The IRS scandal may have its roots in Illinois politics. Specifically, the 1996 U.S. Senate race between Democrat Congressman Dick Durbin and conservative Republican State Rep. Al Salvi.
More than a decade before his 2010 letter to IRS officials urging the agency to target conservative organizations, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin’s political career crossed paths with Ms. Lerner when she was head of the Enforcement Division of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), and directly involved in the 1996 Illinois U.S. Senate race.
Soon after the IRS story broke, Al Salvi told Illinois Review that it was IRS official Lois Lerner who represented the FEC in the 1996 Democrat complaint against him. According to Salvi, Lerner was, without question, politically motivated, and went so far as to make him an offer: “Promise me you will never run for office again, and we’ll drop this case.”
Salvi declined her offer. In fact he ran for Illinois Secretary of State in 1998.
But when he saw Lerner plead the Fifth Amendment before Congress last week, he recognized her. “That’s the woman,” Salvi said. “And I didn’t plead the Fifth like she did.”
[…]
Nearly four years and a hundred thousand dollars in legal fees later, federal judge George Lindbergh dismissed the FEC case against him, leaving the FEC attorney Lois Lerner — who was present and actively arguing before the judge — shocked.
“The judge said to Lerner, ‘Let me get this straight – Mr. Salvi loaning himself money is legal, and you have no complaint against that, is that right?'” Salvi said. “Ms. Lerner agreed. Then the judge said, ‘You just don’t like the way his attorneys filled out the report?’ Lerner agreed.”
Case dismissed, the judge said shaking his head and pounding his gavel, as Lerner objected.
“We never lose!” Lerner said to Salvi afterwards.
Despite all the Democrats’ efforts, Salvi never paid the FEC a dollar in fines or penalties.
[…]
After the U.S. Supreme Court decided the Citizens United case, many incumbent politicians became concerned about the activities of organizations like Crossroads GPS, which had announced it would be running issue ads against Illinois’ Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate Alexi Giannoulias, who was campaigning to succeed Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate.
In October 2010, Durbin wrote IRS Commissioner Shulman about the tax exemption status of Crossroads – a job that would find its way to IRS official Lois Lerner.
I write to urge the Internal Revenue Service to examine the purpose and primary activities of several 501(c)(4) organizations that appear to be in violation of the law.
One organization whose activities appear to be inconsistent with its tax status is Crossroads GPS, organized as a (c)(4) entity in June. The group has spent nearly $20 million on television advertising specific to Senate campaigns this year. If this political activity is indeed the primary activity of the organization, it raises serious questions about the organization’s compliance with the Internal Revenue Code.
Other 2010 letters to the IRS with similar requests from elected officials may be included in four Congressional investigations now scheduled to take place in the next few weeks.
Salvi says it will be interesting to see how Lois Lerner, Dick Durbin, the FEC, IRS, and Illinois politics intersect as these investigations continue.
The Chicago Way is now a national staple in politics, and it isn’t exclusive to one party any longer. Where are the calls from the GOP to abolish the IRS and bring in a fair tax or a flat tax that would replace a thuggish agency that has show itself repeatedly incapable of bracketing politics from its mandate? Where is the national conversation on why we even need an IRS?
The answer is simple: the GOP, like the Democrats, accrue power and influence — and enormous wealth, it seems — by dictating the provisions of the tax code, favoring certain groups, punishing others, and in the process creating entire cottage industries of tax specialists and compliance specialists who are capable of negotiating the tax code, taking the specific deductions designed to help the most important clients of both parties — all while the very legislators who created and continue to convolute the code decry all it’s “loopholes” in their never-ending thirst to justify the confiscation of more private wealth.
And now they stand OUTRAGED by abuses they themselves directed.
This is our country and our government. There is no reason that we need to have an IRS. As a free people committed to our own self-governance, it is our choice to have an IRS — and yet most of us don’t wish to have one.
So why put up with it?
The politicians enjoy the power they can wield by directing the IRS to molest opponents and harass citizens who prove a bit too recalcitrant when it comes to “getting their asses in line.” But there is no hard and fast rule that says that we have to elect representatives who support the existence of an IRS.
I’ve pointed out here many times that the easiest way to rob the left of its class warfare appeals is to promote an actual and true “fair” or flat tax — either one of which is “fair” and equitable in the sense that we as Americans supposedly understand the term. The left has endeavored to turn “fairness” into something else entirely — a redistributive model that takes wealth from those who’ve earned it and give it to those who haven’t, all in exchange for the votes and loyalty of that dependent class it funds by granting itself power to confiscate private wealth.
And yet the GOP doesn’t do so, even in the face of the current scandal. And it is a scandal, albeit one we’ve seen repeated.
That in itself is telling. But most telling is the refusal of the GOP establishment to actively oppose, as a matter of principle, the “progressive” tax scheme that Karl Marx himself proposed — not because the idea is unpopular or couldn’t easily be sold (especially in an era where “fair” is tossed around so casually and incoherently) to an American electorate that lives increasingly in fear of the government and its bureaucratic agencies that are beyond electoral reproach; but rather because a fair or flat tax will take away much of their power and much of their wealth.
And they live to be power brokers, first and foremost. Which is why DC is a kind of club unto itself — one that controls the rest of us while keeping itself largely above the laws it expects us to follow.
Go ahead and put me on a list. I despise this government. But only because it is the opposite of the government upon which this country was founded and around which the Constitution is meant to function.
Spit.
There’s a Chicago connection?
Well knock me over with a feather!
