that of ordinary income). There should be a way to track the origin of "capital" invested: 1) earned income that has already been taxed and is put at risk OR 2) borrowed money or reinvested passive income where there is essentially no/little risk. Tax (1) at 0% and tax (2) at 50%. This issue with "fiat capital gains" based on leveraging capital that has not been earned and for which there is very little risk (note bailouts that have occurred - socializing the losses and all that) that has been doled out from a top-down central-planning monetary authority to those most connected is anathema to free markets and the rationale that no one will risk "capital" w/o low tax rates is just nonsense.


Give me unlimited free money to roll the dice in the casino and I'll gladly pay you 50% of whatever I win.

precisely!
thats _exactly_ whats going on, isnt it? (cept for the 50% tax part...)

and the propaganda we're getting from the FIRE sector/wall st (and their enablers in the political class, ie: krugman and the rest of the re-distributionists inside the beltway, who continue to advocate for ZIRP, with spin from most of the lamestream media for emphasis) is that "without them, main st will fail" = PURE HOGWASH!

what - if We, The People cant borrow money, we're all doomed?

pure BS that flies in(to) the face of most of the past nearly 400 years The US (up til just recently, when the liberals/neo-libs - took over congress - uhhh... ok - throw the neo-cons in there too - they all in it together and pass the laws that dont even effect THEM, while continuing to screw The Rest Of US, without giving a damn about anything other than their own re-election.

TERM LIMITS NOW!!!!

a small r type

[don]

Re: IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

liberal lament . . .

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

[lektrode]

Re: IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

liberal lament . . .

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

ahhh, jess.... altho i havent seen the desert menu yet, methinks the main course here is simply purrrrfect:

and you'll just drool over the recipe:

Photograph by Elizabeth Renstrom for Bloomberg Businessweek

How To

How to Eat Crow, by Chef Melissa Perfit

So you’re just going to give me a crow? I’d probably slit its throat, hang it by its feet to get the blood out. Then chop off the head and feet, they’re probably really poky and talony. I suppose you’d pluck it. You don’t want to eat its feathers.
The meaty part of a crow is its breast meat. Butcher that, set it aside. We’re going to use the other part of the bird for crow stock. Gotta use the whole animal. Put the crow bones and the wings on a sheet tray and roast them at 400 degrees until they get nice and brown and crispy. Put them in a pot, cover them with water. Add yellow onions with skins, celery, carrots, and thyme. You let that simmer for probably eight hours. Crow stock: done.
Season the crow breasts with salt and pepper, and sear them in a hot pan with canola oil. Just until they’re browned, not cooked through. And by the way, crow breasts are tiny, so this would be quite a few crows that we’re using, or else we’d have to make the smallest batch of gumbo ever. You’ll need a whole murder of crows.
Separately, we’re going to make a base for the gumbo. Heat canola oil and flour in a pan. Let’s not overtake the taste of the crow with an over-dark roux, you want it to stir it until you get the color of peanut butter. Add in onions, peppers, and celery. A medium dice. This is the Cajun holy trinity, and we’re cooking Cajun crow. I add jalapeños to mine, and a spice mix with cayenne, paprika, chili powder, and some other things I can’t tell you.
Once the vegetables are nice and soft, we’re going to add that delicious crow stock, let that kind of simmer, the flavors will come together. I add filé too, it’s a sassafras-based thickener.
Then you add your crow boobies. Simmer that for an hour or so. As the gumbo cooks they’re going to braise and fall apart, so they’ll be shreddy and delicious. In my knowledge of crow breasts, that’s what I envision. Best to let it sit overnight after cooking. And I think starting the day ahead would be the best bet for eating crow, anyway, since you need your stock.
Ladle it in a wide bowl on top of some rice. Top it with some parsley and hot sauce. I prefer Crystal to Tabasco, it’s milder, more vinegary. Maybe some Worcestershire sauce.
The person you’re apologizing to, you’d serve them some crow, too. You made a huge pot of it, why not share it? Might as well have everyone enjoy crow. There’s no way you can serve it without a glass of Old Crow bourbon. And a toast; toast it with, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you all are eating crow.”
• Perfit is chef de cuisine at Hard Water, a restaurant on the San Francisco waterfront.

now perhaps we might even have a bit of Humble Pie for an apres dinner snack

Hungry Fran is always right, as we all know. But for you mere mortals out there, there can be times when your bold claims or aggressive statements are well, wrong. In those circumstances, apologies and back tracking can work, but sometimes it’s best just to make humble pie and get on with it.

Ingredients
1 cup of red face
2 drips of upper lip cold sweat (comes with embarrassment)
2 bunches of funny stomach
1-2 sheepish smiles (depends on how many people you are making the pie for)
A dash of humility
1 kilo of sincere apology
Optional
A long winded explanation (only to be used in certain circumstances)
A couple of eyebrow raises and a flirty wink
Method
1. Mix the red face with the upper lip cold sweat until the red face is cooled and the lip is dry.
2. Beat in the funny stomach and allow to rest for 2 minutes.

3. Add the mixture to the sheepish smiles.

4. Add the humility and sincere apology and cook for 10 minutes on a medium heat.

5. Allow to cool and serve with a couple of eyebrow raises and a flirty wink.
Note: long winded explanations may alter the taste of the pie and should only be used on those who have tasted them before and not spat them out.

[astonas]

Re: IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

[Munger]

Re: IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

I feel like Bovard is intentionally trying to muddy the waters here.

Welcome to Rupert Murdock's WSJ -- devoid of credibility since 2007®.

[astonas]

Re: IRS Scandal: It's Okay because they All Do It?

Welcome to Rupert Murdock's WSJ -- devoid of credibility since 2007®.

I've been thinking this a lot recently. The decline in sensible reporting in that paper has been very noticeable. It used to be a pretty reliable paper, if one with a pretty clear an unapologetic perspective. These days it's hard to find a piece there that's not steeped in bias.

It's a shame. We could really use a solid, investigative, member of the fourth estate on that portion of the political spectrum that can't easily be dismissed as obviously unbiased. But they're all slowly being taken over by extremists and/or shills.