Bill McGurn thinks the State Department., the IRS and the FBI are rigged against us

In The Wall Street Journal story "Even Worse Than Hillary Clinton’s Emails".

Hillary Clinton: Imagine if Trump had the IRS to go after his critics and opponents

Yeah, imagine.

Tea Party class action against the IRS certified, goes to discovery stage

From the story here:

Certifying the class allows any of the more than 200 groups that were subjected to the criteria to join the lawsuit. But until the IRS complies with the appeals court’s ruling this week, the list of those groups is secret.

Now that the class has been certified, the case moves to the discovery stage, where the tea party groups’ lawyers will ask for all of the agency’s documents related to the targeting and will depose IRS employees about their actions.

The lawyers hope they’ll be able to learn details Congress was unable to shake free in its own investigations.

Chutzpah: Trump one ups Carson's answer for IRS tax audits

Ben Carson implied in the Republican debate last night that he was politically targeted for an IRS audit after speaking out publicly against Obamacare.

Donald Trump seemed to like the answer so much he decided to go for it for himself.

In remarks made to Chris Cuomo on CNN immediately after the debate, Trump blamed his long history of tax audits on the fact that he was being targeted for being a Christian.

Yeah, like the whole world thinks that's the reason.

After all its crimes, the Republican Congress just gave the IRS an extra 3% in funding as a reward

Story here:

"The $1.1 trillion omnibus provides an additional $290 million for the IRS, an increase of 3 percent over the last fiscal year. ... The base funding level for the IRS was kept at about $10.9 billion."

To pay for highway bill, US House relies on selling strategic oil reserve and privatizing IRS employment instead of raising gasoline taxes

From the story here:

"The bill is in fact financed with a collection of offsets that many lawmakers find objectionable, such as raising $9 billion by selling oil from the country’s emergency oil reserves. Roughly $2.5 billion comes from requiring the Internal Revenue Service to use private debt collectors, reviving a controversial program opposed by many Democrats, consumer groups and the union that represents agency employees."

Obama Injustice Department closes IRS investigation without bringing charges against anyone

Reported here:

'"We found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution," the letter [to Congress] stated.'

I just got the call from the fraudsters posing as the IRS trying to shake-down the sheeple

The call originates from Bainbridge Island, Washington, and the number is 206-201-2799.

The voice is female, obviously a computer.

Republicans sweep House and Senate, and suddenly the IRS finds the "lost" Lois Lerner emails

Hm, funny how that happens.

From the story here:

Up to 30,000 missing emails sent by former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner have been recovered by the IRS inspector general, five months after they were deemed lost forever.

The U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) informed congressional staffers from several committees on Friday that the [Lois Lerner] emails were found among hundreds of “disaster recovery tapes” that were used to back up the IRS email system. ...

In June [IRS Commissioner] Koskinen told Congress the emails were probably lost for good because the disaster recovery tape holds onto the data for only six months. He said even if the IRS had sought the emails within the six-month period, it would have been a complicated and difficult process to produce them from the tapes. ...

There are 250 million emails on the tapes that will be reviewed. Officials said it is likely they will find missing emails from other IRS officials who worked under Lerner and who said they suffered computer crashes [too].

New IRS 1040 clearly shows you'll owe ObamaCare TAX liability on line 61 if you don't have coverage

So in addition to lying about getting to keep your health insurance if you like it, Obama also clearly lied about not raising taxes on anybody making less than $250,000 a year.

Krauthammer on IRS scandal: Nixon was missing only 18 minutes, Lerner is missing two years

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Nixon was missing only 18 minutes. Lerner is missing two years. Nixon is a piker compared to this administration when it comes to concealment, hiding or pretending that they can't find stuff.

With housing ATM shut down, Americans tapped retirements prematurely in 2011 to the tune of $57 billion

So says the story here at Bloomberg, extrapolating using the basic early withdrawal penalty rate of 10%:

It’s a small number that’s part of a much larger picture: The Internal Revenue Service collected $5.7 billion in 2011 from penalties, meaning that Americans took out about $57 billion from retirement funds before they were supposed to.

The median size of a 401(k) is $24,400 as of March 31, with people older than 55 having $65,300, according to Fidelity Investments. Those funds can disappear quickly in retirement, and the early withdrawals indicate that the coming retirement crisis could be even more acute than expected. ...

Meanwhile, the amount of home-equity loans outstanding was $704 billion in 2013, down 38 percent from the 2007 peak, according to Federal Reserve data. ...