Ted Cruz: ‘Mr. President, let’s abolish the IRS’
The only constitutionally-ethical tax is a tax on consumption, not personal income. Personal earnings are time traded for subsistence and must be shielded from the State, all the false arguments about skin in the game notwithstanding.
We’ll get around to a genuine conversation about a national fair tax about the time noted Establican bloggers cease advocating for zero corporate tax.
Abolish the IRS
Paid for by Senate Conservatives Fund. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. http://www.senateconservatives.com
a redistributive model that takes wealth from those who’ve earned it and give it to those who haven’t, all in exchange for the votes and loyalty of that dependent class it funds by granting itself power to confiscate private wealth.
Taranto: *** Strangely, Kahneman never mentions tax withholding in his book, even though it is as pure an example of behavioral economics’ insight about loss aversion as the gambling problems cited above.
Think about it. The money your employer is obliged to deduct from your paycheck is money you earned. But because you never have it in your hand, or in your bank account, you experience it as a forgone gain rather than a loss. “You get $700” feels much better than “You get $1,000 and somebody takes $300 away from you.”
You experience a loss as a loss only if you find you still owe money when you file your return. And then you focus on the amount you owe rather than the much larger amount the government actually collected for the whole year. ***
<jawdrop>
My whole concept of Illinois politics has been shaken. I need to go lie down.
The IRS and FBI: Breach of Faith
JHoward says May 30, 2013 at 11:36 am
The only constitutionally-ethical tax is a tax on consumption, not personal income.
Totally agree. We won’t be rid of the IRS on a “flat tax” anyway, because much of the complexities and length of the tax code involve defining “income”, and not simply listing deductions/loopholes that would be removed under a flat tax.
Corporate income tax has to go also, because the corporate tax is effectively an unofficial sales tax, since “sales to customers” are “corporate income”.
Abe Lincoln, where are you?
FBI? Is that about how the FBI shot the guy who knew the guy because he had a knife and pulled it?
Only he didn’t, and didn’t, that guy?
This post reminds me why I so often donate to this blog…
Too bad that other supposedly “conservative blogs” read Hot Air etc don’t get it.
The left has endeavored to turn “fairness” into something else entirely — a redistributive model that takes wealth from those who’ve earned it and give it to those who haven’t,
Let’s be clear: a lot of those who haven’t earned it are actually quite wealthy. They’re getting subsidies and grants and “stimuli” and other buckets of cash from the public trough.
So really they’re taking wealth from those who can’t defend themselves against the confiscation and giving it to political allies.
Don Pardo, tell her what she’s won (and will have to turn over most of to Leviathan)!
I always assumed if we went to a national sales tax to replace the income tax, politicians would still get lobbied for and buy votes with various exemptions. I am not sure if they could write as complicated a tax code but, it would not stop them from trying.
politicians would still get lobbied for and buy votes with various exemptions
Hobbes: . . . a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
Madison: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.“
This is untrue and is among the most pernicious and unthought myths on the right. Should a tax be levied, it must be levied as far as possible, legally speaking, from the individual. Thus the corporation was and must again become the intermediate, buffering tax entity.
Pragmatic arguments — that a corporate tax is a personal sales tax — are also myth: Taxation is inherently a zero sum problem, and revenues of X dollars are simply revenues of X dollars, regardless. If they come from public companies, then prices from those companies rise in precise proportion to increase in personal income of the amount of personal tax savings.
Net result: No change.
The benefit of wise, fair, and constitutionally-sound tax policy is therefore never expressed in approximate terms of the predicted, pragmatic dollar impact. It is only to be expressed in concrete terms of personal legal protection and secondarily in terms of maximum possible visibility to the voter.
Adding taxes solely to prices for corporate goods serves both aims.
As a third benefit it plays some function in backing out of the other most pernicious erosion of American personal sovereignty — one also naturally missed by the Establican right diligently maintaining same — which is a reduction of crony capitalism, the disease arguably at the very pinnacle of assaults on a classical liberalism.
Only individuals vote. If you ever expect to have a constituency against tax hikes, your argument is 180 degrees off.
I don’t like corporate taxes because I don’t like hiding the tax within the price of whatever good or service I’m buying.
Also, I think it’s a temptation to tax farming.
I could get behind the fair tax, I think.
If they come from public companies, then prices from those companies rise in precise proportion to increase in personal income of the amount of personal tax savings. … The benefit of wise, fair, and constitutionally-sound tax policy is therefore never expressed in approximate terms of the predictive, pragmatic dollar impact. It is only to be expressed in concrete terms of personal legal protection and secondarily in terms of maximum possible visibility to the voter.
I’m sorry, but your rhetorical style is too indirect for me to parse accurately. I can’t tell if you’re speaking with your voice or making assertions from someone else’s perspective thus to refute it by demonstrating its absurdity.
Are you saying that if people have more money in their pockets (because they pay no income taxes), they spend more, which encourages prices to rise? That sounds like demand-side economics, Mr. Keynes.
If you levy taxes on a corporation, it increases the corporation’s costs, which must of necessity be passed on to the consumer. The buck always stops with the consumer, because the consumer can’t pass those costs along. All that happens is that the consumer has less to spend. Less demand for high-end goods, but not less demand for something. That’s much more indirect than paying extra for Intel’s tax burden.
Putting taxes on sales (“fair tax”) screws mightily with imports: we can’t remove the back-end taxes from foreign corporations, so they get the sales tax loaded on top of their costs, and they’re priced right out of the market.
What are you advocating for, again? ONLY a tax on a corporation’s income? ONLY a sales tax? What?
U.S. gubmint used to have to raise money without income taxes. What did it do?
Only individuals vote.
