Categories
free trade & free markets government transparency

Ignorance Is Strength (for Boodle Mongers)

Journalist Mark Tapscott helps spread the word about the boondoggles perpetrated by the Department of Agriculture. But his work is being thwarted by the Super Friends of Government Transparency, the Democratic Congress.

The Ag Department manages Congress’s wretched, anti-​productive policy of paying farmers to grow fewer crops. It also applies these New-​Deal-​era policies in the silliest manner possible — for example, by giving former basketball star Scottie Pippen $130,000 over five years not to grow crops.

Other Dust-​Bowl-​afflicted tillers of the field rescued with taxpayer-​funded largesse include Sam Donaldson, Ted Turner, Larry Flynt and Ben Bradlee. The ridiculous payouts were exposed thanks to the efforts of a nonprofit outfit called Environmental Working Group (EWG), which posted an Agriculture Department database on its website. It obtained the data from reluctant officials by dint of the Freedom of Information Act.

Back in 2002, Tapscott reported that then-​Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle had tried but failed to exempt such embarrassing spending details from freedom-​of-​information laws. Because he failed, the EWG could keep updating its database. But in 2008, the Democrats finally let the Department of Agriculture off the hook. Complying with information requests about its crazy subsidies is now “optional.”

So Aggie officials don’t bother.

Tapscott presses the obvious point: Wasn’t the new Democratic majority slated to embody the “most honest and transparent” Congress ever?

Perhaps their new slogan will be Ignorance is Strength?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability insider corruption

Why Pay Your Taxes?

Why pay your taxes? I mean, why pay your taxes until you’ve been chosen for President Obama’s cabinet?

Most folks pay with little or no threat of having to serve on Obama’s brain trust. 

I pay because my wife tells me to and she agrees to fill out the forms. Some folks pay because they like all or much of what government does. Others may hate the waste, folly, or unconstitutional criminality of the bulk of government spending, but pay taxes out of a sense of duty.

Or fear.

But what of those politicians who constantly put forth the importance — the glorious nobility — of granting government an ever-​larger role? Why would they fail to pay their taxes to support that government?

The latest is the current nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius. She owes $7,000 in back taxes, which now that she’s in line to be a cabinet secretary, she’s taking care of.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel hasn’t paid his tax bill. Sebelius’s predecessor, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination because of, yes, tax problems. And who can forget Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner? He paid up after he was nominated. But of course, he was “too big to fail.”

Maybe it’s how our leaders see the division of labor: We pay, they spend.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.