Different Day, Same Shit.

If Benghazi didn't provide enough fodder for conservatives' sense of victimhood, the following definitely will:

Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved in the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea party-affiliated groups.

IRS employees in Cincinnati also told conservatives seeking the status of “social welfare” groups that a task force in Washington was overseeing their applications, according to interviews with the activists.

Lois G. Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, told reporters on Friday that the “absolutely inappropriate” actions were undertaken by “front-line people” working in Cincinnati to target groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or “9/12” in their names.

In one instance, however, Ron Bell, an IRS employee, informed an attorney representing a conservative group focused on voter fraud that the application was under review in Washington. On several other occasions, IRS officials in Washington and California sent conservative groups detailed questionnaires about their voter outreach and other activities, according to the documents.

“For the IRS to say it was some low-level group in Cincinnati is simply false,” said Cleta Mitchell, a partner in the law firm Foley & Lardner LLP who sought to communicate with IRS headquarters about the delay in granting tax-exempt status to True the Vote.

Moreover, details of the IRS’s efforts to target conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency in May 2012, far earlier than has been disclosed, according to Republican congressional aides briefed by the IRS and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) on the details of their reviews.

It's one thing to investigate 501(c)(4)s to make sure they stay within the legal boundaries of their status. It's another to laser target 501(c)(4)s based on their political affiliation:

Lois Lerner, head of the IRS unit that oversees tax-exempt groups, noted that the number of 501(c)(4) group applications doubled between 2010 and 2012. As a result of this influx, she explained, low-level workers at the agency’s Cincinnati office had flagged about 300 applications for additional review based on a keyword search. None had their status revoked or denied and the IRS apologized for the mistake.

While it unclear whether the IRS workers intentionally targeted conservative groups — an agency spokesman did not immediately respond to a ThinkProgress request for the complete list of keywords used — the office revealed that two of the terms on the list were “Tea Party” and “patriot.” As such, about 75 Tea Party groups were singled out for additional scrutiny.

The spike in 501(c)(4) groups comes after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision that outside groups may make unlimited political expenditures. Since then, some 501(c)(4) organizations have begun abusing the system. Though groups engaged in some political activity may qualify as “social welfare groups” and receive tax-exempt status under this section of the tax code, electioneering cannot be their predominant activity.

It remains seen whether this all was deliberate or unintentional, not that it matters much to conservative Tea Party-types. This only validates their claims of victimization by the Obama administration and chances are they'll milk it for all it's worth. That includes getting yet another round of "Impeach the Socialist Negro"...ahem..."Take Back the White House."

Where were these guys when the IRS decided to take a peek at the NAACP's books during the Bush administration?

Remember Sheldon Adelson? It seems like he has a lot to benefit from a Romney administration. If Mitt gets his way and enacts his planned tax cuts, Adelson stands to gain approximately $2.3 billion in tax cuts. As it turns out, $2.3 billion goes a long way in some places.

"By the way, I had the priv[i]lege of speaking today at the NAACP convention in Houston and I gave them the same speech I am giving you. I don't give different speeches to different audiences alright. I gave them the same speech. When I mentioned I am going to get rid of Obamacare they weren't happy, I didn't get the same response. That's ok, I want people to know what I stand for and if I don't stand for what they want, go vote for someone else, that's just fine. But I hope people understand this, your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this, if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy-more free stuff. But don't forget nothing is really free. it has to paid for by people in the private sector creating goods and services, and if people want jobs more than they want free stuff from government, then they are going to have to get government to be smaller. And if they don't want to repeal Obamacare they are going to have to give me some other stuff they are thinking about cutting, but my list takes Obamacare off first and I have a lot of other things I am thinking of cutting."

Sounds like Mitt Romney's still smarting from his cold treatment at the hands of the NAACP. The above was said at a fundraiser held in Montana shortly after his NAACP appearance. In spite of how massively hypocritical it makes him in light of Romneycare, the presidential hopeful remains intent on banging the "Obamacare = Welfare" drum. Gee, I thought it was a tax.

Meanwhile, there's a growing chorus of folks calling for Mittens to release his full tax records and not just the ones from 2010 and 2011. Even the governor of Alabama's calling for him to get it over with. After all, he's got nothing to hide, right?

Ever since Jefferson County, AL's half-cent occupational tax, authorized in 1967 but not collected until 1988, was struck down as "unconstitutional" back in 2011, the county's been out of an estimated $66 million in desperately-needed revenue. It was the proverbial straw that broke the county's back and drove it into one of the largest bankruptcies in recent history.

Now the county wants to resurrect that tax in an effort to get its fiscal house back in order. Except there's plenty of vocal opposition that would rather have the county eat its cold bowl of court-imposed and "taxpayer"-supported austerity. Instead, Jefferson County is being forced to trim back on indigent care, most notably the services provided by Jefferson County's Cooper Green Mercy hospital. Most of the AL.com crowd wouldn't mind seeing the hospital close its doors, despite it serving a significant portion of JeffCo's poorest and uninsured.