To which we can add, individuals are understood to possess the primary natural right underlying our political order — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (or formerly of property). To them (the individuals individually) we hold the primary responsibilities for securing these rights to themselves. And taxation is the nexus under our political order (and indeed, all political orders as political) of that responsibility.
tariffs which were great fun for the politicos to play with
– The existing tax system is a Ponzi scheme, in which the majority of middle and lower class tax payers are required by law to be the “late comers” who are legally robbed to keep it afloat year after year.
I’m saying that if people have more money in their pockets because they pay no income taxes, they can spend more…in direct proportion to the higher prices they must pay to the taxed corporation.
There is no inherent price pumping: there is no Keynesian effect, as ironic as it is to fear it here while not correcting it elsewhere, which is in the inherently unstable and guaranteed to fail US monetary system, another issue but a deeply related issue.
Which if taken to the extreme is the fallacy of two wrongs.
Tarrifs, and a tax on alchoholic beverages.
It’s no accident, as the Marxists would say that the ammendments for income tax and prohibition appear in the Constitution in the order in which they appear.
– Everybody pays 10%. Thats it. The FED gets 5%, the state you live in gets 5%. Done and done. It will never happen.
ernst is right, beat me to it. Booze fueled the country in more ways than one. Prohibitionists knew this and lobbied for an alt source of Fed income.
Incorrect as a justification for zero corporate tax, but yeah, we’re still screwed: Duties and tariffs are the answer, of course — which in a globalized fiat monetary regime locked in a monetary death spiral with both China, emerging reserve currencies, and its own simple abject failure is a compounded difficulty — but the alternative is today’s system and its post hoc justifications, none of which include the reality of this particular Ponzi structure we find ourselves in.
ONLY A COR — sorry, only a corporate tax. Failing that, which is absolutely assured, a fair national consumption tax, which is a tax on retail use of the economy and has no bearing on, say, homesteading. A flat personal income tax is an improvement of last resort.
Everybody pays 10%
Seven. Nice prime number.
We can’t have the State getting a bigger cut than God.
The other important question to ask is what kind of government can you afford absent an income (or VAT) tax?
That’s kind of a trick question if you think about it for half a sec.
– I reject that argument Howard. China, as well as any emerging countries and their monitary systems desperately need the US market. We just don’t use that lever like we should/could.
– Its a two way street we seem hell bent on making a one way street.
the inherently unstable and guaranteed-to-fail U.S. monetary system
The healthiest man on the planet will still die from exsanguination, regardless of how fit and trim and strong he is.
Which is why the scoffers are wrong that It Can’t Happen Here: I’ve heard expressions of faith in our industries and innovation and hard work, but none of that matters when the currency collapses.
Kevin Williams is right about a collapse destroying the extra baggage we’re carrying. But for some reason he thinks that Congress will finally see the light and effect meaningful reforms, either before or after it all burns down. And that civil society will prevail.
Wow.
Link.
– Talk about starry eyed dreamers.
BBH, the gravity of the monetary system’s terminally symbiotic relationship with unrecoverable debt, Socialism, the global monetary regime, crony capitalism, unavoidable collapse-slash-global currency, and the general disappearance of anything resembling original American structure regarding individual American sovereignty could not be more weighty and more pressing.
Bluntly, I don’t give much of a shit of I cannot save the piano when the entire place is burning down. The Chinese can go pound sand. (Which to be sure, their people are as oppressed as ours are.)
Why the right refuses to see as deeply into money, debt, power, and the collective nature of such as it does into human nature absolutely escapes me. We have this deeply bent perspective on money that says that not only is it durable, just, and reconcilable at the end of the next Republican Administration, it is all noble and good as long as it’s not government holding it or pulling its ostensible levers.
PS: Including State pensions and unfunded national liabilities, the US is up around two hundred fifty trillion dollars in the red. Including financial derivatives, perhaps approaching a quadrillion dollars. Think of this as the American lifestyle kited out on about seventy times the entire national GDP for 2013. Not including interest.
Ocean containers of those greenbacks shipped overseas are involved. Trade with China is not a feature, it’s a bug.
Zero Hedge: On a long enough timeline the survival rate for every one drops to zero.
True. On a long enough timeline.
And said no Framer ever in a somewhat shorter context.
Of course civil society will prevail. The only question is how long will it take us to rediscover civil society again?
I’m guess at least a century.
– I’m referring to the short term Howard. the long term is never definable….too many variables. All you have to do is study the lead-up to the war with Japan. And even there you can’t take it in a vacuum and ignore the events in Europe for decades before that. Ok, but.
– If you don’t attend the current systemic balances available to you, then when you come up short by your own failures its no surprise. We seem to always want to find some “honorable” way to give the benefit to the other guy. Its stupid and short sighted. There are no “nice guys” when it comes to wealth control, just dumb guys and smart guys.
When are you beginning the counting, Ernst? We aren’t very civil today and haven’t been for some years.
With all respect, BBH, I know you are. Sadly, Krugman’s premise makes complete sense too, also in the short term.
I’m referring to the great collectivization prompted by Never Letting the Mother of all Crisis Go to Waste. Without question the Phoenix will not be American.
“Tarrifs, and a tax on alchoholic beverages.”
Also tobacco and other goods. The amount varied from low during normal times to quite high during wartime.
The earliest major incident of resistance to the Federal Government was the Whiskey Rebellion. The farmers on the (then) frontier (say, western Pennsylvania) made whiskey as a conveniently portable method of getting their corn crop to market (whiskey weighs and bulks much less than corn of the same value).