During the 2008 campaign, President Barack Obama proposed allowing penalty-free withdrawals of up to $10,000 from retirement accounts. That idea went nowhere and wasn’t included in the 2009 economic stimulus.

In 2012, the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants proposed a temporary waiver of the penalties while families were recovering from the recession.

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Actually the premature withdrawals could have been significantly higher than $57 billion in 2011. There are many exceptions to the 10% penalty rule, one of which is for withdrawals to pay for health insurance premia, which began jumping in the wake of the passage of ObamaCare in March 2010. Careful taxpayers withdrew exactly for that growing expense, paid no penalty and in certain circumstances also deducted the expense from income when self-employed. Since those sums escaped the 10% penalty, additional sums withdrawn probably contributed to the total penalties collected in 2011.

Obama Regime Doubles Down On Using IRS To Silence Political Opponents

Kimberley Strassel for The Wall Street Journal, here:

Democrats are instead fully vested now in using the IRS to shut down criticism by outside groups of ObamaCare, overspending or (ironically) the IRS targeting. Even liberal groups are howling about the White House's use of the IRS to silence political speech, and the House on Wednesday passed a bill to delay the regulations. The White House's response? A veto threat.

Rush Limbaugh Finds A GDP Conspiracy Where There Is None

When it comes to numbers, I have observed that Rush Limbaugh can be counted on to get something horribly wrong, and today was no exception. Today he has misrepresented the routine revision of the GDP data every five years as a revision of the numbers for only the last five years, as if it were designed specifically to make Obama look better. In actual fact, the revision of the numbers goes back not five years, but all the way back to 1929.

Truly incredible, and embarrassing in the extreme, since the truth is the revision occurs every five years, and this is the 14th revision in the series. This is why conservatives hope Rush retires soon, nevermind why liberals hope he retires. He's making us all look stupid when he carries on like this.

I have shown "five" in red below from today's Rush transcript so you can appreciate the thorough-going depth of Rush's misrepresentation of the facts: 

RUSH:  Here's what the Commerce Department is doing. 

They have "made changes to how it calculates gross domestic product," going back five years. "At the same time, the government also went back and revised data for the past five years, to reflect more complete as well as additional statistics from a variety of sources, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the US Department of Agriculture." They have made changes to how they're calculating the gross domestic product, or economic growth, and what they're doing now is they're going back five years. 

They have revised data for the past five years to, they say, "reflect a more complete, as well as additional statistics from a variety of sources, such as the IRS and the Department of Agriculture.  Why do you think they decided to go back the last five years to revise data?  To rewrite the horrible 4-1/2 years of Obama.  There's no question.  I don't know if it's fraudulent, but they're cooking the books -- and after cooking the books, after making it look as good as they can, it's 1.7% economic growth.

Here, however, is the statement from the BEA in today's official release about the routine revision every five years, which has been telegraphed to every reader of BEA GDP reports for many quarters running going back at least to last year (meaning Rush Limbaugh has never read even cursorily a single one of those GDP reports from the BEA in the interim, let alone today's):

Today, BEA released revised statistics of gross domestic product (GDP) and of other national income and product accounts (NIPAs) series from 1929 through the first quarter of 2013. Comprehensive revisions, which are carried out about every 5 years, are an important part of BEA's regular process for improving and modernizing its accounts to keep pace with the ever-changing U.S. economy.

-----------------------------------

1.7% GDP in Q2 2013 is horrible enough, but the average report for the last three quarters comes in under 1%, 0.966% to be exact. So if there is some conspiracy to make things look better than they are, whoever's in charge of that ought to be fired, stat!

This country remains in deep trouble, and there is no conspiracy to hide it. 

The IRS Is Obstructing The Investigation Into Its Crimes

Peggy Noonan here:

House investigators this week said they have in fact received less than 1% of the documents they have been asking for from the agency. The IRS itself at one point identified a whopping and rather intimidating 65 million documents that might be relevant to the tea-party scandal. To date—almost three months since the scandal became public—the House Ways and Means Committee says the IRS has turned over only 13,000 pages. And some of them were duplicates. It's gone beyond what staff aides were, last month, calling "slow walking." Chairman Dave Camp said in a statement the IRS's actions look "a lot like obstruction." One aide said: "Patience is wearing thin."

