IRS and Corruption

Seal of the United States Internal Revenue Service. The design is the same as the Treasury seal with an IRS inscription. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So we are all shocked that the IRS targeted conservative/Tea Party groups to slow down their tax exempt status, huh? Why on earth would you be surprised? FDR did it, Kennedy did it, Johnson and Nixon did it, probably the rest did as well. The only difference is that they perhaps were a bit more discreet.

You cannot have a tax system that runs 70, 000 + pages without playing favorites. That’s why you have a tax code of 70,000+ pages. First Congress sells special breaks and then the executive sells special breaks for whatever reason.

Oh, you thought the IRS was this objective group in an ivory tower that read objective books and never showed favoritism? Good luck with that. OK, I will say that they have been very obvious the last few years, like nobody could challenge them any more. Seems to be a lot of hubris going around in the Obama administration, I don’t really understand why, but there is. I guess they think they are going to be able to rewrite history.

Note that it could not really be anything other than corrupt by the way, if you’re trying to enforce that mass of regulations you, are going to default to the solutions you know, even if there are other options. It’s not really corruption, a lot of times, in my mind, as much as it’s laziness, and we are all subject to that.

But you know, Congress could solve this tomorrow, if they had the will. It’s called the flat tax. And in its simplest implementation, you replace all 70,000+ pages with one that says. “All income earned in any manner by any natural person in the United States, and it’s possessions shall be taxed at the rate of 10%”.

That’s it. Make a buck-send them a dime; make a million dollars- send them $100,000. And you know what? You’d have very few compliance problems because everybody can understand it, and therefore there are no excuses.

You did catch the rest, right, no deductions for anything, none, nada, zilch. Nothing is exempt, and nothing except natural persons pay taxes. And therein is the downside, and why it’s so hard to get Washington to listen. How many people, inside the beltway, make their living directly or indirectly off the income tax code? I’d bet on more than half a million, many of them lawyers, and many of them politically connected. They’d have to find honest work. But it’s the only fair system, particularly since absolutely everyone in the country has skin in the game, not at a rate that hurts them but enough to notice.

And to make sure they do, repeal withholding, and the employer contribution, make them write the check, then they’ll notice what the government boondoggles are costing them.

And as a by-product-I’ll guarantee that the economic activity will pick up as fewer people are worrying about the tax code, and more are trying to make a living.

And just to make you rest easy, you realize that Obamacare is approximately the same size as the tax code now (and still growing), and will be administered by those same fine folks at the IRS.

What could possibly go wrong?

Related articles

• Jared Bernstein: Why Should Any of These Groups Have Tax-Exempt Status? (huffingtonpost.com)
• Culture of Corruption: IRS officials in DC were involved in IRS targeting (riehlworldview.com)
• IRS Scandal: What Does the US Congress Expect? (thedailybell.com)

Obama Wastes No Time Dealing “Payback” To Energy Creators | The Strident Conservative

 

I’ve nothing to add to this, you already know who Marita Moon is so read and enjoy weep.

 

Part of the hope the Romney campaign offered was a comprehension of the role energy plays in the American economy—especially energy that is abundant, affordable, and available. He made “energy” the number one point of his five-point plan. During his now-unsuccessful bid for the White House, he met with industry leaders from a variety of sectors to determine what would unleash job growth and economic development. Those meetings, and America’s current predicament, brought about a transformation in his thinking and resulted in specific agendas designed to roll back the Obama Administration’s onerous regulations—specifically those imposed by Lisa Jackson’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Many of the EPA regulations, such as the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards for Power Plants and Boiler MACT (Maximum Achievable Control Technology) Rule, are particularly destructive to the coal industry. Understanding the deathknell the Obama Administrations’ regulations were issuing to the coal industry and, more particularly, the miners and their families in Appalachia, the region rallied around Romney.

On Friday, November 9, a coal industry newsletter stated: “In President Barack Obama’s second term, U.S. coal producers are bracing for tighter regulation of everything from emissions from coal-burning plants, to coal ash, to respirable coal dust in mines, to Appalachian surface mining activities. … One example is the U.S. EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, one of the most costly rules in EPA history.”

