One of my favorite economists, thinkers, writers…Frederic Bastiat should be read by all.
Get started by reading “The Law”. It was originally published as a pamphlet in 1850. The Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEE), has many works available for free on its website.
Here’s a link to “The Law”, where Bastiat gave his famous definition of “legal plunder”.
So, happy birthday to Bastiat — and get started reading some fantastic writing about a free society.
You can’t have anyone that stupid be in charge at NBC.
Chuck Todd, who is NBC’s “Chief White House Correspondent” and also NBC’s “Political Director”, is out there mischaracterizing the IRS scandal. To blame it on 501c4s is utterly incomprehensible.
Yesterday on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown”, Chuck Todd gave this statement:
CHUCK TODD: Time now for my “Takeaway.” The controversy surrounding IRS may be more than a year old but of course we’re still talking about it. On Monday, the IRS Commissioner testified before Congress. A week after the IRS told Senate investigators that two years of e-mails disappeared in a computer crash back in 2011. While this certainly doesn’t make the Obama administration nor the IRS look very good, it’s important to remember what this actual story is about because it’s gotten lost.
The question at hand is whether explicitly political organizations should be filing as tax exempt social welfare groups under the tax code and both political parties are pointing blame. Republicans say that just conservative-sounding groups were targeted by the IRS. That’s why they want to see the e-mails. Democrats have responded by claiming, hey, liberal groups were targeted, too. But here is the story many are missing. Why should primarily political organizations get a taxpayer exemption, basically get a handout from the tax code? Both sides are in an uproar because they couldn’t take advantage of a borderline shady way to raise money for political purposes or launder money for political purposes.
So while the IRS is certainly not a good guy here they have been terrible about being forthcoming. Are there any actual real victims? Folks, this scandal is not black and white since frankly two wrongs don’t make a right. We know what really is working here for Republicans. Beating up the IRS, good for the base. Good politics there makes for great fundraising e-mails. But let’s remember what the controversy itself is about.
The problem is that Chuck Todd is flat-out wrong. 501c4s are not a way to engage in political spending. They are issue advocacy groups, and always have been — for nearly 100 years. Never until this administration has anyone had a problem with 501c4s.
The real crux of the problem is that the IRS attempting to try to turn issue advocacy — which is a first amendment, free speech issue — into political speech, so they can try to curb it. This was clearly evident in the recent uproar with the IRS trying to re-write the rules on 501c4s, which generated tens of thousands of comments in protest.
The short version is that issue advocacy deals with issues (free speech) and is not “political”, whereas advocating for a candidate or a party is “political”. It may not be a perfect divider, but it has worked quite well, and no one has even suggested anything better.
Proving Chuck Todd to be even more clueless is the fact that 501 c4 organizations do not really get any tax benefits from their “tax exemption”. All a 501c4 is, is a group of people pooling their after tax money to pay for a non- deductible expenditure. There are never “profits”, the receipt of funds from its members is not income, and the expenditure of these funds are not “deductions”. Just as there is no tax effect from an individual spending on issue advocacy, there should be no tax effect from individuals pooling their funds for the same spending. The IRS granting of 501c4 status is just recognizing the obvious.
Chuck Todd is either disingenously preying on low-information viewers to not know the differences between 501c4s and other tax-exempt organizations, or else he really is that stupid. Either way, he should submit his resignation today.
During testimony on June 23rd, the IRS Commissioner could not name a law or statue that he has reviewed to make certain no law has been broken. Rep. Trey Gowdy did the superb questioning.
From the Weekly Standard:
“You have already said, multiple times today, that there was no evidence that you found of any criminal wrongdoing,” Gowdy said. “I want you to tell me: What criminal statutes you have evaluated?”
“I have not looked at any,” the IRS commissioner admitted.
“Well then how can you possibly tell our fellow citizens that there is no criminal wrongdoing if you don’t even know what statutes to look at?” Gowdy followed-up.
“Because I’ve seen no evidence that anyone consciously –”
“Well how would you know what elements of the crime existed? You don’t even know what statutes are in play,” Gowdy said, visibly annoyed. “I’m going to ask you again: What statutes have you evaluated?”
“Uh,” the IRS commissioner stumbled, “I think you can rely on common sense–”
“Common sense? Instead of the criminal code, you want to rely on common sense? No, Mr. Koskinen, you can shake your head all you want to, commissioner. You have said today that there’s no evidence of criminal wrongdoing and I’m asking you what criminal statutes you have reviewed to reach that conclusion.”
“I reviewed no criminal statutes,” said the IRS commissioner.
You can watch the testimony here:
Even though the IRS claims it lost all of Lerner’s emails due to a hard drive crash, as least some of those appear at some point to have been archived (the ones from 2009): As reported,
“House congressional investigators have requested emails from 2009 to 2011, when the IRS division led by Lerner began targeting for extra scrutiny Tea Party and other conservative nonprofits applying for tax-exempt status.
