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Stephen Moore, former CATO fellow who founded The Club for Growth before Koch cronies took it away from him and handed it to Pat Toomey; Stephen Moore who then pontificates for the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board; Stephen Moore who NOW “is a Fox News contributor. He serves as chief economist at the Heritage Foundation“; Stephen Moore, who tells us what the Koch agenda is as faithfully as the weather vane on top of the barn, has a brilliant new proposal to parrot:
2015: It’s time to fire the IRS Stephen Moore / Fox News
Imagine what would happen if a retail store or company like Best Buy or Home Depot announced it has plans to slash customer service, that it will make people stand in lines for at least a half hour, and that any customer due a refund will have to wait several weeks.
Yes. Having just had their budget savagely cut by an “angry” GOP congress who continue to cling to the fiction that there was an IRS scandal over the widespread and blatant attempt to pervert the tax code to use 501(c)4s as a way of shielding “dark money” (a practice pioneered by the Koch machine, as I’ve reported SINCE 2006); having slashed the IRS budget to crippling levels (in a never spoken back-door attempt to scuttle Obamacare, since the IRS is required to administer it) , NOW complains that the cripple can’t sprint. To wit [emphasis added]:
Imagine what would happen if a retail store or company like Best Buy or Home Depot announced it has plans to slash customer service, that it will make people stand in lines for at least a half hour, and that any customer due a refund will have to wait several weeks. Oh, and it may not be able to prevent identity theft. That company would probably soon find itself in chapter 11 bankruptcy as shoppers fled to other banks or stores or restaurants where they can get first class service. That’s what America is about and every businessman and woman knows the customer always comes first.
Mr. Moore can be forgiven as an “economist” for not understanding that government and business aren’t the same thing. Mr. Moore can be forgiven as an economist for not understanding economics, since he works for organizations that don’t WANT actual economics, but want partisan “cooked books” that they can turn into Frankenstein legislation.
But we cannot be forgiven for swallowing such idiocy.
Mr. Moore complains that the IRS says it “can’t function” with a mere 4 percent cut in its overall budget, and claims “During the recession many businesses took cuts of 30 and 40 percent and they did it by becoming more efficient and cutting waste.”
He doesn’t mention that, because of ACA, IRS mandate has expanded SIGNIFICANTLY — the equivalent of say, expanding a retail store by doubling it, and THEN cutting the original payroll for the pre-expansion store. (Customer service going to crater? Duh.) Nor does he mention that the GOP House has made starving the IRS a priority, and that IRS has been cut to the bone in GOP years — for years.
Last summer, I was at a Pacific Northwest tax consultants convention, and I heard complaints FROM THE IRS PERSONNEL (not to mention the tax professionals) that because of cuts, the last “Eastern” field office in Spokane was being closed, so that in order to have a face to face resolution of tax problems, taxpayers and tax representatives would have to travel to SEATTLE from Idaho and Oregon, even though the field offices were much better for customer service for taxpayers, AND IRS PERSONNEL!
Congress has been doing everything in its power to destroy customer service at IRS as a GOP long-term PLAN (just like their bankrupting of the Postal Service) and have been working on it in every GOP congress since the Dubya “War Criminal” Bush years.
You don’t know that. You’re not SUPPOSED to know that.
The attack on IRS has always been an attack on the tax system itself so that Grover Norquist can strangle government in a bathtub.
Now, with IRS overseeing large swaths of ACA (Obamacare) the prioritizing of the destruction of IRS is seen as crucial to GOP long-term planning.
Why?
Because who — other than lamebrains like me — would ever defend the IRS from partisan water-carriers like … Stephen Moore?
Andrew F. Kazmierski / Shutterstock.com
If Mr. Moore had an actual case, he wouldn’t have to buttress his case with blatant fantasy assertions and non-evidence like this:
The IRS has been rocked by scandals of targeting, abusing and financially harming individuals and conservative groups it doesn’t agree with. Maybe it could shut down that division and use those resources to help taxpayers. Instead of showing signs of remorse the agency brass is petulant. The attempt to extort more tax dollars out of taxpayers is the so-called Washington Monument ploy and Congress should demand an immediate private audit of the agency’s spending habits.
