Category: government transparency

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government transparency

The Tax Agency and the Tortoise

We are indebted to a publisher of tax information called Tax Analysts for its efforts to make the Internal Revenue Service slightly more accountable.

The IRS finds itself beleaguered, sort of, by scandal — the fallout from their practice of impeding applications for tax-exempt status of Tea Party and other “patriot” and “constitutionalist” groups. But the agency doesn’t always cooperate with investigations of its conduct.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, Tax Analysts has sued the IRS to obtain all materials used since 2009 to train Cincinnati personnel in the art of handling applications for tax-exempt status.

Folks at the IRS had at first “agreed” to comply with the FOIA request for these instructions ─ which will shed light on what, exactly, employees have been told at various times about how to deal with applicants of various ideological hue. But the agency kept dithering, first telling Tax Analysts that it would supply the stuff pronto, then saying it needed more time; then saying the same when the next-named comply-by date arrived; etc., ad infinitum.

Like the ever-slowing competitor to Zeno’s tortoise, the IRS found it impossible to ever cross the finish line or actually supply any documents.

Yet these guys slap us with penalties if we’re late with the taxes. . . .

Well, Tax Analysts has seen the IRS’s delaying tactics before. So now the matter is in court. Sooner or later we shall learn whether the agency’s own written instructions counsel ideological discrimination, or these instructions are untainted by such but have been flouted by IRS officers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

The National Confessional

Secrecy in diplomacy and intelligence-gathering is supposed to protect the nation. But secrecy also protects bad policy . . . including great crimes that undermine our security.

This week, the National Security Archive released onto the Web the first official admission that agents of the United States government brought down — by assassination and violent coup — Iran’s democratically elected president, Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, 60 years ago:

The explicit reference to the CIA’s role appears in a copy of an internal history, The Battle for Iran, dating from the mid-1970s. The agency released a heavily excised version of the account in 1981 . . . but it blacked out all references to TPAJAX, the code name for the U.S.-led operation. Those references appear in the latest release.

The sunsetting of the secrecy provisions on the information finally provides sunlight, transparency, to this crucial moment in history.

Crucial, because it involved public American support for Masaddeq’s successor, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, “the Shah of Iran.” The Shah became quite brutal in his embrace of “modernism” and (this is hard to write with a straight face) “Western values,” including the suppression of religious dissidents. This led to the fundamentalist Muslim backlash, with Mid-East Muslims widely interpreting American intervention and support for the Shah as both imperialistic and anti-Islamic, setting up the current “clash of civilizations” . . . in which neither side ends up looking good.

It’s interesting to note that much of the secrecy about the event not only covered up American crimes, but British ones.

America’s foreign policy seems so un-American. In so many ways.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency too much government

Illinois Pension Ills

When it comes to the full faith and credit of the Great State of Illinois, three major credit rating companies judge it the lowest in the union. The problem is that state politicians made pension promises they didn’t pay for and still aren’t.

How bad is it? Illinois’s total unfunded pension liability now tops $200 billion dollars – that’s roughly 250 percent of the state’s annual revenue. And growing.

But take, heart!

Gov. Pat Quinn just said that the massive pension shortfall will grow at a slower pace than previously thought, $5 million (instead of $17 million) a day.

Whoopee!

Folks at the Illinois Policy Institute are a little mystified by this pronouncement, though. The projection seems based more on wishes and hope than the straight dope. Besides, “this isn’t the first time the state has predicted that the growth in the state’s unfunded liability would slow,” Institute Senior Fellow Jonathan Ingram writes, noting that “the exact same prediction was made last year based on the actuarial projections made in fiscal year 2011. The systems predicted that the unfunded liability would grow by ‘only’ $5.3 billion in fiscal year 2012.”

The conventional wisdom blames too many years of the legislature shorting the annual payments to the five public-employee retirement funds.

Another way to look at it is simply that politicians are a whole lot better at promising than delivering, and defined benefit (rather than defined contribution) pensions are too tempting to trust to any politician.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment government transparency

Welcome Debate?

As the weekend began, we learned that the Obama Administration had formally charged Edward Snowden with espionage, theft and stealing cable TV. Snowden is the guy who leaked classified information about massive and unconstitutional National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs and then fled to Hong Kong.

President Obama said he welcomed the debate touched off by Snowden’s disclosures to The Washington Post and Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian in London . . . but apparently not enough to welcome the man himself.

