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Courage Of Convictions: The Tax Collector And The Republican

Congressional Republicans constantly remind us that principle is more important than principal. They are willing to shrink government at all costs. The latest example comes from the new budget agreement that has an impact on the IRS and tax collections.

Tax collection is one of the IRS’s principle functions as we are all reminded this time of year. There are some who not only refuse to cheerfully pay what they owe but actively take steps to avoid paying taxes they owe. As a result, some IRS employees have as their main job, identifying those people and taking steps to encourage them to pay what they owe.

In 2006, Republicans in Congress came up with a whole new approach that provided employment to the non-governmental sector, a group that is always favored by Republicans. (That is because Republicans know that those who work for the government tend to be lazy and inefficient whereas those in the private sector are hard working and productive. That is, of course, something of a generalization, since occasionally someone in the private sector will disappoint and prove to be lazy and/or unproductive.)

Because of the Republican belief in the virtues of the private sector (which is almost as fervent as its belief that in taking funds from programs for children and the poor it is doing God’s work), in August of 2006 it was announced that within a couple of weeks the IRS would turn over to private collection agencies 12,500 delinquent tax accounts of $25,000 or less. According to the New York Times, this new way of collecting taxes was thought up and put in place by the Bush administration. The plan had, like many plans do, an upside and a downside.

The upside was that the debt collectors were part of the private sector. Under the private debt collection system the collectors would collect $1.4 billion each year of which they could keep $330 million, thus lining the private sectors’ pockets by that amount instead of having it go into a government pocket where it would, in all likelihood, get lost. Although that seems like a win-win, in 2002 Charles Rossotti, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, had told Congress that if it hired additional IRS employees to handle collections, it could collect more than $9 billion each year at a cost of only $296 million, considerably less than the cost if the same work was done by private collection agencies. That came out to a cost of $.03 per dollar collected. According to the NYT, his testimony was correct but Congress didn’t want to swell the size of government by authorizing the hiring of additional personnel for the IRS. Charles Everson, IRS Commissioner in 2006, when the private debt collection program was implemented, agreed with Mr. Rossotti and said it was more efficient to hire more IRS personnel but Congress would not appropriate the funds it needed to do that. Congress’s reluctance is a perfectly sensible approach since if you want to shrink government you have to make sacrifices and in this case, the sacrifice is increased revenue.

In 2008 Democrats took control of both houses of Congress and in March of 2009 it was announced that the IRS had determined that IRS employees could do collection work more efficiently than the private debt collectors, just as Rossotti and Everson had said some years earlier, and there was no reason to continue the program. Senator Grassley, who was the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, was outraged. Ignoring the fact that the government would have more money if the IRS were responsible for collections, he said the IRS was caving in to “union-driven political pressure.” He would have rather seen the federal government lose money than take away business from the private sector. The last chapter in this saga, however, has not been written.

Now that the budget compromise had been reached here is one of the things that has happened. The White House had requested an increase in the IRS budget of approximately 9% which would have enabled the agency to hire an additional 5000 personnel. Many of those could have been used to collect taxes which would have helped reduce the deficit. Echoing what Messrs. Rossotti and Everson had said years earlier, Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, who testified before Congress in March, said: “Every dollar invested in IRS yields nearly five dollars in increased revenue from non-compliant taxpayers.”

Republicans have refused to authorize the hiring of additional personnel at the IRS in order to collect taxes. A release from John Boehner’s office said increased funding for the IRS had been denied as part of the budget agreement. This shows that the Republican majority has the courage of its convictions. The rest of the country can enjoy the benefits of living off the fruits of its follies.

By: Christopher Brauchli, CommonDreams.org, April 16, 2011

April 17, 2011 Posted by | Budget, Congress, Conservatives, Corporations, Democrats, Economy, Federal Budget, GOP, Government, IRS, Jobs, Lawmakers, Politics, Public Employees, Republicans, Tax Evasion, Tax Loopholes, Taxes, Unions | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“I’m Not A Politician So Let Me Be Perfectly Clear”: Raise America’s Taxes!

President Obama in his speech on Wednesday confronted a topic that is harder to address seriously in public than sex or flatulence: America needs higher taxes.

