IRS frequently used as tool to silence political enemies

Gail Russell Chaddock of CSMonitor didn't have a problem blaming Calvin Coolidge for the wrongdoing of his subordinates in her "Playing the IRS card: Six presidents who used the IRS to bash political foes"

"There's no evidence that President Coolidge personally directed the IRS to punish political enemies. But his Treasury secretary – banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon – had no such scruples."

Presumably CSMonitor was applying Truman's actual "buck stops with me" 






vs  Obama's "buck stops with you" slogan to slag off Coolidge:




In fairness, even though Obama seems to have gotten his prepositions mixed up, he nevertheless seems to have relayed the spirit if not the letter of Truman's quote, from 13 July 2012 Daniel Harper Weekly Standard article: "Obama: 'Harry Truman Said the Buck Stops with You'"

" Well, here's what I know, we were just talking about responsibility and as president of the United States, it's pretty clear to me that I'm responsible for folks who are working in the federal government and you know, Harry Truman said the buck stops with you."
 

 However, ABC, not surprisingly, rejects this guilt by association, guilty until proven innocent bias when describing Obama's scandal from their 15 May 2013 story "IRS Has Long History of Political Dirty Tricks" :

"Nobody has shown that Obama had anything to do with this. We do not know if that's true or not. That's one of the mysteries that undoubtedly will come to light," he told ABC News."

I might agree w/ABC's conclusion, except Democrats and their media are stonewalling any investigation to determine if Obama, like his predecessors, were responsible for his subordinates actions. As you're taught in the military: "You can delegate authority but you can never delegate responsibility."

But I ultimately agree with WashingtonsBlog 22 May 2013 post: "The IRS Targets Political Opponents Under Both Liberal and Conservative Administrations"

"Obviously, the fact that 'everyone does it' is no defense. No one should do it … And anyone who does should be prosecuted."

I suppose in defense of Obama's IRS henchwoman, Lois Lerner, she at least has of late taken a slightly more ethical course of action by only taking the 5th Amendment vs point blank lying, as her predecessors apparently felt entitled in doing, from James Bovard's 14 May 2013 WSJ article: "A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting":

"The IRS has usually done an excellent job of stifling investigations of its practices. A 1991 survey of 800 IRS executives and managers by the nonprofit Josephson Institute of Ethics revealed that three out of four respondents felt entitled to deceive or lie when testifying before a congressional committee."

#Obamacare is NOT free health care!!!!

Hour 3 in Beck's radio show (it's behind a firewall and costs $) cites Opie and Anthony trying to convince an interlocutor that Obamacare does NOT equal free health care and doesn't lower cost, either.

To listen to Opie and Anthony for free, the Obamacare shtick occurs at 3:13:30





Opie and Anthony reminds people that Obama isn't giving people health care insurance, he's forcing people to BUY health care and if you don't, the IRS will fine you.

Or, as Redd Foxx would say, "You big dummy!"





A less cuss infused macro/big picture explanation comes from the CATO institute:

Nor should we forget that across the country there are people who are not being hired or, worse, are being laid off, because employers cannot afford the cost of insurance, especially since Obamacare has not only failed to curb rising insurance costs, it has already added 2–3 percent to premium prices. These unemployed workers are more of the unseen victims of Obamacare.

This is a lesson that goes well beyond Obamacare. Politicians often act as though government programs are cost free. President Obama, in particular, seems to believe that government intervention comes without any down side. Regulations do only good. Taxes don’t harm anyone — except maybe a few rich people, and they don’t count anyway. But there are always costs and unexpected consequences. Those costs and consequences may not be as easily seen as the goodies that government distributes, but they are no less real.
Or as another great economist, Milton Friedman, put it two hundred years after Bastiat, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

And a more detailed/numbers oriented explanation from Dr. Roth:

Already, the Congressional Budget Office is estimating at least 4 million will not comply and be hit with fines by 2016. According to William Douglass MD 3 million of them will be middle class. He reminds us that a family of 4 making under $120,000 will all be forced to pay a fine of $1,000 each – 2.5% of income, $695 minimum if they refuse to pay.  

Happy #4th of July: Big Government Appreciation Day!

To defend of Rep. Allen West's description of Pres Obama's strategy of trying to demote free US citizens down to economic slaves:

“He [Obama] does not want you to have the self-esteem of getting up and earning and having that title of ‘American,’” the congressman said of the president. “He’d rather you be his slave and be economically dependent upon him.”

I'd like to cite the historical example of Medieval England. PBS is running Michael Woods' documentary about the history of England as seen through the eyes of the common people, specifically, the inhabitants of Kibworth.  Woods describes the process by which the Norman invaders demoted the free men of England into dependent villeins (sharecroppers) and serfs, namely, through imposing dues, services, customs aka big government over regulation & taxation. Hence, the Doomesday Book (aptly named) sounds like a precursor to the hordes of IRS agents hired to implement the Obamatax for Obamacare. If William the Conqueror had better PR, he would have simply renamed feudalism as Normancare.