I'm in my 40s, married, three kids. I've been a pastor for close to 20 years, slightly more than half of that as a chaplain in the US Navy. In this latter capacity, I have deployed to the Middle East three times and have been involved in combat operations on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am now serving a mid-sized congregation in the mid-west, having resigned my commission a couple years ago for personal reasons. My undergraduate degree is in history, I have the usual M.Div. that most seminary-trained clergy have, and I've taken various other classes in the years since my graduation.
I don't put my name here not because I am ashamed of my positions, but to emphasize that these are my own. As a pastor, it is often assumed that I speak for the Church - either locally or denominationally. In this blog, I most decidedly do not speak for anyone other than myself. I most certainly am not speaking for God here, either. If you have a problem with my opinions, you have a problem with me, not the CRC, not the congregation I serve, and not God.
Dan Foster lays out part of the reason why it's easier to just gut the IRS than to try to find the particular culprits in that maze and root them out.
It goes back to the weird laws governing federal civil service - laws intended to protect bureaucrats from political pressure in many instances, but which in effect make it more likely that a federal employee will die on the job than be fired, no matter what they've done.
More on those adoption audits, since it seems the IRS targeted adoptive families in 2011 as well as 2012.
In 2011, they found no evidence of fraud and of 35,000 returns claiming the adoptive child tax credit that were audited via correspondence (that is, the taxpayer did not have to actually go in to an IRS office), a mere 17% were found to under report the tax owed. The rate for returns audited in such a fashion generally is 86%.
Remember, too, that in 2012, a paltry 1.5% of the amount claimed on the adoptive child tax credit was disallowed, although 90% of those returns received extra attention and 69% were audited.
This is a massive witch hunt intended to harass families who adopt children. There is no rational basis for this kind of targeting and it is of a piece with the IRS going after conservative groups.
I repeat, yet again, that the only possible solution is to reduce the power and authority of the Internal Revenue Service.
It's not that all IRS workers are leftist shills, or that they're bad people. But it is a massive, intrusive, poorly overseen agency trying to hold people accountable to an incomprehensibly byzantine tax code that impedes the collection of taxes as much as it impedes the conduct of business. It is also too easily manipulated to political ends in violation of those rights and privileges which should attend a free people. And the only way to get rid of the IRS and its too-easily abused power is to get rid of the tax code it is responsible for enforcing.
Well, it's starting to come out why our ambassador was ordered by Secretary of State Clinton to Benghazi, despite all the security warnings and such like. Stingers - Man-Portable Air Defense missiles (HAT TIP: Jim Geraghty). Both these sources make clear that some of this needs substantiation, but it is the only explanation I've seen so far that pulls all the pieces together with some coherence.
The Libyans had some 20,000 of them in their arsenals which, as you might expect, fell into rebel hands. They didn't all stay in Libya. But there was also an initiative within the State Department to arm Libyan rebels, too. The CIA opposed this because - also as you might expect - they believed (correctly) that a significant portion of these weapons would end up in the hands of terrorist organizations connected to al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. Hillary knew better than Gen. Petraeus, so the U.S. went ahead and supplied sophisticated weapons to our enemies in Libya.
After the rebels defeated Kaddafi, Hillary decided we'd better get those weapons back. So she sent our ambassador to negotiate with these al-Qaeda elements to repurchase the weapons - those same al-Qaeda elements that instead attacked the compound and murdered our ambassador.
That rather explains a lot. It explains why the administration (or was it just Clinton?) orchestrated the leaks regarding Gen. Petraeus' peccadillos so as to force him out at the CIA. It explains the misinformation campaign - letting folks know the real reason our ambassador was in Benghazi would point out just how wrong-headed Hillary is and how blunderingly naïve U.S. foreign policy has been under the Obama-Clinton partnership and we can't have that. It also explains why the State Department interfered to prevent the military from responding to the attacks - those attacks would have gone in by air, and why was Stevens in Benghazi? To buy back loads of anti-aircraft missiles. You know - the kind that shoot down airplanes and helicopters. It could very well have turned into another Desert One fiasco.