That assertion is the fantasy that Darryl Issa spent years and millions of dollars failing to prove. Like Benghazi, there was never any “there” there, and NO ONE WAS EVER ACTUALLY HARMED — no one, that is, save for the IRS employees whose careers were destroyed over GOP petulance in the face of realities that the GOP refuses to accept as “real.”
And throws in this anecdotal “scandal” that wasn’t nearly the scandal painted, and came from BEFORE the first round of punitive IRS cuts, JUST TO PRETEND that somehow the IRS is mismanaged as a monumental boondoggle.
Let me tell you kiddies: tax collectors have NEVER been popular. Going at least as far back as the New Testament, when Jesus is slurred by the Stephen Moores of his day for hanging out with them.
But Mr. Moore’s bald-faced assertions of IRS incompetence and greed are as at odds with reality as is my business plan for a unicorn breeding facility and show arena: [emphasis added].
But the Internal Revenue Service now says that taxpayers had better get used to shabby service from the tax collection agency. And the IRS is hardly an agency known for warm and friendly service to begin with. Complaining about belt tightening budget cuts, this week IRS Commissioner John Koskinen lectured: “People who file paper tax returns could wait an extra week—or possibly longer—to see their refund. Taxpayers with errors or questions on their returns that require additional manual review will also face delays.” It says it will cut enforcement efforts to root out identity theft…. Congress needs to hold the IRS accountable and demand the firing of Mr. Kostiken because he has he admitted openly he can’t do his job.
You’ve got to do a whole lot of cherry-picking to come up with that jawbreaker of a pit.
No: what we can take away from this is that as congress cuts IRS services get worse.
Duh.
And as IRS services get worse, taxpayer anger at IRS grows.
Duh.
And that American voters are so stupid that they will blame IRS and the Postal Service for the drop in customer service that congress has engineered.
Duh.
And that Americans will re-elect a congress that claims deficits are going to destroy the country and HERE, have another tax cut.
And cripples the ONLY agency charged with COLLECTING taxes.
One upshot?
The IRS doesn’t have the resources to go after the REAL tax cheats: the Kochs, the Waltons (whose shell-game off-shore money laundering schemes are among the most conplex and choreographed ever seen, according to one IRS agent I talked to) and the other oligarchs who own this country and this congress.
Another upshot?
The continued assassination of civil society by the inmates of that asylum known as the GOP side of the aisle.
Mr. Moore remains the fabulist-for-hire he’s always been paid to be.
But you don’t have to remain ignorant.
The IRS is usually doing its job and doing it so silently that unless you’re being audited or there’s some massive SNAFU, you never notice it.
The Echo Machine behind Stephen Moore wants to change that. It wants to undermine (legally) institutions and offices it cares not for, and pretend that it is not a form of sedition, a fundamental abrogation of the rule of law, and the non-acceptance of the outcomes of elections (that they don’t like, that is).
The elections that they rejected in 2008 and 2012 but demand that we embrace in 2010 and 2014.
(You can’t have it both ways, but they insist that THEY can.)
Or, to quote the original game that the GOP seems to have modeled their entire approach to governance from:
Heads we win. Tails, you lose.
Courage.
Beware of any GOP tax called “Fair” Cheryl Casey / Shutterstock.com
NOTE: Watch the weathervanes like Moore for the new “simpler and fairer” tax code proposals, since no one has bothered pointing out that SIMPLER rarely equals FAIRER.
Example?
OK: All misdemeanors: five years in prison. All felonies: death penalty or life in prison.
Simpler, yes. Fairer? Just remember to beware of any “simpler, fairer” tax system proposed by billionaires. Nine chances in ten that it involves YOU paying THEIR tax share.
Beware of any tax proposal in this congress termed “fair.”
Because it ain’t.
Hart Williams, in addition to his reportorial background, is an Oregon licensed tax preparer.
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.