Moonshine laws were generally enforced by the Treasury’s Bureau of Internal Revenue (“revenooers”), predecessors of the current IRS. ATF was originally part of Treasury, though it’s now part of Justice.
We kind of are at that indeterminate stage, aren’t we? Too far gone to be worth pillaging, not yet far gone enough to squat upon the ruins.
What’s a goth to do?
JHoward says May 30, 2013 at 1:10 pm
Not buying this. As long as we have any kind of “income tax”, even at the corporate level, we’ll have an IRS.
I don’t want the corporate tax, because income taxes pick winners and losers by their very functioning.
What’s a goth to do?
Well, I thought we were counted to be already doing it, whatever it is.
The only question is how long will it take us to rediscover civil society again?
Depends on who you mean by “we.”
Civil society can prevail in isolated pockets, which may eventually merge into larger societies, but there’s no reason to believe we could get the entire 50-state enchilada back together.
We only got where we are because of the specific historical circumstances, none of which are repeatable. The U.S. of A. may exist in a different form (different boundaries) in the future; and personally, I’d be glad to be rid of some parts of it.
First, it’s not corporate income tax. It’s a tax on profit. A semantic point but since income tax is tantamount to sacred around huge blocks of “conservatives”, it’s one worth pointing out.
Second, how would you expect either a flat tax or a fair tax be collected and enforced if not the IRS?
Third, your point about winners and losers does not compute. But I get that you’re not buying what I’m selling, which is the unacceptably radical notion that the individual must resume his independent sovereignty from the tax regime as an essential component of his classical liberalism.
With Bachmann gone probably you’re marginally safer from that now than you were yesterday.
I’m referring to the great collectivization prompted by Never Letting the Mother of all Crisis Go to Waste. Without question the Phoenix will not be American.
– All due respect right back at you, I know where you’re coming from. Your analogy to the house burning is correct. But the house is always burning and always has and always will. The question comes down to whether the players will go all in for self destruct or survival will kick in as it always has before. Sometimes it takes a war to quinch the flames. Sometimes the players recognize the buttered side of the bread and get religion.
– At this point its doesn’t look good, but how many points in history could we have made that same statement, but here we are, such as we are. Optimist or pessimist. Pick your poison. Personally I think the world has a mind of its own that generally decides its too big to fail, and things intervein, but thats just a studied opinion.
That’s all fine and good, BBH, but it’s inconsistent for conservatives to propose all sorts of reforms except when it comes to the biggest game on the planet. And by game I mean game.
Then they meander from incomprehension to justification to simple fallacy to defeatism.
As a long term goal, is the Union a Good Thing™, e.g., viable any longer? We may do just as well to break up into nation-states rather than perpetuate the host:parasite paradigm we are currently engaged in.
ma cat says fiddle-i-fee
What’s a goth to do?
Or, in an active sense, we could set sail to that distant, mist enshrouded and foreign shore known as Federalist 30 (and its neighborly environs, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 and 36), there to explore carefully and minutely whatever we may find, reporting back as discoveries come to light.
– As to the IRS question, we could have an IRS with a different nature. We will never be able to rid it of the collection arm. People will always try to game the system, but I refuse to believe we can’t contrive of some construct that effectively precludes political vandalism.
More thunderstorms sweeping the plains.
Evabody OK?
We’re OK here in OK. Stop sending this crud to us!!
True dat, sdferr. However I can hear the wailing from DC all the way out here on the lone prairie.
It’s getting cloudy. But it’s done that every afternoon at around this time for the past week or two, and it still doesn’t start raining until after the 10 o’clock news.
Which for the most part is a good thing, this time of year.
But I get that you’re not buying what I’m selling, which is the unacceptably radical notion that the individual must resume his independent sovereignty from the tax regime as an essential component of classical liberalism.
I guess it’s a good thing “individuals” don’t start/run businesses. Oh, wait…
how would you expect either a flat tax or a fair tax be collected and enforced if not the IRS?
How did we survive four score and six years without one?
– I heard a tax payer advocate lawyer state on a radio program this morning that approximately 35% of the tax payer base either duck taxes altogether until they get caught or seriously fraud the system.
– My first reaction is to go to the nature of the IRS and the tax code as the chief cause. Clean up both and that percentage would drop significantly. I see that as a fundemental problem . Rates and sources would be next, but first fix the system of taxation and collection. First things first.
Huh?
Without a flat or fair tax? Did we?
“First things first.”
i think slashing the size of the fed gov’t be foist
It’s nature is fundamentally opposed to individual liberty and property.
A lesser cancer?
Fix it how, when you imply it’s conducive to rights when its assault on them is merely better regulated.
Consider what incentives this will provide to form corporations that show no profit, purely to avoid paying tax.
Consider what other kinds of tax avoidance will be invented, exploited, and what kind of market distortions would result.
Maybe you have, but you’re not talking about it.
Consider what incentives this will provide to form corporations that show no profit, purely to avoid paying tax.
Consider what other kinds of tax avoidance will be invented, exploited, and what kind of market distortions would result.
Maybe you have, but you’re not talking about it.
We are already there now.
Consider what incentives this will provide to form corporations that show no profit, purely to avoid paying tax.
You like hiring on every shareholder as a consultant and paying them “fees” in lieu of dividends at the annual meeting? Consulting expenses being a legitimate business expense, and all. Not that I’d do such a thing if I were on a board of directors somewhere…
Stick a “mean” up there in the appropriate place. I’ve been told to be nicer in my commentary, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what they meant.