The IRS had a contract with email-achiever Sonasoft in effect at least through 2009, according to the website FedSpending.org.
That same year, the company tweeted: “The IRS uses Sonasoft to back up their servers, why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”
And a document on the company website suggests its system “archives all email content and so reduces the risk of non-compliance with legal, regulatory and other obligations to preserve critical business content.”
However, whether Sonasoft’s government contract extended through 2011 or if the company had the capacity to save every email from such a large agency remains unclear.”
The saga continues.
In sworn testimony this morning (Friday, June 20th) IRS Commissioner John Koskinen stated that Obama was told about Lerner’s emails in April. This would be 6 weeks before Congress was told.
“The IRS knew in February, or maybe even in March, and Treasury and the White House knew at least in April — but Congress and the American people didn’t find out until June.”
Congress received a letter from the White House on Wednesday informing them they knew about the emails in April, having been informed by the Treasury Department. IRS head, Koskinen, stated he had seen the letter as well.
“He said his “understanding” is that someone in the IRS general counsel’s office informed someone in the Treasury Department’s general counsel office “that there was an issue and the IRS was investigating.”
And yet, in March “Mr. Koskinen told the House Oversight Committee in March, “if you want them all, we’ll give them all to you, though he added that doing so might take years”.
This is worse than Watergate, indeed.
Yesterday the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, painted a picture of class warfare, claiming his side does not have any billionaires.
“The decisions by the Supreme Court have left the American people with the status quo in which one side’s billionaires are pitted against the other side’s billionaires,” he said this morning on the Senate floor. “Except one side doesn’t have any billionaires.”
Here’s the video:
Seems Harry Reid conveniently forgets:
George Soros
Tom Steyer
Ann Cox Chambers
Irwin Jacobs
Ron Burkle
Marc Benioff
Penny Pritzker
James Simons
David Shaw
Jon Stryker
Haim Saban
Who are we missing? Fill in the comments section below!
Now we’ve gone from yes, we have emails —> no we don’t have emails because of a computer crash —-> the hard drive may have been recycled. Politico reports:
“Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightning rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources.
What’s more, “On Wednesday, the White House retorted that for the time frame in which Lerner’s emails are missing, there are no direct communications between 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and the now-retired Lerner.
Earlier this week, Ways and Means Republicans said as many as six IRS employees involved in the scandal also lost email in computer crashes, including the former chief of staff for the acting IRS commissioner”
The WSJ calls this IRS Scandal “worse than Watergate“. ““The Watergate break-in was the professionals of the party in power going after the party professionals of the party out of power. The IRS scandal is the party in power going after the most average Americans imaginable”
At this point, I’m inclined to agree.
Did a failed medical scheduling project at the VA contribute to the development of “secret waiting lists”?
At least one attempt to implement a scheduling system at the VA never got off the ground after nearly a decade of trying.
Apparently a medical scheduling project for the VA was begun in 2000 and was discontinued in 2009, 9 years after it the project began — and it remained utterly unfinished. Nothing seems to have been done for another 3 years until 2012, when the Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs launched a contest to create an app for scheduling — a contest which didn’t close until the summer of 2013. Was it during this interim time between scheduling systems that the practice of “secret lists” began as a coverup/bandaid for the problem?
According to a press release in 2013 announcing the winners in the “scheduling app” contest, it was noted that the “VA started to develop a Medical Scheduling Package replacement in 2000. This effort was not successful. When VA ended the project in 2009, none of the planned capabilities were delivered. It had cost more than $127 million”.
So, was used at the VA between the end of the Medical Scheduling Package project in 2009 and the Medical Scheduling App Contest of 2012/2013?
We now know there were secret waiting lists as some of the facilities. It also appears the the Obama Administration knew about the “secret waiting lists” as early as 2010. The Daily Caller reports that there was an internal VA investigation in 2010 regarding “paper” waiting lists:
“We conducted this review to determine the validity of an allegation that senior officials in Veterans Integrated Service Network 20 (VISN) instructed employees at the Portland VA Medical Center to use unauthorized wait lists to hide access and scheduling problems,” according to an August 17, 2010 VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) report entitled “Review of Alleged Use of Unauthorized Wait Lists at the Portland VA Medical Center”
Underfunding the Department of Veterans Affairs is not the problem. From 2007 to 2012, enrollment in VA services has increased by 13% from 2007 to 2012. At the same time, the VA budget went from $82 million to $125 million — a 53% increase, and the biggest jump in the VA’s budget history since records go back to 1940. The failed Medical Scheduling Package project alone cost $127 million dollars.
$127 million is a lot of taxpayer monies that could have been used on veterans’ treatments. Yet even with a generous budget, the VA could not deliver quality services to our Veterans.
