Glenn Reynolds:
At a tax symposium at Pepperdine Law School last week, former IRS chief counsel Donald Korb was asked, “On a scale of 1-10 … how damaging is the current IRS scandal?”
His answer: 9.5. Other tax experts on the panel called it “awful,” and said that it has done “tremendous damage.”
I think that’s right. And I think that the damage extends well beyond the Internal Revenue Service. In fact, I think that the government agency suffering the most damage isn’t the IRS, but the National Security Agency. Because the NSA, even more than the IRS, depends on public trust. And now that the IRS has been revealed to be a political weapon, it’s much harder for people to have faith in the NSA.
As I warned President Obama back in 2009 after he “joked” about having his enemies audited, the IRS depends on trust:
Should the IRS come to be seen as just a bunch of enforcers for whoever is in political power, the result would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the tax system. Our income-tax system is based on voluntary compliance and honest reporting by citizens. It couldn’t possibly function if most people decided to cheat. Sure, the system is backed up by the dreaded IRS audit. But the threat is, while not exactly hollow, limited: The IRS can’t audit more than a tiny fraction of taxpayers. If Americans started acting like Italians, who famously see tax evasion as a national pastime, the system would collapse.
Since then, of course, the new “weaponized IRS” has, in fact, come to be seen as illegitimate by many more Americans. I suspect that, over time, this loss of moral legitimacy will cause many to base their tax strategies on what they think they can get away with, not on what they’re entitled to. And when they hear of someone being audited, many Americans will ask not “what did he do wrong?” but “who in government did he offend?”
This is particularly true since the Obama administration is currently changing IRS rules to muzzle Tea Partiers.
As Kimberley Strassel reports in the Wall Street Journal, Obama’s negotiating strategy on the omnibus spending bill that just passed revolved around using the IRS to keep Tea Party groups silenced:
One of the biggest fights was over GOP efforts to include language to stop the IRS from instituting a new round of 501(c)(4) targeting. The White House is so counting on the tax agency to muzzle its political opponents that it willingly sacrificed any manner of its own priorities to keep the muzzle in place. … It’s IRS targeting all over again, only this time by administration design and with the raw political goal — as House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) notes — of putting ‘Tea Party groups out of business.’
Meanwhile, the person chosen to “investigate” the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups in 2010-2012 is Barbara Bosserman, a “long-time Obama campaign donor.” So the IRS’s credibility is in no danger of being rebuilt any time soon.
Not long ago it seemed that I was the only one who was worried about obama wanting to turn the USA into a non-free country, and I based it mostly on one video. I took a lot of ribbing for my stand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt2yGzHfy7s
Since then, obama seems to be acting more like a king than a president. Several different federal agencies have ordered over 3,000,000,000 rounds of ammo, and they are getting thousands of guns, and they are getting armored vehicles like the military have, and SWAT teams are in agencies that never had them before. We are borrowing more than we can pay back. There is a massive gun ban going on. The obama administration wants us to sign treaties with the UN that would give them more power over our land, and move people into the cities and off of rural areas. obama is going along with the Muslims every time, and against the Christian and Jewish religions every time.
Remember when obama told us not to listen to Rush Limbaugh, Joe The Plumber, Fox News, etc. Later on, he told us not to get our information off of electronic devices. Why does he want us to stay away from those people and things?
As I have mentioned before, I am no expert on history, but people who have lived through their country turning into a dictatorship or a socialist or a an Islamic country have told how that what is going on in their home county is going on NOW in the USA. I have learned to believe people who have lived through such events, rather than any or all American politicians saying it won’t happen to us.
Maybe that’s how it sounded to Glenn Reynolds but that was not what some of Obama’s most loyal syncophants at IRS heard.
They heard the ”dog whistle.”
It told them it was OK to audit enemies of Obama.
Being thrown under the bus was a badge of honor to the few of them punished.