– So then, we are presented with an interesting and historic contrast. The American captalist anything goes system which abhores limits on wealth, at least in the abstract, and certainly in the nature of the laws and the legal system, and the Chinese Marxo-Facist complete governmental control on all wealth and commerce. For the moment the Chinese are growing and we are declining, but before you put your money on Asia consider the main flaw in the all control approach, namely the external market dependency that goes along with the iron fisted control.
– The long haul favors free markets, and should eventually prevail, but we may not be the ones that benefit for reasons already stated.
– Ironies abound.
I if I wasn’t clear before, in a system so utterly dominated by corruption and so utterly doomed to mathematical failure as this — especially to the obliteration of classical liberalism — the last thing any of us should tolerate is speculative, unsupported two-wrongs relativism.
Because by comparison to the status quo, it’s so obviously trivial.
Either on further reflection you know better, Slart, or you’re just insufficiently informed how bad this is.
– One thing to consider in the IRS question. Would it be better handled from the stet level rather than the FED. Would it be any “better” or even workable, and more to the point, how would that decrease political vandalism, if at all.
– They say all politics are local, maybe taxation should be also.
– stet = state
Cincinnati IRS Workers to be Questioned by House Investigators
State-level sales tax, submitted to the feds by proper constitutional federalism. The height of monetary classical liberalism.
But NO. NO HIDDEN COSTS FOR GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND THEIR DC LOBBIES.
the irs like epa is a redundant gov’t function
– Maybe if you moved it out of DC it would take on more of a “citizens function”.
I vote that we change the obsolete name of the Justice Department to the “Arbitrary and Capricious Transformative Enemy Fucking Department or ACT-EFD
The American capitalist, anything-goes system
That sounds like the Leftist caricature:
“Every man for himself!” (No: “Stand on your own two feet.”)
“Winner take all!” (No: “You are entitled to the fruits of your own labor.”)
“Anything goes!” (No: “Self-organizing system governed by the rule of law.”)
– We already know that at least a few of the cinn. staffers are going to throw the ball back to DC.
– Its a real kick in the ass to be lorded over at every turn in the decision making process, with virtually no say of any importance in policy, and then the minute things come unglued the king rats try to use you as a shield to protect their own asses. I can imagine that can make someone really grumpy.
– di. The free market system is an abstract. Greed drives our open markets, and thats how it should be. Without incentives nothing happens.
– The fallacy is that wealth exists as a tangible “thing”, and greed “steals” their fair share from them. Thats Marxist bullshit. without the greed incentives and the work and investment there is no wealth. The greed generates the wealth which wouldn’t exist to be stolen from their worthless do nothing asses in the first place.
– The pissed off slackers are always willing to go with the self-serving fairytale.
Any defense you make for the present system, dicentra, I can assure you is issued only toward the faintest vestige of free markets, sound money, and the best interests of the individual.
Today’s capitalism is the height of socialized economics. Absolutely everything flows to or from one top or another, whether directly or indirectly, by direct cause or eventual effect. I suggest to you that at some point in the last decade the more liberty-minded infrastructures shifted somewhat to places and platforms other than the US.
“All markets are rigged” is not a slogan, it is stone cold reality.
– The truth is money is being made, wealth generated, and the Left doesn’t have any bankable talents to take advantage of the process, so they use the political system to steal what they can’t properly earn.
‘Rogue’ IRS agent who wrote threatening letters gets promotion
– And layered even over all of that is what Howard just said.
Greed drives our open markets
Not greed: self-interest.
Greed is insatiable. Self-interest knows when to say no.
And yes, I know that we don’t have a free market anymore, if ever we did. There’s always some coagulation of private interests and gubmint power, whether it’s tariff manipulation or allelopathic soil-poisoning of the soil by the biggest trees.
And no matter what system you set up, someone will find a way to game it.
If we were to abolish all laws that touch commerce, the strong would plunder the weak and it would totally suck.
Unless you want to assert that a centrally controlled system is devoid of greed.
Or that the Chinese politburo isn’t driven by greed.
– The Chinese model is pure greed, but self thwarting through ego amonst the egoists.
Come right down to it, all economic systems are driven by greed.
Deny it if you can.
– I could be wrong but I think we just said that. Several ways.
– Nothing known to man works as a substitute for incentives, whatever you call them, and whatever they’re based on. That is what is meant when they say tha Socialism works until you run out of others peoples money. Aside from any other consideration Socialism has no future because it methodically destroys all incentine as a matter of form and policy. That being the case its easy to see why the word on Progressives is that its a mental deficiency that they can’t understand that simple fact.
the word on Progressives is that its a mental deficiency that they can’t understand that simple fact.
Are we assuming that Proggs want national prosperity or that they just want to be in charge?
all hail proggtardia
– They want free shit. Simple dreams from simpletons.
I mentioned a two-wrongs relativism where, exactly?
No, the thing that concerns me about this idea of yours is I am asking what could possibly go wrong? and you seem to be lacking in answers. In short: you seem to be believing your own press release.
I didn’t say you did outright, Slart. I observed that you had in effect.
Yet again, I see you asserting ills for a prospective system and alleging them terminally worse than those in a malignant known system as it plays its part in an even greater failure.
In other words, considering this system at this date — the perils and failures of which are all the news right now — the Terrible Enormity of the problem of handling corporate rules in the just tax system we’ll never have here in Criminally Corporatized America is for me nearly laughable.
And this is my press release. Right.
how does one get on the jho press release list?
– They want free shit.
And they want “their kind” to be in charge.
“I want a lollipop but only from MY MOM!”
Activist upset RCC’s new chairman is white, but on campus it’s a non-issue
Mother Jones Peddles Racism To Slam Food Stamp Reform
I chalk that up to your creative powers of observation, then. I’d cut out the psychoactive drugs, were I you.