The whole mess in Benghazi was initiated by Hillary in an effort to save her bacon after overruling the CIA and issuing MANPADs to al-Qaeda affiliated Libyan rebels. And everything afterwards was also orchestrated to save Hillary's posterior so she is still a viable candidate in 2016. Yeah, Obama's the president and so he bears responsibility for this, but I must admit that I feel for him just a bit here. He made the mistake of believing Hillary is as smart as her propaganda makes her out to be (a mistake Bill made when he let her try to manage health-care reform back during his presidency). But Hillary is not that smart. She's gullible, naïve, unsophisticated, and just plain dumb when it comes to international relations and every aspect of her work at State backs that up.
And so do the graves of four Americans killed in order to cover her backside.
UPDATE: Jim Geraghty goes over some public sources that corroborate, but do not definitively substantiate, the initial column in greater detail.
Some Senate committee hauled in some representatives from Apple, Inc. the other day to chew them out. The kind of malfeasance Apple displayed just couldn't be tolerated.
What malfeasance was that, you ask?
Complying with U.S. tax law in a manner that put the smallest possible dent in the company's profits. It's not that Apple isn't paying taxes. They did, to the tune of $6 billion in 2012. But they're keeping a fair bit of money overseas and Congress wants to tax that money, too.
Currently, if a U.S. corporation earns money in, say, Germany, the U.S. government considers that company liable for taxes in the U.S. As long as it stays in Germany, the U.S. government can't really get at it, so they only levy the tax if the company brings their money back to the U.S.
Oh, let's not forget. Since they made the money in Germany, the German government is also levying taxes on it.
Like any sane and rational corporation, Apple doesn't want to bring that money back to the U.S. because they'd then be paying taxes on it twice - once to the German government and once to the U.S. government. Foreign governments like this arrangement because it gives U.S. corporations a tremendous incentive to invest where they are rather than in their U.S. activities.
But Apple wanted to pay out a dividend to their U.S. shareholders, which would have meant bringing some of that foreign money back to the U.S. and thus paying taxes on it. What to do? Ah! We'll borrow the money from our overseas subsidiaries. Loans aren't profits, so they aren't taxed. Our shareholders get a good return and we don't get double-taxed on the same profits.
Perfectly legal. Perfectly rational. And perfectly infuriating to the Democrats in the Senate who find it intolerable that corporate tax accountants and attorneys are smarter than they are.
It's also just one more example of why we need a flat tax. Just shove all the crap out of the way, toss in a cost-of-living deduction that is standard across the board, and go. And it's only taxed here if it's earned here.
The IRS says they've stopped their unconstitutional (though, according to Ms. Lerner and Mr. Miller, perfectly legal) harassment of conservative groups.
Here's something a bit chilling. The Internal Revenue Service is not only targeting conservative groups connected with the Tea Party. They've targeted folks who adopt.
That's right. If you adopt and claim the adoption tax credit, just assume the IRS will audit you. Ninety percent - let me repeat that - ninety percent of returns claiming the adoption tax credit were subject to additional review and sixty-nine percent were audited. More than 2/3 of taxpayers claiming the child adoption tax credit were audited and almost all of them were subject to additional review. Some 55% of those audits turned up absolutely nothing. Only 1.5% of adoption credit claims were actually disallowed. This harassment resulted in an average delay of 4 months (126 days) in resolving tax returns and - if warranted - collection of refunds due. This is not including the additional costs imposed on the taxpayer to comply with the IRS demands.
Planned Parenthood and other abortion mills are supported by your tax dollars without any real review or oversight. But try to reduce abortion by adopting one baby, and the full force of the federal government is going to come after you to try to find some way to nail your backside.
But, hey, President Obama says we shouldn't listen to those folks who say the government can't be trusted. I guess it's all right then.
We need to eliminate the IRS and to do that, we need to vastly simplify taxation. A flat tax isn't just a good economic policy. It's becoming clear we need it to preserve our liberty.
It's interesting that Obama's defense in all this is, "Nobody told me." I guess his staff didn't want to interfere with his tee time?
Every boss I've ever worked for has had one cardinal rule: Make sure I'm not blind-sided. To hear the White House spokesman, you'd think our president has given his staff exactly the opposite instruction. Maybe his real name is Schultz?
I remember when Reagan was president, and the whole Iran-Contra thing was going on. Reagan said he didn't know anything about it, too. Perhaps he didn't. I don't expect presidents to be omniscient. But then, as now, it is the president's job to know and it is the job of his staff to make sure he is aware of what is happening in his administration. If staff members are interfering with the president in the performance of his duties by withholding vital information, they should be fired. The president should never be finding out about actions of his administration from the morning papers.