That ugly truth looms over today’s budget battles, but politicians have mostly preferred to run from reality. Mr. Obama’s speech was excellent not only for its content but also because he didn’t insult our intelligence.

There is no single reason for today’s budget mess, but it’s worth remembering that the last time our budget was in the black was in the Clinton administration. That’s a broad hint that one sensible way to overcome our difficulties would be to revert to tax rates more or less as they were under President Clinton. That single step would solve three-quarters of the deficit for the next five years or so.

Paradoxically, nothing makes the need for a tax increase more clear than the Republican budget proposal crafted by Representative Paul Ryan. The Republicans propose slashing spending far more than the public would probably accept — even dismantling Medicare — and rely on economic assumptions that are not merely rosy, but preposterous.

Yet even so, the Republican plan shows continuing budget deficits until the 2030s. In short, we can’t plausibly slash our way back to solid fiscal ground. We need more revenue.

Kudos to Mr. Obama for boldly stating that truth in his speech — even if he did focus only on taxes for the very wealthiest. I also thought he was right to say that we need spending cuts — including in our defense budget. Mr. Obama didn’t say so, but the United States accounts for almost as much military spending as the entire rest of the world put together.

As I see it, there are three fallacies common in today’s budget discussions:

 • Republicans are the party of responsible financial stewardship, struggling to put America on a sound footing.

 In truth, both parties have been wildly irresponsible, but in cycles. Democrats were more irresponsible in the 1960s, the two parties both seemed care-free in the ’70s and ’80s, and since then the Republicans have been staggeringly reckless.

After the Clinton administration began paying down America’s debt, Republicans passed the Bush tax cuts, waded into a trillion-dollar war in Iraq, and approved an unfunded prescription medicine benefit — all by borrowing from China. Then-Vice President Dick Cheney scoffed that “deficits don’t matter.”

This borrow-and-spend Republican history makes it galling when Republicans now assert that deficits are the only thing that matter — and call for drastic spending cuts, two-thirds of which would harm low-income and moderate-income Americans, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. To pay for tax cuts heaped largely on the wealthiest Americans, Republicans in effect would gut Medicare and slash jobs programs, family planning and college scholarships. Instead of spreading opportunity, federal policy would cap it.

 • Low tax rates are essential to create incentives for economic growth: a tax increase would stifle the economy.

 It’s true that, in general, higher taxes tend to reduce incentives. But this seems a weak effect, often overwhelmed by other factors.

Were Americans really lazier in the 1950s, when marginal tax rates peaked at more than 90 percent? Are people in high-tax states like Massachusetts more lackadaisical than folks in a state like Florida that has no personal income tax at all?

Tax increases can also send a message of prudence that stimulates economic growth. The Clinton tax increase of 1993 was followed by a golden period of high growth, while the Bush tax cuts were followed by an anemic economy.

 • We can’t afford Medicare.

 It’s true that America faces a basic problem with rapidly rising health care costs. But the Republican plan does nothing serious to address health care spending, other than stop paying bills. Indeed, Medicare is cheaper to administer than private health insurance (2 percent to 6 percent administrative costs, depending on who does the math, compared with about 12 percent for private plans). So the Republican plan might add to health care spending rather than curb it.

The real challenge is to control health care inflation. Nobody is certain how to do that, but the Obama health care law is testing some plausible ideas. These include rigorous research on which procedures work and which don’t. Why pay for surgery on enlarged prostates if certain kinds of patients turn out to be better with no treatment at all?

Ever since Walter Mondale publicly committed hara-kiri in 1984 by telling voters that he would raise their taxes, politicians have run from fiscal reality. As baby boomers age and require Social Security and Medicare, escapism will no longer suffice. We need to have a frank national discussion of painful steps ahead, and since I’m not a politician, let me be perfectly clear: raise my taxes!