Yet again, I see you playing Polyanna with an idea that it seems you’ve considered only lightly. And you seem to have this assumption in play that things cannot get worse. Dangerous, I think. Not that there’s any real danger, because it will never happen. And not that you’re even taking a swing at any persuasive arguments.
You know what? I am not in the least bit interested in dragging details, if such even exist, out of you. Particularly if you’re going to be a dick about it.
Will?
Let’s stop kidding ourselves and paying the accounting fees.
I have a confession. Most of the time I read JHoward ‘s comments twice or three times and still don’t know exactly what the hell he just said.
Says it real pretty though…
You know, skimming over the thread just now, I’ve got three, maybe four spot on, brilliant pithy comments.
Damn you Dicentra for stealing my thoughts before I even had them!
Well, Slart, I consider it a persuasive argument that you’re in so far over your head that clearly you can’t see the surface, finding that depth sufficient perspective to, you know, lie through your teeth misrepresenting me, calling that my problem.
My problem to beg your audience. Such as you surely must be. That too somehow being mine to cart around for your loftiness, waiting for instructions on when, where, and just how to dump it.
Tax accountant, are we? I wasn’t aware they came with thrones.
All you Republicans have a nice day now. And fuck this.
You keep accusing me of doing things without showing where I’ve done them. Please stop doing that. Oh, and you might also want to stop being a dick. I don’t know what your problem is of late, but it’s not a problem that I bear any blame for. That’s purely a hypothesis at this point, because you’re doing a lot more emoting than you are explaining.
I can’t understand this comment at all. It looks like English, but doesn’t convey any meaning that I can parse.
I wasn’t aware that we all had to have our accounting credentials to discuss. That aside, see my above suggestion about not being a dick anymore. It’s just a suggestion, though.
Obtuseness and ripping things from their clear context is being a dick, Slart, and then playing victim only adds to it. Look, I’ve seen you here for years. In this thread it looks like your dog logged in.
Yet again:
1. The tax system is broken and tyrannical. Check.
2. It is an unconstitutional component in a fraudulent, globalizing, and mathematically doomed monetary system. Check.
3. Right wingers adore both, bitching endlessly about debt and doing nothing to halt it: Bankrupt old school socialism is sacred. Check.
4. 1913 — the Fed act, the income tax and 16th Amendment, etc — was arguably the nation’s worst year. Yet as noted, right wingers bitch endlessly about debt and do nothing to halt it because old school socialism is sacred … and evidently old school personal tax tyranny is wonderful, especially old school personal tax tyrannies that do nearly nothing to actually fund government.
5. Return to only a corporate tax, thus shielding the individual.
6. BUT CORPORATE LOOPHOLES!
7. Bullshit: Any return to just taxation cannot possibly but include an inherent abolition of the present mountain of tax code, a tax code explicitly constructed, as Pablo points out, to jack corporations entirely out of liability.
It is patently dishonest to claim before the fact that a new tax code cannot collect from one cohort what it’s collected under pain of imprisonment from another for one hundred years.
It is patently statist to see the present system as just, functional, apolitical, constitutional, or durable. Or to see it as patriotic or “skin in the game”, or pro-capitalism, or any of the other idiotic arguments rock-ribbed right-minded Republicans use to bolster their holy patriotic creds. “Liberty? But who will build the roads?”
It is patently false to claim a dollar collected from the corporate state doesn’t have the same one hundred cents impact on the economy — plus and minus — as one collected by gun from you personally. Or to hold up China — and the utter falsity of the global monetary system that allows China to trade war the globe while we currency war one another — as constitutional grounds to allow these problems to persist.
Hard to believe this needs to be said so many times, or that resistance to simple wisdom and renewed constitutional ethics concerning the most important component to classical liberalism, which is individual sovereignty, is fought by classical liberals on the grounds that either it doesn’t matter, or there might be a problem on the horizon of a reformed system’s future, or that this nation can’t somehow collect from a simpler table of taxation, or that surely we need an unrepresented and unaccountable federal monetary and revenue Goliath to make the trains run on time.
And I’ll be a dick for expecting that any of that is somehow self-evident.
Charming as always, JHo. I’m always surprised that your patience and genteel manners don’t win you more converts.
I’ll ask Jeff to consider Charm Offensive to replace Protein Wisdom, Squid. Just for you.
For you and the rock-ribbed Republicans and their favorite statist excesses.
You’re welcome.
“5 . . . shielding the individual.”
This element is still incoherent with the founding and framing we seek to recover, I believe. It makes no sense, is what I mean.
The more the individual understands what he or she pays for government (and that understanding is better acquired by direct than by indirect payment) the better will the individual understand the connection between his or her needs in government and his or her desires or whims in government.
The better this understanding, the more will the individual exert themselves to select representatives who will constrain the government within the limits set out for it, and thereby preserve the liberty we prize (which liberty happens to include the function of paying for the preservation of itself — which is the main point of government in the first instance). If there is any ‘obligation’ to taxation at all, that obligation rests at the individual’s feet, owing to the individual’s sovereignty.
We harken here to Abraham Lincoln, where he said he would not countenance a scheme which said “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.”
JHoward says May 31, 2013 at 7:05 am
5. Return to only a corporate tax, thus shielding the individual.
As far as I can find, there was no permanent (non-emergency) corporate tax in the US until 1909. So these glory days when classical liberals roamed the Earth, and were taxed as the Founders intended were the roughly 4 years between 1909 and 1913?
