Politics, Government & Public Policy: May 2013 Archives
Leftists are quick to brush the IRS scandal aside as "bad customer service" while conservatives call for a special prosecutor to indict the obvious criminals, but what if they're both wrong? The actions of the IRS may not have broken any laws, and perhaps no one in the White House knew anything about anything. If so, that's even worse, and it won't be solved by a special prosecutor.
This column is generally on Kudlow's side here, which is to say that we share his outrage about the IRS abuses. But we're uncomfortable with his framing. What if congressional investigators, or a hypothetical special prosecutor, fail to find evidence of crime, conspiracy or direct White House involvement? Then guys like Crook and Scheiber will crow that they were right all along.But they aren't. This may turn out to be one of those cases in which the real scandal involves what is legal, not illegal. Obama's endless demonization of his political adversaries and lack of respect for the gravity of his own office certainly aren't illegal. The media smear campaign against the Tea Party was protected by the First Amendment. And the IRS could have violated the constitutional rights of countless Americans without running afoul of any criminal statutes in the process.
The scandal here is that an agency of the federal government used its fearsome authority to benefit the party in power. If it did so unthinkingly, that is even more disturbing than a criminal conspiracy.
Uh oh, another problem with Obamacare. Apparently it contains provisions that encourage employers to offer "skinny" plans that cover routine medical care but not surgery, hospital stays, or having a baby. Obamacare is exactly the opposite of insurance! Too bad no one read this monstrosity before it became law. Good job, America.
People buy insurance to pay for low-probability, high-cost and undesirable events. It doesn't make sense to hold onto enough cash to replace your house if it burns when you can buy an insurance policy that will cover that unlikely disaster.But Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has a different idea of what insurance is. In response to an American Society of Actuaries report that health premiums would rise 32 percent under ObamaCare, she said, "Some of these folks have very high catastrophic plans that don't pay for anything unless you get hit by a bus." ...
But as the Daily Beast's Megan McArdle commented, "Coverage of routine, predictable services is not insurance at all; it's a spectacularly inefficient prepayment plan." ...
People stuck with these policies will have insurance that pays for the equivalent of oil changes (up to six a year!) but not for the equivalent of wrecked car. Just the opposite of real insurance.
Elected politicians can be maddening enough, but even worse are the legions of unaccountable bureaucratic overlords that really run America. We need to drastically cut the number of non-military federal employees and reduce the rule-making authority of the uncountable agencies. Congress should stop delegating it's responsibility to unelected bureaucrats.
There were times this past week when it seemed like the 19th-century Know-Nothing Party had returned to Washington. President Obama insisted he knew nothing about major decisions in the State Department, or the Justice Department, or the Internal Revenue Service. The heads of those agencies, in turn, insisted they knew nothing about major decisions by their subordinates. It was as if the government functioned by some hidden hand.Clearly, there was a degree of willful blindness in these claims. However, the suggestion that someone, even the president, is in control of today's government may be an illusion.
The growing dominance of the federal government over the states has obscured more fundamental changes within the federal government itself: It is not just bigger, it is dangerously off kilter. Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency. ...
The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress's lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of "laws" governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations. ...
The judiciary, too, has seen its authority diminished by the rise of the fourth branch. Under Article III of the Constitution, citizens facing charges and fines are entitled to due process in our court system. As the number of federal regulations increased, however, Congress decided to relieve the judiciary of most regulatory cases and create administrative courts tied to individual agencies. The result is that a citizen is 10 times more likely to be tried by an agency than by an actual court. In a given year, federal judges conduct roughly 95,000 adjudicatory proceedings, including trials, while federal agencies complete more than 939,000.
Andrew McCarthy lays out a compelling case that the IRS scandal should be resolved politically rather than through the legal process. A special prosecutor/special counsel would focus on bringing lawbreakers to trial rather than fixing a horribly broken bureaucracy. If anyone broke the law they can be prosecuted for years to come, but an investigation now would likely end any hope of significant
reform of the underlying tax system.