IRS Political Targeting Scandal Goes All The Way To The Top

pappastax.com April 2009

Peggy Noonan, last week here:

The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel. That is a bombshell ... Mr. [Carter] Hull told House investigators that at some point in the winter of 2010-11, Ms. [Lois] Lerner's senior adviser, whose name is withheld in the publicly released partial interview transcript, told him the applications would require further review:

Q: "Did [the senior adviser to Ms. Lerner] indicate to you whether she agreed with your recommendations?"

A: "She did not say whether she agreed or not. She said it should go to chief counsel."

Q: "The IRS chief counsel?"

A: "The IRS chief counsel."

The IRS chief counsel is named William Wilkins. And again, he is one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS.

Hm. IRS Cancels Spy "Equiptment" Order For Some Reason.

Here.

Still can't spell, though.

IRS Wants 4 Coffee Trays With Concealed Cameras, Among Other Spy Items

Here's the link, see for yourself.

(Damn fools can't spell "equipment").

I imagine all that spy equipment comes in real handy right before they call in the boyz 'n girlz with the (illegal for the public) 14" barreled Remington 12-gauge shotguns they ordered in February 2010, here:

"The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) intends to purchase sixty Remington Model 870 Police RAMAC #24587 12 gauge pump-action shotguns for the Criminal Investigation Division. The Remington parkerized shotguns, with fourteen inch barrel, modified choke, Wilson Combat Ghost Ring rear sight and XS4 Contour Bead front sight, Knoxx Reduced Recoil Adjustable Stock, and Speedfeed ribbed black forend, are designated as the only shotguns authorized for IRS duty based on compatibility with IRS existing shotgun inventory, certified armorer and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts."

Nolan Finley Of The Detroit News Wants To Junk The IRS, And The Income Tax

THIS IS NOT NOLAN FINLEY

Here:

"[R]eplace the income tax with a national sales tax. You’d pay tax on the money you spend instead of the money you earn. That would eliminate the need for an IRS that audits tax returns, hands out non-profit status and enforces a tax code that is egregiously complex and unfair. If the national sales tax isn’t the answer, then a similar outcome might be achieved by drastically lowering current income tax rates in exchange for eliminating all deductions and credits. With no reason to examine returns, the IRS could be much smaller. Without auditing power, it’d be less intimidating."

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Why not do both? A low flat sales tax and a low flat income tax? We already have one flat tax, called Social Security. And we already pay an average state sales tax of 5+% everywhere. Just abolish the income tax and augment the current flat Payroll Tax with the new one. Business everywhere is already set up to collect that and withhold, so dovetailing that with a corporate flat tax should also be easy to do. Presto. No IRS needed for America's 151 million wage earners and the millions of businesses who employ them.

Herman Cain's more or less revenue neutral 999 plan looks better and better with every passing day of the IRS scandal targeting Obama's political enemies: a flat 9% federal sales tax, a flat 9% tax on all income, and a flat 9% corporate income tax.

A man before his time.

IRS Casts Wide Net Full Of 88 Employees In Scandal, One Claiming DC In Charge

CNN had the stories here on Friday:

The Internal Revenue Service has told House GOP investigators they have identified 88 IRS employees who may have documents relevant to the congressional investigation into targeting of conservative groups, according to a congressional source familiar with the investigation.

And here on Sunday:

One Cincinnati IRS employee interviewed by the Oversight Committee rejects the White House assertion (that the Cincinnati office was responsible) and points to Washington as being responsible for targeting effort (from 5/30 interview):

Q In early 2010, was there a time when you became aware of applications that referenced Tea Party or other conservative groups?

A In March of 2010, I was made aware.

******

Q Okay. Now, was there a point around this time period when [your supervisor] asked you to do a search for similar applications?

A Yes.

Q To the best of your recollection, when was this request made?

A Sometime in early March of 2010.

******

Q Did [your supervisor] give you any indication of the need for the search, any more context?

A He told me that Washington, D.C., wanted some cases.

******

Q So as of April 2010, these 40 cases were held at that moment in your group; is that right?

A Some were.

Q How many were held there?

A Less than 40. Some went to Washington, D.C.

Q Okay. How many went to Washington, D.C.?

A I sent seven.

******

Q So you prepared seven hard copy versions of the applications to go to Washington, D.C.?

A Correct.

******

Q Did he give you any sort of indication as to why he requested you to do that?

[…]

A He said Washington, D.C. wanted seven. Because at one point I believe I heard they were thinking 10, but it came down to seven. I said okay, seven.

Q How did you decide which seven were sent?

A Just the first seven.

Q The first seven to come into the system?

A Yes.

*****