Just because I don’t like corporate taxes, and see them as:
1> Horribly inefficient (millions of corporations [something like 98.5% of them] heap up big compliance costs filing returns but paying little to nothing in taxes while the richest [or poorest organized] 1 to 2 percent pay most of the tax)
2> Needlessly complex (when compared to a straight consumption tax)
3> A dangerous “victimless tax”with few to advocate against increases that fund (enable) big government.
and
4>A big disincentive to corporations to exist within our borders.
that doesn’t mean I’m against serious Constitutional tax reform. I like the idea of state-level collection of federal revenue, and would love to see the way the different states handled taxation, not that any of it will ever happen, of course.
Shorter sdferr: Since there are none better at avoiding undue pain than the tortured, torture away. For the education.
And: That part where you said the first wave of protest to entirely visible, higher retail prices under a return to taxing the publicly-held engines of actual commerce will be the individual consumer, JHo? You never said it.
Like I said — dick that I am for noting it — fuck it. These sorts of contortions are the definition of insanity. Because Lincoln and the 16th Amendment and like that…
…or the Personal Income Tax Act of the First Continental Congress.
Circular. Addressed 1:45 prior.
I invite you to begin by defining it.
JHo, it seems you’ve got a bug.
sdferr, I invite you too to begin by defining it.
I’m still wistfully musing upon my lack of an ex post facto comment editing function, and how useful that would be in holding these civil conversations. (but I’ll give a thought or two to that bit where I’ve insisted on a personal “income” tax, just as soon as I find it.)
Constitutional tax reform – the act of getting all emo and going off on people you would otherwise agree with most of the time and pejoratively calling them members of a political party they would seldom agree with at all.
I see. So you’re suggesting I’m responsible not just to convince that regained personal liberty is an actual founding principle, but — for fear of giving even more offense — to divine that those opposing it are not establishment Republicans while debunking fallacious claims about a reformed and apparently constitutional tax system more than once.
I’m afraid that that’s beyond me, as I’ve said. It’s just not worth it.
Howard says May 31, 2013 at 9:34
regained personal liberty
This is not synonymous with a corporate tax only system (which I now doubt has ever existed, in which case we cannot “regain” one), but nice try.
while debunking fallacious claims
Saying “circular” in response to a multi-point post is not “debunking”. It’s a Monty Python Argument sketch…
Anyway your initial comment was obviously spoiling for disagreement before anyone said anything when you asserted that “Establicans” advocated for zero corporate tax.
Classical liberalism celebrates your champion, mondamay:
Me: “…regained personal liberty…”
Right. Technically nothing is synonymous with a corporate tax only system except a corporate tax only system.
Yet I seem to read that 1) personal income tax does not conflict original, structural, and freeing American principle, and 2) that only a fool would conflate moving its burden to a publicly-held state agency with any improvement in original constitutional personal sovereignty. But I made a nice try, unfortunate as it is that I must repeat myself to attempt to be clear.
Me again: “…while debunking fallacious claims…”
Right again. Sending you back to an answer I posted nearly two hours before your challenge is my circularity, not yours. And that answer is itself fallacious because, well, it just is.
Declaring a future tax system based on historical precedent — and I’d argue constitutional validity — flawed in theory because it’ll invariably be saddled with all the burden and corruption of a current system, well, that’s logical and supported.
Of course it was. Because the best argument for more of the same tyranny is a counter argument gotten off to on the wrong foot per nonpartisan wage and debt serfs whose unexpressed political sensibilities are found after the fact to have been one of the first matters of decorum of debate. And this in a political climate and national dialog where the ostensible right is as vigorous in its stake-in-the-game defense of the status quo as the left is. I take it it should be far from me to notice that.
I’m afraid you do indeed have me there. Really: There’s nothing more that need be said, except to continue to point out, if I may, the fallacy inherent to that position, such as it is.
It’s fucking self-evident, and you’re an idjit for not seeing it.
<phonograph needle scratching noise>
Moving its burden?
Moving its burden?
That’s your overarching ambition about the tax code?
Of course, rejecting taxation oppressive to personal liberties and properties is foundational, Slart, and learned, classically liberal researchers are avoidably foolish for not recognizing that.
Sigh. It’s almost like there’s a prejudice against the foundations of liberty thick enough to obscure the last two hundred years and replace them with a fog of ginned up neocapitalist central corporatism, redefining it as Honest, Competitive Productivity in 2013 indistinguishable from or even superior to original American principle.
That would be awful if I had done that. Sadly, all I said was that it would present a different set of tax-avoidance incentives, and asked you whether you had considered those.
That would be awful if I had done that. But, you know, I haven’t said anything of the kind.
Try arguing with some voices that are not inside your head.
No, you’re already a dick for imputing all of that onto me, and also a complete dick for spending hundreds of words that serve nothing but to deflect some fairly basic questions.
Which you have already answered, in effect: no, you have not considered any potential pitfalls of your newly magical tax scheme that will never, ever make it into a Congressional committee.
Not that I care anymore. My only remaining dog in this fight is to get you to see that you’re being a dick. From the evidence, it’s a lost cause, but I’m feeling Quixotic today.
The tax code?
JHo is starting to become more tedious than that Warren Bonesteel dude ever was.
Are we still on about this?
I grow old, I grow old.
Shall I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled?
Do I dare to eat a peach?
Take a walk along the beach?
JHo, striking an indignant pose is unbecoming. Climb down off your soapbox and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.
You’re out of bounds for insisting on playing both sides of that fence. Try arguing with some degree of integrity to points instead of staking out your rhetorical victories by reframing those points as personal attacks on yourself.
They’re not, obviously, because you and it aren’t worth it, frankly. Or I can come over and draw you a nice hot bath and when you’re ready we can retire to the study to itemize more civily; your choice. But it is your choice.