In her book Regulating to Disaster, economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth describes the regulations this way:

“The Mercury and Air Toxic Standards for Power Plants rule will make electricity generation far more complex and expensive, especially in the eastern half of the United States. It will require the closure of many coal- and oil-fired power plants, and placement of emissions control equipment on others.”

“Maximum Achievable Control Technology means that plants and boilers have to use the most stringent methods possible to get heavy metals out of the air, even if these methods cost billions and the benefits are worth far less—as the case with the new utility rule. That is why many plants will have to close.”

Furchtgott-Roth explains that the new regulations mean “higher electricity prices for these parts of the country, which are already suffering from declining manufacturing.” Interestingly, she points out that the “battleground states of Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Florida and Michigan” will be hit particularly hard by the increased electricity rates brought about by the regulations—regulations that a Romney presidency would have likely overturned.

 

Continue reading Obama Wastes No Time Dealing “Payback” To Energy Creators | The Strident Conservative.

 

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Islamophobia Part 3, Going on into the Maelstrom

It seems that I have developed a Reputation for speaking plainly, without pretense, to you. I’m proud of that, I don’t deal here in political correctness or any other euphemisms. Why? Because they obfuscate the truth, and only the truth is relevant to making the proper decisions for ourselves. our communities, our countries, our civilization, and our world. You also know, as I do that Evil exists, it is the absence of good. OK, got that? Good, lets speak plainly and honestly here then. Dr. Delacroix whose articles we have been following here and here posted one on his own blog last week that is germane, it is entitled, Levelling with Muslims. I am going to use a couple of excerpts but I do want you to read it all.

Levelling with Muslims

The Obama administration, as did  to an extent the Bush administration before it, and now even Rep. candidate Romney, all persist in not levelling with the Muslims of the world. I have some readers in Muslims countries so I will do it myself. I hope they will pass the word.

1 Our government pretty much operates within the bounds of a short constitution written and adopted a long time ago. It’s not just a fiction as the world’s mental adolescents tend to believe. It’s a reality. The main word here is “bounds” imposed on government action.

2 Our constitution unambiguously protects blasphemy and blasphemers.

What separates our moral tradition in that area from Muslims  is not a little ditch as American governments and the pussy-footed State Department bureaucrats would sometimes have you believe. It’s a Grand Canyon.

DOJ: Family Can’t Run Their Business as Catholics – John Malcolm

In our system, a corporation is a collection of individuals and/or other corporations organized to do something, it might be to run a food bank, build houses, run a hospital, organize workers in a workplace, or in this case make heating, ventilating, and air conditioning equipment. A corporation is by legal definition and tradition, going back to the early 1800s (at least) a person. It, or its duly authorized representatives, usually officers, can make contracts (which is why it started out that way), and have all the freedoms of a natural person. The Citizens United case a few years ago ruled that corporations have full free speech rights.

Until Now

The administration has decided that corporations do not have freedom of religion. These types of things do not come up very often because in the normal course of doing business, they just don’t arise. And in most cases of corporations the owners (stockholders) are so diverse that exercising most rights could actually hurt the business. That does not mean they don’t exist, they just are not exercised. You don’t have to exercise your right to free speech for it to exist. In this case we have a corporation (as I understand it) wholly owned by four people, which is not at all uncommon, even many farms are organized this way for tax and inheritance purposes. The owners are believing Catholics and refuse to pay for sterilizations, artificial contraception and abortifacients.

Here is the article, I’ll have a bit more to say at the end.

William, Paul and James Newland and their sister, Christine Ketterhagen, who together own Hercules Industries, have no right to conduct their family business in a manner that comports with their Catholic faith.

The federal government can and will compel them to either surrender their business or to engage in activities the Catholic faith teaches are intrinsically immoral.

This is exactly what President Barack Obama’s Justice Department told a U.S. district court in a formal filing last week.

Never before has an administration taken such a bold step to strip Americans of the freedom of conscience — a right for which, over the centuries, many Christian martyrs have laid down their lives, and which our Founding Fathers took great care to protect in a First Amendment that expressly guarantees the free exercise of religion.

As the Founders understood, no government has legitimate authority to take this right away, because it does not come from government. It comes from God. The very purpose of government is to protect this right. A government that seeks to strip it away from the people is by that very process stripping away its own legitimacy.