By: Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, April 13, 2011 

April 16, 2011 Posted by | Class Warfare, Congress, Conservatives, Corporations, Democrats, Economic Recovery, Economy, Federal Budget, GOP, Government, Governors, Health Care Costs, Lawmakers, Medicaid, Medicare, Middle Class, Pentagon, Politics, President Obama, Rep Paul Ryan, Republicans, Tax Increases, Wealthy | , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Unfettered Money: The Enabling Of Campaign “Speech”

When the Supreme Court ruled that money equals speech 35 years ago, it was responding to forces of technology and economics reshaping American politics that made it much more expensive to run a campaign. While ruling that public financing and limits on contributions are valid ways to limit donors’ undue influence, it struck down candidate, campaign and independent spending limits.

Now the court’s conservative majority is again reshaping politics, ruling that what matters most for money and speech is their “fair market” impact. The result will be closer scrutiny of public financing, while enabling even more rampant spending by wealthy candidates.

In the landmark 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo, the court said that “virtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money,” so restricting campaign spending meant restricting political speech. The First Amendment required that political speech be unfettered, so the same was required for political spending.

But when the court ruled that money equals speech, it didn’t mean, literally, that money is speech. It meant that money enabled speech. A political contribution enabled the symbolic, or indirect, speech of the donor and the actual speech of the candidate — and may the best speech win. The focus was on enabling the speech, not the money.

That changed in 2008 when the conservative majority struck down a federal rule that had tripled the limit on campaign contributions for a candidate outspent by a rich, self-financed opponent. Justice Samuel Alito Jr. wrote that the rule diminished “the effectiveness” of the rich candidate’s spending and of his speech.

In oral argument recently, the court’s conservatives appeared ready to take their next step in restricting campaign finance reform and to strike down Arizona’s public financing mechanism called triggered matching funds. This is one of the most compelling innovations in the country. The state will match for a state-financed candidate what an opponent raises in private contributions up to triple the initial amount of state financing.

To William Maurer, the lawyer opposing the Arizona mechanism, whenever “a privately financed candidate speaks above a certain amount, the government creates real penalties for them to have engaged in unfettered political expression.” That “speaks” was not a slip, but a reinforcement of the money-equals-speech notion.

The fundamental problem, he said, is “the government turning my speech into the vehicle by which my entire political message is undercut,” because the public funds triggered are a penalty that reduces the impact of the privately financed candidate’s spending and speech. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. made clear in the argument that he, too, sees triggered matching public funds as a limit on the privately financed candidate’s speech.

That makes no sense. Arizona’s mechanism means more candidates — not just the wealthy — will be able to run in elections. And that means more political speech, not less. But that view depends on seeing money as enabling speech, not vice versa. Money already has far too much sway everywhere in politics. If the court continues this way, the damage and corruption will be enormous.

By: Editorial, Opinion Pages, The New York Times, April 11,  2011

April 13, 2011 Posted by | Constitution, Corporations, Democracy, Elections, Politics, Supreme Court, Voters | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gut Punch To Seniors: Republicans Are Done Pretending

“Should Congress have cut Medicare half a trillion dollars to pay for ObamaCare?” asked a 2010 ad for Republican newcomer Renee Ellmers in North Carolina’s 2nd congressional district. 

That theme — “Obama’s coming for your Medicare!” — helped Ellmers and GOP candidates across the nation consolidate the senior vote, winning that crucial voting bloc by a 59-38 margin. In 2008, Democrats won seniors by 49-48. The dramatic shift was a massive component of the GOP wave.

It was a dishonest attack, of course. The Democratic healthcare law cut $126 billion from Medicare Advantage over 10 years, not half a trillion. And Medicare Advantage, which allowed seniors to get healthcare via private insurers, was an inefficient and wasteful experiment to see whether private companies could deliver health services more efficiently than the government. It failed. In fact, Medicare Advantage cost 11 percent more to run than standard Medicare for identical services.

Yet “fiscally responsible” Republicans successfully demagogued the issue all the way to a majority, winning precious senior support with promises to “protect Medicare.” Those promises are now officially history. Republicans are now rewarding seniors for their vote by punching them in the gut.

GOP Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) has fired the first shot in a new war to destroy the benefit structure that seniors paid for throughout their working lives. Under his plan, seniors will no longer enroll in Medicare, but rather receive vouchers to try and secure care through private insurers. Ryan’s plan delays implementation for 10 years to ward off the wrath of current seniors, but the end result is the same — the elimination of a program Republicans pretended to protect.

