Eighty-seven thousand new IRS agents! What could possibly go wrong? In a bill passed and signed last August, “$80 billion worth of new funding over the next decade” was shoveled at the Internal Revenue Service “so it could” — as a recent Reason article summarizes — “hire 87,000 new workers,…
The IRS doesn’t just seize money for reasons of taxation. The folks in that agency have another racket in their job description. Click on over to Townhall for the story, then come back here for background. Treasury.gov: “Criminal Investigation Enforced Structuring Laws Primarily Against Legal Source Funds and Compromised the…
Two days from now, elections across the country will produce a “new” Congress, with all 435 seats in the so-called House of Representatives on the ballot and one-third of the U.S. Senate up for grabs. The state of play in Senate contests makes it appear increasingly likely there will be…
We get taxed so much while we're living, it seems kind of overkill to tax folks when they die. To me, dying is bad enough already. And now Terence Jeffrey, editor of Human Events , gives us another reason to oppose the death tax: it's murdering the First Amendment. Nearly…
Deena Gilbey is a British woman living in New Jersey. Her husband had a work visa to be in the U.S. and she was a "dependent" on that visa. Mrs. Gilbey's husband was killed in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Now somehow she has no legal status…
Remember Deena Gilbey? She was the British woman at risk of being deported after her husband died in the recent attacks. Her residency status depended on her husband's work visa. So within days of the 9/11 tragedy, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was telling Mrs. Gilbey that with the end…
Two wrongs don’t make a right. It’s simple but true. And, as a corollary, let me add that using the power of the federal government to harass individuals or groups one happens to dislike or disagree with is wrong. You might recall that our Declaration of Independence rebuked King George…
The temptation to cover up a bit of ugliness with the proverbial fig leaf will always be with us. According to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), that is just what the U.S. House did when it squashed Justin Amash’s amendment to the 2014 defense bill, replacing it with a weaker measure…
Former Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers proposes that we switch from an eight-year, two-term limit for the union’s presidency to a six-year, single-term limit. He contends that by chucking the president’s second term, we can maybe prevent such gridlock and scandal as tends to especially afflict those second terms. Six…
Congressman Jared Golden, a Democrat in a Trump district, may be feeling heat. “First, Nancy Pelosi said she’d raise taxes. Now, she’s coming for what’s left,” warns an American Action Network television advertisement airing in Golden’s Maine district. “To help pay for trillions in new spending, Pelosi wants the government…