What we are seeing from the Obama administration today — in its attack on religious liberty — is simply evil. When government seeks to compel individuals to act against their consciences and to engage in activities that, if willfully done, would imperil their immortal souls, there is no other word for it.

The Newland family owns and operates Hercules Industries, a Colorado-based corporation that manufactures heating, ventilation and air-conditioning equipment. Through their hard work and dedication, and through their willingness to reinvest their own money in building their family business, they have managed to create jobs for 265 people while exerting a positive influence on the communities they serve.

The Newlands believe the morality the Catholic faith teaches them must animate their lives not only within the walls of the churches they attend, but literally everywhere else, as well — in the way they deal with their families, their neighbors and, yes, their business.

The Newlands sued to protect their free exercise of religion in this regard because Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a regulation, under the Obamacare law, that requires virtually all health care plans to cover — without cost-sharing — sterilizations, artificial contraception and abortifacients.

Continue reading DOJ: Family Can’t Run Their Business as Catholics – John Malcolm.

The administration is just plain wrong here, the owners of a corporation have a God-given right (as we all do) of freedom of religion, so does the corporation. The government cannot revoke rights given by God, that’s both common sense and basic constitutional law. The issue is exactly the same as is facing the Catholic church.

The other thing I don’t understand is where the government found the power to regulate any internal part of a firm. Firms are private entities (persons, if you will) the government has no more (and no less) right to regulate their internal policies, than it has to tell me I have to wear clean underwear everyday. You, as a stockholder, employee, customer, supplier, or anything else have a choice of whether or not you choose to deal with them. Their rights (like yours) end where you infringe on the rights of another.

Anything else is statism at best, tyranny at worst.

Are you really willing to sell your freedom for a free birth control pill?

Related articles

• Congress must protect Americans’ freedom of religion from Obama’s assault (fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com)
• Sebellius Channels JFK to Promote Government As the New Religion (independentsentinel.com)
• Catholic hierarchy endorses Missouri ill-advised Amendment 2 (secularnewsdaily.com)

Follow the “M” word: More on the “National Defense Resources Preparedness” executive order

J.E. Dyer over at Hot Air has some things to say about the National Resources Defense Preparedness Executive Order, and I think he is making a lot of sense, so go and see what he has to say.

Not “martial law,” folks.  Not that “M” word.  The other one: “money.”

Ed did an excellent job breaking down the few actual differences between Obama’s new defense-resources EO and the previous version from 1994.  Here are the two main differences:

1.  The Obama EO elaborates vague-sounding functions for federal agencies in maintaining defense-resources preparedness (Section 103).  Ed summarizes them as follows:

Note what this EO specifically orders: identify, assess, be prepared, improve, foster cooperation.

2.  The Obama EO delegates authorities under Section 308 to agency heads.  The Section 308 authorities include putting additional equipment in public and private defense industrial facilities, and modifying or expanding private facilities, including modifying or “improving” industrial processes.

Any time I see the Obama administration and “modifying private industry” in the same zip code, I get curious about who’s cooking up ways to spend taxpayer money on uneconomic ventures.  We’ve had that whole thing with the green-tech companies making out like bandits from Obama administration crony projects – while failing, destroying unused parts, and charging the military four times the cost of regular fuel – so it’s not like there’s no precedent for the concept.

And it turns out that Obama’s new EO did not emerge from out of nowhere in this regard.  The Department of Energy has become notorious for its funding awards to Obama cronies, but there has been much less of that unpleasant publicity about the Department of Defense.  Where Obama has proposed increasing defense expenditures, however, is in public-private partnerships to develop “advanced manufacturing” technologies for the defense industry.  A whole infrastructure of initiatives and organizations has been set up to bring the idea to fruition.  And a key due-out in each case will be DOD money going to businesses.

Continue reading at: Follow the “M” word: More on the “National Defense Resources Preparedness” executive order « Hot Air.

Knowing this administrations’ proclivity for crony capitalism (otherwise known as “Pay to Play“) I have trouble discounting this take. I just have real problems with anyone, even delusional leftists, believing they can cow the entire American population, that would not be ‘A bridge too far’ as much as about half a continent too far.