Cooper Green is currently some $8.9 million bucks in the hole. The hospital's seen its obstetrics and oncology services put to an end in an effort to cut back on spending. People who can't afford decent care from the other surrounding hospitals may have no other choice but to hit the emergency rooms of UAB and others. Meanwhile, the county is doing its best to shed enough of its budget to meet a $40 million dollar shortfall. It doesn't matter how much that ground glass hurts going down, you have to finish all of your austerity before eating dessert.

The whole point of the occupational tax? There are thousands of suburbanites outside of Jefferson County who commute into the county for work but leave promptly afterwards, with their paychecks not far behind. Most of these people choose not to spend any money inside the county beyond the occasional lunch and a tank fill-up. They don't pay property taxes because they don't live in Jefferson County, but they still utilize the road networks and rely on law enforcement, fire and rescue and other resources.

These folks live in Shelby, St. Clair, Bibb, Tuscaloosa and Blount Counties*, places with much lower taxes and far more conservative social and political mores. As you can imagine, they'll extract wealth from JeffCo, but that's about it. A half-cent occupational tax would go a ways to recoup some of those expenses spent on those commuting into JeffCo.

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The most recent bill drafted by lawmakers, the "Alabama Financially Distressed Counties Act," will give other counties the power to levy their own occupational taxes when they fall between a rock and a fiscally hard place. Unfortunately, those suburban folks are the kind of folks who reflexively twist their faces in disgust over paying yet another (half) penny in taxes, despite effectively having their cake and eating it. But it's not just the virulently anti-tax people who are up in arms over the prospect of an occupation tax.

Part of the problem lies in Alabama's fucked up legislative methods when it comes to county-wide affairs. You see, while most other states give their counties home rule, Alabama...doesn't. In most cases, if you want to get get things done in your county, it has to go through the state legislature as either a local bill, seen and approved by the county's legislators or a general bill, seen and approved by all of the state's lawmakers. It only takes four county representatives in the House or one senator to take a local bill, beat the living shit out of it and toss it into a corner, broken and battered until the next legislative session. This is what the illustrious State Senator Scott Beason did to a prior attempt at resurrecting the occupational tax.

The other part of the problem is the bill authors being their own worst enemies. Sen. Jabo Waggoner and Rep. Jack Williams each pushed their own versions of the "Alabama Financially Distressed Counties Act" as a general bill. Williams managed to get his bill through committee. And then a Birmingham News reporter asked a simple question: whether the bill included exemptions for lawyers, doctors and other professionals.

Keep in mind this was an understandable question to ask. The previous occupation tax had this exemption in place to prevent professionals who were already paying professional license fees from essentially being double-taxed. Rep. Williams answered in the affirmative. And that's where the sugar turned to shit.

You see, Rep. Williams didn't actually read the whole bill, despite being credited as the author. As it turns out, no one actually writes their own bills. Or reads them. Worse, lobbyists and other people with vested interests in legislation are the ones penning the bills:

For Williams, the incident exposed an embarrassing fact about how legislation becomes law. Most lawmakers don’t write the bills they sponsor. This is probably for the best, since many are not lawyers and could do more harm than good if they did pen the bills themselves. What’s more, many lawmakers don’t read the bills, either. Instead, they trust the lobbyists and interested parties who shop legislation to them. This becomes a frustrating and embarrassing problem when pesky reporters ask them about the legislation or when the bills become law and have all sorts of unintended and irritating effects, as Alabama’s immigration law, HB56, had last year.

It might seems silly from the outside looking in, but in a system run by lobbyists and politicians, trust is essential.

That sums up Alabama's entire legislative problem in a nutshell. The legislators are merely figureheads and decoration for the real powers: lobbyists and corporate interests.

JeffCo Commissioner David Carrington neglected to make clear to Williams how the exemptions weren't gonna be in the bill. Whoops. Fortunately, Waggoner's bill had these exemptions, in the form of a deduction from professional license fees as long as the fees were less than the tax. Waggoner's bill made it past the Senate, but it didn't make it past the House County and Municipal Government Committee intact.

...the County and Municipal Government Committee of the House of Representatives today voted 7-4 to rewrite the plan to exempt people who live outside the county from paying the occupational tax.

Jefferson County Commission President David Carrington said that change would reduce revenue from the allowed occupational tax to about $45 million a year.

Opponents of the amendment excluding Jefferson County workers who live outside the county said it would be unconstitutional, since it would create two separate classes of workers.

That defeats the purpose of the bill, which is perhaps the intended effect. The last bill got killed because an "unconstitutional" amendment. Leaving this poison pill in the pie could get the whole thing thrown out at some point.

