We Have a Taxing Problem

It was disturbing to hear that the IRS wasted $50 million three years on several hundred conferences. Yes, the $50 million was extravagant but why are we just now investigating the matter? Checks and balances should have been in place years ago. The IRS cannot be squeezing every nickel out of taxpayer’s liability and then take part in a spending frenzy. It’s like the 2- pack a day father scolding his teen-age son for smoking. That agency needs a $50 million cut in their budget request.

I was watching the circus Congress calls an investigative committee, grill the new IRS Commissioner who had to sit there and take partisan questions. In a court of law the legislators would have been warned after an opposing lawyer shouted “ inadmissible hearsay judge” and the judge would have replied “ sustained” and I’ve watched enough of Law and Order shows to know. The IRS Commissioner or anyone else who works for the IRS  cannot comment on a specific case under the privacy laws. They can give an opinion to a  hypothetical question. Politicians,members of the committee,the chairman of the committee,pundits and the news media are not bound by any ethics. They can hype up the questions and answers to suit any agenda they are pursuing;and they do.

The IRS scandals has lead some to call for tax reform and a flat tax ,as if that’s going to solve the current problems. The scandals are unrelated to anything that can be fixed with tax reform. The tax-exempt classification can be solved by deleting the word “primarily” from the regulation and go back to using “exclusively” for social welfare and not a dime for politics.

This morning the panel of “Morning Joe” called for bringing home some of $92 billion,18 of the Fortune 500 firms who are legally putting away their profits in tax shelters abroad. They suggested that we drop the corporate rates from the present 35% to 25% and tax the sheltered funds they have out there at 5%. How many times do we have to be hoodwinked by corporate America before we learn our lesson? We tried that a couple of times and companies used the savings to buy back their shares and actually laid off additional people to boost their bottom line;thanks suckers. Corporations pay an effective tax rate of 17%,so if we drop their corporate rate to 25%,their accountants will find ways to pay an effective rate of 10%. We need a flat tax for corporations not individuals. Corporations don’t take their firms overseas because the corporate rate is too high. They get countries to build roads,warehouses, and supply them with cheap labor and weak environmental  and workplace laws. 
 
We don’t have to be a part of the uninformed who try to sensualize everything, as if they have now found the smoking gun.For example,Bill O’Reilly told his viewers that the outgoing IRS Commissioner had visited the White House 157 times, so something was up.First,for the first time ever in our history, the Obama administration allowed the visitor logs to be posted for public viewing, as part of their transparency agenda. The 157 visits were known several years ago but that number just means that he was cleared for a visit by the Secret Service. Those visits could have well been across the street from the West Wing because they share the same logs. The IRS will part of the Obamacare transition, so it’s highly probable that the Commissioner had to be there for important meetings.  Still a skeptic?  Jon Stewart has the answer for you. The first visit would have the president telling the commissioner to kill those conservative applications;the second visits would have been to ask how he was doing. In reality, not one of the applications in question was  ever denied and an application is unnecessary to hold yourself out to be a 501 (c ) (4 ).

Yesterday,the Young College Republicans stated the obvious when they submitted the results of the difficulty of  the GOP efforts to recruit young members.They started by saying that the Republican Party is "closed-minded, racist, rigid, and old-fashioned."It’s probably going to take another election loss before they see the errors of their ways. Right now, the party is holding out hope that they will win the 2014 off-year elections, so they don’t have to change. That’s why they have become the party of NO. They are still waiting on reinforcements, but they can’t decide whether they will be led by Chris Christie or some combination of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio or Rand Paul.. 

God must have a lot of patience because he's always getting involved in GOP politics....:-)

" Barely 36 hours after the caustic New Year’s Day vote, Boehner faced a coup attempt from a clutch of renegade conservatives. The cabal quickly fell apart when several Republicans, after a night of prayer, said God told them to spare the speaker. Still, Boehner came within a few votes of failing to secure his speakership on the initial vote, an outcome that would have forced a second ballot for the first time in nearly a century."

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/04/john-boehner-god_n_3381883.html