I joined the Tea Party in my locality when it began because I sincerely believed in its simple, but extremely powerful and direct message:
Low Taxes
Limited, Constitutional Government
Individual liberty
and nothing else. The Tea Party was not to be a political “Party” with positions on every subject under the sun. It would only be involved in its particular concerns, so as not to dilute its message.
Then what is this nonsense regarding certain Tea Party groups espousing substantial anti-immigration rhetoric?
How can someone espousing limited government, individual liberty, and rule of law be FOR crony capital government-imposed restrictions on businesses hiring who they want?
And with that, a large reason for such a high number of “illegal” immigrants is because the government has created arbitrary, low quotas which limit the amount of foreign-born workers allowed — though many sectors of our economy demand more.
The current Tea Party was galvanized by the original (Boston) Tea Party and share a same disdain over high and unjust taxation. But the original “tea partiers” would be turning over in their graves by being associated with the current Tea Party’s anti immigration stance!
Our colonists came to America for a variety of reasons ranging from freedom of religion to economic opportunity and wealth. They sought hope, prosperity, and freedom. They were the original immigrants.
America is a unique country because men, women, and children from other countries all want to come here. Unless you have a relationship to a US citizen or a permanent resident, the only way to be able to come here is through a job by being a skilled laborer or professional. This is a good thing.
We are getting the creme de la creme from other countries — and we want to say no to them? Here we have people who work and are motivated enough to uproot and better themselves by living in another country. That is the best kind of ethic we need to continue to nourish and aspire to America, the way we always have.
As for those who flee here from oppression: if their only crime is that they seek a better life, decent housing, food, and hygiene and they risk life and limb to come here, how can we turn that spirit away?
The current Tea Party would do well to remember that this country has survived and thrived precisely because of immigration; first, from the original colonists and second, from the wave of people who came here mainly during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
You are here because of an immigrant who believed in America. For the Tea Party to be closed-minded and protectionist on the issue of immigration flies in the face of the original Tea Partiers who inspired them.
From Committee on Ways and Means Chairman, Dave Camp:
“Due to a supposed computer crash, the agency only has Lerner emails to and from other IRS employees during this time frame. The IRS claims it cannot produce emails written only to or from Lerner and outside agencies or groups, such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices”.
This revelation comes a year after the IRS scandal broke. Commissioner Koskinen stated that he would turn over all documents pertaining to Lois Lerner. The time frame of the lost documents cover January 2009 – April 2011, a critical time relating to the scandal.
But wait. National Review Online reported just a few days ago that in October 2010, (squarely during the time frame of the lost emails),
“[the IRS] sent a database on 501(c)(4) social-welfare groups containing confidential taxpayer information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to documents obtained by a House panel. The information was transmitted in advance of former IRS official Lois Lerner’s meeting the same month with Justice Department officials about the possibility of using campaign-finance laws to prosecute certain nonprofit groups. E-mails between Lerner and Richard Pilger, the director of the Justice Department’s election-crimes branch, obtained through a subpoena to Attorney General Eric Holder, show Lerner asking about the format in which the FBI preferred the data to be sent”.
.
Emails. Between Lerner and an outside agency. In 2010.
Additionally, last month, Katie Pavlich reported that, “According to new IRS emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request from Judicial Watch, former head of tax exempt groups at the IRS Lois Lerner was in contact with the Department of Justice in May 2013 about whether tax exempt groups could be criminally prosecuted for “lying” about political activity”.
So we know Lerner communicated with an outside agency in 2013. Here’s another one in 2012:
It also came to light in April that “House Oversight Committee show staff working for Democratic Ranking Member Elijah Cummings communicated with the IRS multiple times between 2012 and 2013 about voter fraud prevention group True the Vote. True the Vote was targeted by the IRS after applying for tax exempt status more than two years ago. Further, information shows the IRS and Cummings’ staff asked for nearly identical information from True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht about her organization, indicating coordination and improper sharing of confidential taxpayer information”.
But we don’t know anything about 2009 – 2011. Except at some point, emails did exist. WHOOPS!
Flashback: Remember the TIGTA report? You can read the entire Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, (TIGTA) timeline report here. Incredibly, this report, released in May 2013, names “email” as the source for much of their timeline documenting events in 2010 and 2011, but possibly now, those emails are “lost”. 16 out of the 26 non-redacted events in that timeline refer to “email” as the source. Take a look. And, what was redacted? We don’t know.
Again, the IRS claims it only “has Lerner emails to and from other IRS employees during this time frame…it cannot produce emails written only to or from Lerner and outside agencies or groups, such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.” The ability for an inbox to lose certain emails during the time frame — but not others — is incredible.
David Camp hits the nail on the head when he notes that, “because of this loss of documents, we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone”.
See how it works? Since the IRS cannot produce any hardcopy evidence of corroboration, the Obama Administration and its agencies are conveniently spared.