Let's put law and atmospherics aside and try to be completely practical. The imperative in the IRS scandal is not criminal prosecution. It is political accountability: to lay bare what corrupt officials have done, for the purpose of swiftly determining whether they are unfit to hold offices of public trust and whether the system in which they operate tends to corruption. The appointment of a special counsel would undermine that goal.The moment a prosecutor -- special or otherwise -- takes over, the public flow of information stops. All witnesses will claim that the pendency of a criminal investigation means they cannot discuss the matter "on advice of counsel." They will cease cooperating with congressional investigators. The prosecutor will claim that grand-jury secrecy rules bar comment about the expansive investigation (a claim the government routinely makes, even though the rules actually bar comment only by the prosecutor, investigative agents, and grand jurors -- not the witnesses).
Public disclosure should be the goal here. It is the one thing that has driven the IRS story to this point. Public disclosure of the shockingly intrusive harassment of the president's political opponents, the prohibitive legal and regulatory expenses imposed on ordinary people for merely exercising their right to participate in the political process, is what has broken through the administration's Obamedia fortress. Yet public disclosure is precisely what would be lost if Congress were to punt its oversight responsibilities to a special counsel.
So the IRS admits that it has been targeting conservative groups for years. Duh? I was hit way back in 2009.
Instead of griping about the past or hallucinating about impeaching President Obama, let's consider the best possible resolution for our country. The power of the IRS wasn't abused because any of the actors in this scandal are particularly evil; they're just normal people doing what they think is "best". Don't get me wrong -- no one behaved nobly, but their failings were well within the normal range of human behavior.
Unfortunately, and inevitably, vast power wielded for good intentions leads to bad results. The people aren't the problem, not even the President. They're no worse than average. The problem is that the tax system is hopelessly twisted. There's no way for a bureaucracy made of normal human beings to administer our tax system in a fair and just manner. The system has too much complexity, too many purposes, too many rent-seekers, too much discretion, too many rules, too many holes, and too much history for anyone to expect it to function.
The solution is to execute the IRS. Dissolve the entire organization, repeal all the tax laws, and start over with a blank slate. A Flat Tax would be my preference, but it almost doesn't matter. Any new system would be better than what we've got right now.
The current scandal may have enough punch to penetrate the consciousness of the general public, which already has a low opinion of the IRS. President Obama is popular and protected by the media, but more importantly he's impotent and he's leaving office in a few years anyway. However much you dislike President Obama, don't worry, he won't be around much longer. But the tax system will never die on it's own. It will have to be killed. Take this opportunity to strike at the heart of the Beast.
(And yes, this post makes me nervous. If I attract the Beast's attention it could easily crush me.)
The Missouri legislature has tried and failed to pass a right-to-work law for a while, but now they're sending a "paycheck protection" bill to Governor Nixon which would have a similar effect, though more limited. Nixon is likely to veto the bill, and the Republican legislators don't appear to have enough votes to override a veto.
But the legislation, which earned final approval at the Capitol on Monday, would require public employee unions to get consent every year from members before deducting fees from their paychecks. Additionally, the bill also would require such unions to get annual written permission from members before using those fees for political purposes. ...The measure passed the Republican-controlled House in an 85-69 vote -- well below the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto.
The ongoing sequestration has reduced federal spending by only about 3%, but since "mandatory" spending is exempt those cuts all come from "discretionary" spending. The cut to "discretionary" spending is somewhat less than 6%. Anyone who has managed a family budget knows that cutting expenses by 6% is a walk in the park that should barely be noticed, and yet we're being flooded by doom and gloom from federal bureaucrats. I don't believe the complaints.
Jenny Brown is in her 27th year as an examiner for the Internal Revenue Service, where she answers peoples' tax questions. The IRS is a major employer in Ogden, Utah, where Brown works, but her co-workers are getting fed up and leaving -- and they aren't being replaced."We keep being told things like, 'Work smarter, not harder.' Or, 'Well, you're just going to have to do more with less,' " Brown says. "And there's only so much you can do."
As a result of understaffing, Brown says, wait times on the IRS hotline have quadrupled. And after more than an hour waiting on the phone, taxpayers get downright ornery.
These effects sound like they're caused by a cut of more than 6%, so what's going on? Presumably Jenny Brown's office has been cut by more than 6% so that other spending could be protected. I can see why that would frustrate her (and the taxpayers who require her services). Perhaps her office's funding shouldn't have been cut so heavily, but from the outside it's hard to know.
However, as a taxpayer it's reassuring to me that the bureaucrats are being forced to make trade-offs. If every bureaucrat was heavily funded and content then we'd know that waste was running rampant.