Sunday, we awoke to hear of Snowden’s new travel plans. Clearly, there is surveillance! Snowden left Hong Kong and flew to Moscow. From there, he appears headed to Ecuador, where he is requesting asylum.

Having just turned 30, Mr. Snowden, a former Central Intelligence Agency employee, then employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, a contractor for the NSA, remains mysterious. Whatever we learn about Snowden, though, I agree with Greenwald’s judgment: “What he has done is an immense public service, an act of real patriotism, to inform his fellow citizens about things the government has been doing of great consequence in the dark . . .”

A separate story over the weekend drives that point home: “President Obama held his first-ever meeting Friday with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) — the group charged with ensuring that the executive branch balances privacy and civil liberties needs with its national security efforts.”

Were it not for that Snowden fellow, would this group “charged with ensuring” our rights and privacy have ever even met?

Don’t bother asking. The story reports, “The White House declined to comment on the meeting.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom government transparency national politics & policies too much government

Google or Government?

The ugly fact: our government is capturing all of our phone records. It reportedly is grabbing our credit card information, as well tracking us online. The latest “defense” of this practice? Such mined data’s no worse than the information we voluntarily provide Google or Facebook or other big, bad corporations.

This after-the-fact rationalization comes up short, however, missing that crucial “voluntary” aspect, whereby we get to choose what information we give to a corporation, including providing none at all. That’s not how the National Security Agency works. The NSA just grabs our information without our consent.

What other possible differences might there be?

There’s the crucial matter of degree, too. “The government possesses the ultimate executive power,” argued The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, author of Deep State, appearing on “All In with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC. “I mean, it can jail you, it can detain you, it can kill you.”

“Even though the Obama campaign and Apple . . . know more about me than perhaps members of my family, and probably the government,” Ambinder added, “what the government can do with that information is much different than what a corporation can do. They can make me buy something or vote for someone; the government can imprison me.”

Mr. Ambinder is absolutely correct . . . except for his ridiculous statement that campaigns can “make” you vote for their candidate or that corporations can “make” you buy their products. The crucial difference is between the arts of persuasion (including tempting, cajoling, nudging) on the one hand, and sheer homicidal force coupled with kleptomaniacal thievery on the other.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency tax policy

The Block Stops Here

We were initially told that the IRS had apologized to Tea Party and patriot groups for blocking them from non-profit tax status.

But there has been no apology.

Instead, last Friday, Lois Lerner, the head of the tax-exempt division of the Internal Revenue Service, confided to a group of tax attorneys at an American Bar Association conference in Washington. She admitted that the IRS had indeed been guilty of unfairly delaying and blocking Tea Party and conservative groups from establishing tax-exempt organizations, as these dissident groups had been complaining about for years.

Who was to blame? Only mere “low-level employees” — no senior management, heaven forfend.

Then it was disclosed that senior IRS muckety-mucks actually knew in 2011 — well before the IRS commissioner assured Congress that the agency wasn’t doing precisely what it was doing. Now, latest disclosures put the beginning of the political bias policy all the way back to 2010.

Of course, the IRS vehemently denies that politics played any role.

And what about Barack “buck-stops-here” Obama?

“I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this,” the president said in response to a question, adding, “I think it was on Friday.”

In denial, the president spun, “If, in fact, IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that had been reported on and were intentionally targeting conservative groups” and “if you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and non-partisan way, then . . . it is contrary to our traditions.”

Well, if these ifs weren’t so (traditionally?) evasive, we might take the prez seriously.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets government transparency national politics & policies

Your Taxes, in Small Type

The business of business is to profit by helping others. The business of government is to make sure that businesses don’t profit by cheating others.

Unfortunately, sometimes it’s the governments that cheat.

Take the airline industry. Though substantially deregulated by the early 1980s, government has not treated it in an exactly laissez faire manner since. First there are the taxes, quite heavy. And recently the Department of Transportation decided that it must regulate the way in which airlines may advertise their prices . . . and the taxes. That is, the DOT insists that the “total price” — by which it means the price-plus-tax — must be shown prominently, with the tax portion “presented in significantly smaller type than the listing of the total price.”

Talk about regulatory micromanagement!

Now, this rule isn’t something Congress cooked up. It’s the result of a bureaucracy gone wild.

And the rule has one obvious effect: It shields government from consumer criticism, showing bureaucrats at their most self-serving. About one fifth of every airline ticket goes to the government, and folks in government don’t want you to know that.