After all, if the plan is so great for seniors, why wait until 2021 to implement it? 

Ryan’s plan would cap the growth of vouchers to a hair over the rate of inflation. However, the cost of medical services has far outpaced inflation. So what happens when the vouchers aren’t enough to cover the cost of expensive life-saving medical procedures? If Republicans won’t bargain with drug companies or limit reimbursements to doctors (and they won’t), the only thing left would be real-world death panels.

In other words, seniors would die, needlessly and prematurely.

It is no coincidence that Republicans are using this moment to try and discredit the AARP, which will undoubtedly push back against this irresponsible plan. The House Ways and Means Committee has launched an investigation into the organization’s finances, arguing that its support for last year’s healthcare reform measure should invalidate its tax-exempt status. “Republicans are desperate to try to break the trust that America’s seniors have in AARP,” said Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) during the committee hearings. “They need to do so before they announce their budget that will devastate Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”

If Republicans were serious about containing healthcare costs, they would take a fresh look at a public option, allowing Americans to choose government-run insurance that would compete against private insurers. But Republicans don’t really care about providing quality care at reasonable prices — they care about enriching their insurance lobbyist friends. 

Seniors allowed themselves to be taken in by the GOP in 2010. But their choice now is obvious. Republicans are done pretending.

By: Markos Moulitsas, The Hill, April 5, 2011

April 12, 2011 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Congress, Conservatives, Corporations, Democrats, Elections, GOP, Health Care, Health Reform, Insurance Companies, Lobbyists, Medicaid, Medicare, Pharmaceutical Companies, Politics, Public Option, Republicans, Right Wing, Social Security, Voters | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Risks To Boehner In Debt-Ceiling Brinkmanship

Although John Boehner and the Republicans are coming off what is widely being scored as a victory on the argument over the 2011 budget, they risk overconfidence as Congress turns its attention to the next debate, which is the fight over raising the federal debt limit.

Perhaps the most important piece of reporting that you’ll read on the debt limit debate is this one, from The Times’ Jackie Calmes:

The Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has privately urged the conservatives not to filibuster, without success, say three people familiar with the talks. He argued that if Republicans did not filibuster and just 50 votes were needed for passage, the Republicans could try to force all the votes to come from the 51 Democrats — including 17 who are up for re-election. But if 60 votes are required because of a filibuster, ultimately some Republicans would have to vote for the increase lest the party be blamed for a debt crisis.

Mr. McConnell is discouraging his colleagues from filibustering a vote to increase the federal debt limit because he knows that, if push came to shove, some of his colleagues would almost certainly have to vote yea. He’d rather it pass in a 51-vote environment, where all of the votes could come from Democrats, than in a 60-vote environment, where at least seven Republicans would have to agree to a cloture motion. 

Although Mr. McConnell’s remarks were made privately, other prominent Republicans have said as much publicly (including Mr. Boehner, who has said that a failure to raise the debt limit would create a “financial disaster,” and the G.O.P.’s designated budget hawk, Paul Ryan, who has remarked that the debt ceiling must be raised and will be raised.)

That doesn’t sound like much of a negotiating position. How to reconcile it against comments from other Republicans, such as Eric Cantor, that the debt ceiling vote will provide Republicans with “leverage” to extract additional policy compromises from President Obama and the Democrats. The obvious answer is that Republicans are running a bluff.

If the Congress does not vote to increase the debt ceiling — a statutory provision that governs how many of its debts the Treasury is allowed to pay back (but not how many obligations the United States is allowed to incur in the first place) — then the Treasury will first undertake a series of what it terms “extraordinary actions” to buy time. The “extraordinary actions” are not actually all that extraordinary — at least some of them were undertaken prior to six of the seven debt ceiling votes between 1996 and 2007.

