Tag: IRS
Rep. McDermott: Why Do Anti-Tax Political Groups Want Government Hand-Outs in the Form of Tax Breaks?
In a hearing on the IRS scandal, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) questioned representatives from tea party groups that appeared to be political groups who oppose taxation whether they actually qualified as social welfare groups as required by law in order to receive tax exemptions. His prepared statement follows:
The Case for the IRS Targeting the Tea Party
It seemed to come as a great shock when it was recently revealed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) examines some taxpayers more closely than others.
Really? Because no one has ever objected to the IRS targeting some tax returns for audit. Among them:
- Millionaires (in fiscal 2011, the IRS audited 12.5% of them)
- People reporting more than $200,000 in income
- People claiming confusing tax breaks like the first-time homebuyer credit
- Home office workers
- Small business and self-employed people generally
- Very low income filers who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
I’m not saying the IRS should target according to ideology. I’m saying it should target according to likelihood that tax laws are being flouted and circumvented.
So why, in the wild west of the first election years since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling allowing political action groups, many with questionable funding, to mushroom and proliferate…why should anyone be surprised the IRS would exercise scrutiny on these here today, gone tomorrow groups? Why, in fact, would they not demand that the IRS do precisely that before granting tax-exempt status to whoever applies for it?
And why not specifically take a hard, cold look at tea party groups?
Thank You, IRS, for Giving the Tea Party What It Needs Most: Victimhood
CBS News headline: “Recharged tea party demands justice in IRS targeting scandal”
In public, tea party activists and pundits and the lobbyists who fund them may be expressing outrage over the admission by the IRS that it has targeted tea party groups over their claims of nonprofit status, but away from the cameras and microphones, the movement’s members and the corporatists who back them are surely dancing the happy dance. Miracles do happen. A purportedly anti-tax movement has been resurrected — by the IRS.
Before the scandal broke last week, the tea party was at its lowest point nationally since its inception four years ago. Now it’s alive again and surely to be increasingly reinvigorated as the scandal drags out over the next weeks and months into next year — just in time to give it the power and influence to tilt the 2014 midterm elections to the extreme right, just as it did in the in 2010 midterms.
In fact, the lobbyists who run the tea party couldn’t have asked for a better scandal. By targeting the tea party, the IRS has played into the movement’s key motivator: the victimhood of conservatives in general and of white right-wingers specifically.
The fundamental paranoia of the movement is evident in its foundational myths:
Don’t Forget to Take Your Receipt, and Thank You for Shopping with the IRS
Just in time for tax day, the White House provides this interesting little widget to make us feel better about whatever our tax return said.
On my own receipt, I’d like to see more than $20 toward science and space programs, and way less toward agricultural subsidies. Recent visits to the grocery store checkout line do not convince me of the need to prop up agribusiness, which seems to be doing all right for itself.
It’s also funny to see that I’m paying more than three times as much toward Social Security benefits as I am toward Medicare, in light of the fact that Republicans want to ax the latter.
Check it out for yourself and see how much you’re spending where.