Related articles

• Obama: Executive Order 3/16/12 – National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order – Revised and Extended (nebraskaenergyobserver.wordpress.com)
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Obama’s War on Coal Undermines Manufacturing Jobs

Tom Borelli has an article up at Townhall on how Obama’s war on coal is undermining manufacturing jobs. He’s absolutely right on the effects, he might be is understating the case. What he doesn’t talk about in it is how disruptive the brownouts and blackouts caused by the shutdowns of coal fired plants will be. Like all of you, I’m learning things all the time. One thing I learned this weekend is just how destructive to modern systems the semi-annual silliness of daylight saving time is. Mark America (who is an IT guy, it seems) talked this morning about how much work this entails.

…Each year, in my own organization, the changing of the time results in a number of unavoidable failures among systems that must remain within twenty seconds of synchronization at all times to function.  There are manufacturing systems in which the time-sync is even more critical, but in any event, the organization in which I work requires one of we technical folks to be standing-by, ready to intervene if some system doesn’t make the shift in a timely manner.

Our systems experience a real jolt in the Fall, because whereas in Spring, we just lose an hour in our records, in Autumn, as the clocks jump back one hour, we gain those records but we have two sets of records tagged with timestamps from 01:00 to 01:59.  This creates significant confusion despite the appending of other markers, using sequential fields on records, because when we query the system for review of various events, we get multiple returns by time that make it difficult to sort out what’s gone on. Of course, this difficulty exists in Spring too, as an event that begins at 01:59 and ends at 03:05 will be recorded as having taken one hour and six minutes when it actually took just six minutes.  All of these things are repairable but it’s a good deal of work that my organization incurs twice yearly, and it’s really unproductive, lost, wasted work that gains nothing for the organization but headaches.  Frankly, I’m waiting for the Obama administration to propose bi-weekly time changes as a ‘stimulus’ program, given the uselessness of it all. …

Read the whole post, it’s interesting and in accordance with what I know.

Continuing, my only disagreement with Dr. Borelli is in attribution of Obama’s action to ignorance. I, following the old saying “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck” am coming to believe that the administration is not ignorant but malevolent, whether it’s an actual belief in the efficacy of ‘Green Energy‘ or a desire to take America back to pre-industrial conditions, or some reason not yet discerned, there are too many consistent indicators for this to be ignorance on display. As is said, “even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

After all that introduction read what Dr. Borelli has to say, except for motivations, he is completely right, and probably conservative in his estimates of damage.

President Obama’s glaring ignorance of the economic consequences of his energy policy will doom a central theme in his State of the Union speech: his “Blueprint for an America Built to Last” plan to boost manufacturing jobs.

Obama revealed in his speech that his command-and-control energy policy will now emphasize the use of natural gas to compliment his renewable energy push to generate electricity. Notably absent from Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy is coal, which currently provides about 45 percent of our nation’s electricity.

In classic Obama heavy-handed style, the President is using the regulatory power of the EPA to manipulate the free market to favor natural gas and renewable energy by regulating coal-fired electricity out of existence.

Obama’s blunder is ignoring the transition cost of eliminating about half of the country’s cheap and dependable source of electricity. Higher energy costs resulting from the shift from coal to Obama’s choice of electricity generation will drain the disposable income of consumers and, most important, be a huge barrier to the creation of new manufacturing jobs.

The EPA’s war against coal is already making electricity prices skyrocket. The compliance costs associated with the agency’s Cross State Air Pollution and Utility MACT rules are forcing coal-fired utilities to close and electricity prices to rise across the country.

Ohio-based utility First Energy, for example, recently announced it was going close six coal-fired power plants due to the costs associated with EPA regulations. The reduction in the supply of power is expected to almost double electricity prices.

An UBS stock analyst estimated the rates for power would rise to $200 per megawatt per day from $126. An analyst from a different firm predicted rates could go as high as $500.

Continue Reading.

One thing he didn’t mention is that manufacturing tends to be a continuous process. It is very disruptive to shut down and restart an assembly line. Modern controls make this worse because the standards of power for electronic equipment are much higher than what was used in plants before the ’90s or so.

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