This being the case, you might think — as George Will does — that the First Amendment would apply, especially since the First Amendment is now routinely held as protecting political speech more strictly than commercial speech. But, so far, courts have ruled for the taxing and regulating bureaucrats, not the competitive airlines. Or consumers.

Frequent fliers (I’m one) should hope the Supreme Court justices take up the case, which shows why economic and political freedom go best together.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency too much government

Nothing But Blue Skies

It was the thirteenth day of the century’s thirteenth year, yesterday, and the worst I got was a cold.

Meanwhile, the Russian government is trying to stop a triskaidekaphobic panic. Russian media folk have been making much of Apophis, the near-Earth asteroid that will come within spitting distance on a Friday the 13th in 2029, and which will return for a closer, more dangerous fly-by on another Friday the 13th, April 2036.

Russian media had dubbed Apophis the “space threat of the century.” But the Russian emergency experts — government officials, charged with calming things down — have countered paranoia with statements like, “In 2013, none of the known asteroids will pass by the Earth at a dangerous distance.”

Well, nice to know. But this year had never been a worry to scientists. The crucial years were 2029 and 2036. The folks at Goldstone say they have ruled out any impact in 2036, and scientists had already determined the earlier date non-hazardous.

Good. But, if you are like me, when government officials all agree that the sky is blue, you’ll call it “cerulean.”

But maybe it’s only about budgets, taxes, and special ops that governments lie.

Take Jerry Brown, California’s governor and a most interesting fellow. He insists that his state’s deficit problems are nearly over. Great! Well, he bases his cheery picture on future growth projections, and he’s just so optimistic that he’s advocating still more spending! Now.

I once defined pessimism as the lazy stepchild of vigilance. Brown’s optimism has no vigilance in it. I don’t believe him.

I hope the government-paid scientists charting Apophis’s transits are more rigorous and trustworthy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

We’re All Bond Fans Now

The latest James Bond film, Skyfall, is so well liked that there’s even Oscar buzz about it. But it’s not just moviegoers who feel like they’ve entered a new era.

In the new flick, M, played by Judi Dench, argues before a parliamentary board that, because “the enemy” can be just about anybody these days, now’s really the time for some good old-fashioned espionage, James Bond-style. You know, with casual murders committed by men given a “license to kill.”

But things have changed. The old Bond skirmished with Russkies while fighting rich criminals who dreamed of destroying or ruling the world. Today’s Bond fights an ex-agent who wants to hurt the higher-ups in the spy biz who had hurt him.

In reality, it’s the U.S. President — Felix Leiter’s boss — who has the license to kill, exercising it by overseeing multiple drone programs, the practice of rendition, and a developing program called a “disposition matrix,” which aims to target people who are up-and-comers in the America-hating (and thus) terrorist game.

Many critics have noted that the recent Bond films starring the brilliant Daniel Craig have become more personal and less gadgety. Maybe that’s the way real-life spying plays in Britain (I doubt it) but from the American perspective, the current reality of drone strikes overseas, unregulated-by-law rendition tribunals, and database management geared to determining terrorist psychology is positively science-fictional.

And I don’t mean that in a good way.

This is not a Brave New World or a 1984, I realize. But it still frightens.

Indeed, for people in the targeted regions it must be pure horror. America’s ruling classes have upped the game. And we can expect to reap a . . . skyfall.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency national politics & policies

The Latest Legislative Land Mine

The most prescient thing ever said about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, was articulated by then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

The medical reform package is quite the hodgepodge. Actually reading the whole thing makes taking on Middlemarch, War and Peace, and In Search of Lost Time a course of light entertainment.

The latest revelation from its thousands of pages? A passage prohibiting doctors from asking their patients questions about guns in the home.

The Washington Post reports that many gun control groups are incensed at the power of the NRA to limit their ability to “collect information”:

Physician groups and public health advocates say the cumulative effect of these restrictions undercuts the ability of the White House and lawmakers to make the case for new laws, such as an assault-weapons ban, in the face of opponents who argue that there’s no evidence such measures are effective. Advocates for regulating guns lament that reliable statistics are limited in part because physicians and health researchers who could track these patterns are being inhibited.

Considering the quality of previous doctor-led sociological studies into gun usage — and really, this is not a medical problem but a complex, society-wide issue far beyond the competence of medical training to comprehend — the prohibition might really best be described as a defense of scientific method.

But the big issue here is not the politics of “research.” It’s that a health care reform package passed nearly three years ago contains hot potatoes such as this, and we are only discovering them now.

Nancy, you were all too disastrously correct.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.