Or is that dickish circles in dickish circles?
Okay, tax system. Tax power. Whatever phrase you prefer.
The burden doesn’t need to be moved. It needs to be dismantled. The power it finances needs to be starved. Slartibartfast knows that there is no tax scheme that will not lend itself somehow to being exploited, and those who wish to exploit it to take and spend more, will only be abetted by a tax scheme that does not directly burden the voters as individuals.
It’s fucking self-evident, and you’re an idjit for not seeing it.
Yes, well, I’ll cheerfully grant I’m an idjit . . . . . . but I don’t think that’s on account of an inability to impose coherence everywhere it doesn’t exist, let alone good humor where little but bile holds sway.
leigh, you spelled Slartibartfast wrong.
Deflect away, human penis.
You boys carry on.
Yes. And assuming that zero tax is even less palatable to the patriotic right than corporate-only tax, Fair Tax, and flat tax, in that order — with “patriotic right” not meant sarcastically this time — a corporate-only tax by nature dismantles the current code, reinverts the relationship between corporate America and the State back to where it should be, and dismantles individual tax liability.
Yet I don’t see Slart arguing that point effectively if at all, nor do I see any continuity between tax reform and a guarantee of a poorer, post-reform tax climate as the consequence.
That reasoning leads to one conclusion: That the present system is perfect because any other system is guaranteed to fail even worse.
“Dmitri! Your glasses are so thick, how can you hear anything at all!”
Addressing this from another angle:
Again, you’re mistaken on a number of these assertions — if I may own my intent and if you’ll examine what I’ve read with half the gusto you insist I expend divining from your stuff how not to be a dick — but the point other than that inherent dickishness I see flopping around like a flounder on deck is this:
That constitutional fidelity, its rational ethics, and their desired and intended outcome may be contingent on whether a “magical new” tax scheme shall ever make it “into a Congressional committee”, much less pass through it to a President’s desk.
In other words, political pragmatism. In all candor, I did not know this. In fact, I don’t see a dime’s worth of evidence that anyone here has ever held that view.
Look I don’t speak for Jeff and I certainly don’t want to mistake his intent such that I’d defile the blog proposing presumably unsuccessful bills, but unless I miss my guess that sort of reasoning — and hopefully not the intolerable dickishness of those opposed to it — seems out of place.
Like I said, I’ve read you for years, Slart, but I’m thinking someone hacked your account.
You’ve just finished (hopefully) reading paragraphs of meaning into my short initial comment, here, that just weren’t there on this side of the screen. Why not compound the insult?
I’m going to make one more try here since you have elaborated a bit, which I do appreciate:
corporate-only tax, Fair Tax, and flat tax, in that order
1>Reverse the priority of the first two options, and we’re essentially in agreement.
2>I don’t like taxes on any kind of income/profit, because governments gain too much power/control through the absolutely necessary step of simply stating what “income” is (which controls/influences behavior, and is why I say it intrinsically picks winners and losers), and then working out if you/corporations have paid the correct amount of it. Sales are (or sure seem to be) less ambiguous/contentious to define (not to mention fewer records [and fewer auditors] to sift through), and therefore will not require as much lengthy and dangerous legislation to determine.
I honestly don’t understand the historical taxation point you’re making, so I’ll leave that be.
I will admit, and perhaps this is most of my problem, that I think more often about what is wrong with our federal government in terms of the Constitutional role it has abandoned, and the new role it has usurped, than I do about specific tax policy, which I see as somewhat secondary (although still very important) to that issue.
Better question: How can I not? See, you insist I’d addressed you. I’d addressed the issues.
So let’s go with endless dickish insults for good measure, shake hands, and call it the voices in my head.
Way, way back in the thread, JHo wrote: Yet again, I see you asserting ills for a prospective system and alleging them terminally worse than those in a malignant known system as it plays its part in an even greater failure.
This in response to Slart’s questioning of whether JHo had considered the incentives for cheating that JHo’s proposed system might create.
Now, I read Slart’s question as a legitimate, good-faith effort to get JHo to elaborate more on his scheme, which I’m certain is fully fleshed-out in JHo’s mind, but is still pretty ill-defined for the rest of us (it certainly was at that point of the conversation). JHo appears to have read Slart’s question as an attack on his proposal — an act of opposition — rather than as a request for more detail, which is how I read it.
Thus we have the situation where JHo accuses the entire community of being a bunch of know-nothing Republican apologists hell-bent on crushing human dignity. When all I really wanted (and I suspect this is true of Slart and sdferr and others) was for JHo to provide a bit of detail to go with his sweeping assertions that he insists are self-evident, even when faced with a half-dozen would-be allies for whom it’s obviously not self-evident at all.
Looks like Bachmann isn’t the only one who can scare off a multitude who might have been allies.
Then I hereby retract my intent, Squid, and defer to the community for it.
If I may paraphrase you, I actually intended to leave my idea ill-defined, pounce on opposition to it thus stepping outside of the conversation, convert legitimate questions to personal assaults on myself, name-called an entire community in reply, refuse to refine and define my sweeping assertions, and should just join Bachmann over in the corner where she belongs.
Let’s go with that then.
Graduate of the Frank Nitti School of Public Administration
From an earlier link:
“Ryan is hopeful that President Obama will work with Republicans on corporate tax reform. “This is the one thing I think we’ve got some bipartisan agreement on,” he said.”
Luv the Chedder Senator but; C’MON MAN, unless he can exploit the effort (I mean to higher scales than the current rate) he ain’t interested in reform.