But once the Treasury exhausts this authority, the United States would default on its debt for the first time in its history, which could have consequences like the ones that Mr. Boehner has imagined: a severe global financial crisis (possibly larger in magnitude than the one the world began experiencing in 2007 and 2008), and a significant long-term increase in the United States’ borrowing costs, which could cost it its leadership position in the global economy. Another severe recession would probably be about the best-case scenario if that were to occur.

A second recession would almost certainly hurt Mr. Obama’s re-election chances, regardless of how articulate he were about trying to pin the blame on the Republicans. But it would also hurt virtually every other incumbent, including the Republicans (and likely also the Democrats) in the Congress.

While it’s hard to know exactly what the political consequences might be — a debt default has never happened before — some combination of the following might occur:

1. Mr. Obama would be significantly less likely to win a second term;

2. Mr. Boehner, Mr. Cantor, Mr. McConnell and other Republicans would have more difficulty retaining their leadership positions in the Congress;

3. All incumbents would have more difficulty winning re-election, both because of the magnitude of the policy disaster and because the debt default (in addition to hurting the poor) would have a large impact on wealthy individuals and corporations, who are key to fund-raising;

4. Similarly, all incumbents, including Mr. Obama, would become significantly more vulnerable to primary challenges;

5. The two major parties would be significantly discredited and might fracture, possibly leading to the rise the rise of a credible presidential candidate from a third-party, or a spin-off of one of the existing parties;

6. A Constitutional crisis might ensue, because the Treasury has contradictory obligations in the event of a debt default with few clear rules (and no precedent) to guide them;

7. The challengers that were elected in 2012 would have significant difficulty retaining their seats in 2014 and 2016 because the fiscal crisis brought on by the debt default would probably last for several years and would lead to extremely unpopular austerity measures — so any immediate-term gains by either party could prove fleeting.

In short, this as close as you can get in American politics to mutually assured destruction. No matter how Machiavellian your outlook, it’s very hard to make the case that any politician with a significant amount of power would become more powerful in the event of a debt default. They also would be harmed personally, since many Congressmen have significant investments in credit, stock or housing markets, all of which would be adversely affected.

A lot of the reporting I’ve seen on the debt limit vote, especially in those publications that focus more on politics than policy, has portrayed it as a zero-sum game. That’s the wrong characterization. In contrast to a government shutdown — which could have some negative consequences for incumbents of both parties, but not ones so large that they couldn’t be outweighed by strategic considerations — a debt default would be a bigger emergency by at least an order of magnitude. Its consequences are also much less linear and much less predicable than those of a government shutdown: you can’t partially default any more than you can be half-pregnant.

Now, that doesn’t mean that Republicans won’t be able to extract any concessions at all out of the Democrats. It’s possible that the White House — which has been risk-averse in recent months as it has focused on Mr. Obama’s re-election — might not be willing to take the chance of something going wrong. It’s possible that the White House could give the Republicans some concessions that they viewed as minor, inevitable, or actually desirable from a political and policy standpoint.

But Mr. Boehner may face just as much risk as Mr. Obama, if not more. He has promised his more conservative members that he will extract significant concessions from the Democrats before he agrees to an increase in the debt limit. A White House that was willing to play hardball could put him to the test, and perhaps cause a substantial loss of face.

I don’t know that this particular (and rather cautious) White House is likely to do that. But the equilibrium outcome is probably some fairly token concessions — enough to provide Mr. Boehner with some cover with the Tea Party but not much more.

That’s assuming, of course, that both sides play the “game” optimally, which is far from assured. If Mr. Obama is a good poker player, he’ll know not to disregard Mr. Boehner’s earlier rhetoric, which gave away the vulnerability of his hand. And he’ll recognize Mr. Boehner’s more recent and more confident rhetoric for what it is: the oldest “tell” in the poker book, a show of strength betraying the ultimate weakness of his position.

By: Nate Silver, Five Thirty Eight, April 11, 2011

April 12, 2011 Posted by | Congress, Conservatives, Constitution, Corporations, Debt Ceiling, Debt Crisis, Democrats, Economic Recovery, Economy, Elections, Federal Budget, GOP, Government, Government Shut Down, Ideology, Lawmakers, Politics, President Obama, Republicans, Right Wing, Tea Party, Voters, Wealthy | , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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