… until the FBI bugs the West Wing of the White House, or the Treasury building next door, or the Internal Revenue Service’s headquarters a few blocks to the southeast, we might never know the exact origin of America’s tax collectors harassing President Obama’s political adversaries.
Maybe there was never an explicit order. Considering the threat of being overheard, it’s part of the job of the capos to know what the boss wants and make him happy by giving it to him without him even having to ask.
The IRS and the Obama administration are on the same page when it comes to big government: Tea Partiers and other conservatives threaten the massive state they love, and the IRS’ powerful army of bureaucrats is a pretty handy weapon for use against them.
…This is not a coincidence, any more than awakening with a severed horse’s head in your bed after being made “an offer you can’t refuse” is.
Someone — either within the IRS bureaucracy or above it — saw what Carson did, didn’t like it, and decided to make him pay. The American people must know who it was.
I find quite bizarre the repeated claims that the Supreme Court’s decision in NFIB v. Sebelius should somehow end debate on the PPACA and the individual mandate. Did the Supreme Court’s decisions upholding the Hyde Amendment or other limits on federal funding for abortion end debate over the wisdom or fairness of these policies? Of course not — nor should they have. These decisions did not dampen the debate over the underlying constitutional questions either. There is nothing inappropriate about abortion rights groups continuing to challenge these policies, politically and in the courts. By the same token, so long as a substantial portion of the American electorate opposes key elements of the PPACA, we should expect efforts to limit or overturn it. That’s how the system works.
Indeed. There are more cases pending, and if they reach SCOTUS, they may still overturn the law (particularly given the ruling that it is non-severable). It will simply happen on some grounds other than those previously argued. Also, unless Roberts’ decision arose from his being blackmailed (I wish I could be sure that it wasn’t), he probably learned a lesson from it, and won’t pass up another opportunity to strike it.
When it comes to the International Space Station resupply business, these firms are competing with governmental operations from Russia and Japan. Congressional defenders of the old-school government-operated space service are curiously disdainful of American entrepreneurship and eagerly point out how these foreign solutions can fill our needs while we compel NASA to build a Space Shuttle replacement. What these critics miss, however, is that every dollar going to one of our domestic firms stays in the U.S., creates serious jobs, and makes the most of America’s entrepreneurial advantages. Funding this investment in America’s future follows in the steps of successful Federal investment in jumpstarting industries that have included the transcontinental railroad, the Internet, and GPS. Such visionary investments have produced big economic returns that increased government revenues for decades.
A hundred years of the federal income tax. One of the most disastrous fruits of the “Progressive” era. We got rid of Prohibition (at least for alcohol, but then replaced it with other drugs), but we still have that one.
[Update a while later after the Instatweet]
Link was missing before. Sorry!
More thoughts from Dan Mitchell, who thinks that this may be the anniversary of the worst day in American history.
We resent being told how to feel, and we hope ObamaCare fails, spectacularly and quickly.
We hope it fails spectacularly because that would provide an emotionally satisfying dramatic conclusion. If Barack Obama is forced to spend, say, the last two years of his presidency contending with the undeniable failure of his signature initiative, that would be a fitting punishment for the hubris of his first two years, especially since the imposition of ObamaCare on an unwilling country was the main consequence of his hubris.
We hope it fails quickly for an additional reason: to minimize the damage. Imagine if the Post had written a similar editorial in 1917, after the Russian Revolution, titled “Everyone Should Hope Communism Works.” That would have seemed equally high-minded: If communism didn’t work, tens of millions of people would be made miserable.
Which, of course, is precisely what happened over the next 70-plus years. The Post might respond that that’s an argument against communism rather than an argument against hoping communism works. But when you put it that way, it’s not such a clear distinction, is it? The communist revolution would not have succeeded absent a critical mass of people hopeful communism would work. Nor would it have endured as long as it did if no one had an emotional interest in its perpetuation.
Unfortunately, many still have that emotional interest.
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