Wednesday is the last day of the current state legislative session. Unless the governor feels like opening a special session, this may be the last chance for the county to see a solution to the fiscal problems ailing it.


*There's an urban myth out there that Walker County residents actually commute into JeffCo. I doubt the veracity of this myth, as most Walker Co. residents have traded their wheels for cinder blocks.

The nature of anonymous trolls make it so when there's more than one person making the same or similar point to the troll, chances are that person is a second account made by the same troll. In following one of these troll's YouTube video, I stumbled on the following comment:

@lmdslam republicans and democrats both suck. the new TEA party types are the best answer for us now. Small federal government, less taxation, fewer regulations, strong military.

The above comes from YouTube user "1Makyo". So why focus on boilerplate Teabagger script from some run-of-the-mill YouTube denizen?

Simple.

"Small federal government, less taxation, fewer regulations, strong military."

Let's break this down. In order for the United States to maintain its overgrown yet strong (in most respects) military in 63 countries, with over 250,000 military personnel and countless support staff, including contractors, the U.S. spends over $700 billion per year. That's more than other countries spend on their military forces combined. In contrast, China spends barely over $100 billion on their military.

Now that requires a pretty beefy federal government that's doing a fair bit of taxation. On the other hand, the small federal government desired by the Tea Party wouldn't be able to swing these types of expenditures. At best, the U.S. would have no choice but to cut the military aid, pack up the troops and send them home, and then shut down and gut the bases they were in. America's priority would suddenly shift to homeland defense. No more bodies coming from Iraq and Afghanistan. Cue the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico that the Tea Party wants.

The main problem with that is it will kick America's geopolitical chessboard from under it, and all of the carefully planned chess moves that involved military aid, interventions, counterterrorist works and plain old show of force will be for naught. Neocons will weep in anguish. If the U.S. wants to continue projecting force, something's gonna have to give.

The second problem comes from the taxation end. Given the wealthy and multinational corporations will be the most reluctant to pay their fair share in taxes (or believe what they're paying now is their fair share), the bulk of the tax burden will fall on the usual suspects -- the middle classes and the working poor. The whole idea of activating the "trickle-down effect" to spur consumer spending by relieving the "tax burden" from the wealthy and large businesses fell apart before America's very eyes during most of this year.

All of those tax cuts should have translated into spend-happy businesses and wealthy folk who hired more people and spend more money on more things just for the sake of spending, which should have translated into dollars trickling down from above and into the pockets of ordinary Joe Schmoes. Instead, the recession proved to companies that they could fire half of their workforce, force the other half to work twice as hard, and use the savings from firing the "dead weight" and their tax cuts to give their CEOs performance bonuses and better pay, while sitting on the rest of the money.

Now, how do you expect to fund your overgrown yet strong military if you have to rely largely on an exhausted tax base that is punitively hit with regressive taxes at every turn? Well, the U.S. military could start relying on corporate sponsorship as a way to shore up those funds. Businesses donated to the NYPD to shore up their operating costs during Occupy Wall Street, so there's nothing to stop them from throwing a few bones to the Army or Air Force every once in a while, in exchange for certain services...

You could also push a flat tax akin to Herman Cain's old "9-9-9" or new "9-0-9" tax scheme. And since "half of Americans don't pay taxes," all you have to do is to make them pay by getting rid of certain deductions and credits! Say goodbye to the EIC and Making Work Pay. Of course, this may drive some to partake more heavily in welfare/assistance programs, but you can kick them off the rolls just as well, if those programs even exist anymore. But that still takes a pretty big federal government to pull off.

In the Tea Party-governed world of 1Makyo, the concept of "small federal government" is applied everywhere except the military, while it also receives private bankrolling from corporate sources, in exchange for playing mercenary whenever there's a natural resource that needs securing. As far as "fewer regulations" go, all you have to do is march backwards in time to see the environmental, commercial and health-related damages that will ensue.

Hmm...sounds like business as usual. Perhaps the Teabaggers aren't up for the whole "small federal government, less taxation, fewer regulations, strong military" theme, after all.

The Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center crunched the numbers from Herman Cain's "9-9-9" tax plan. Once you get past the glossy exterior and tricked-out trim, things don't look so good under the hood:

A middle income household making between about $64,000 and $110,000 would get hit with an average tax increase of about $4,300, lowering its after-tax income by more than 6 percent and increasing its average federal tax rate (including income, payroll, estate and its share of the corporate income tax) from 18.8 percent to 23.7 percent. By contrast, a taxpayer in the top 0.1% (who makes more than $2.7 million) would enjoy an average tax cut of nearly$1.4 million, increasing his after-tax income by nearly 27 percent. His average effective tax rate would be cut almost in half to 17.9 percent. In Cain’s world, a typical household making more than $2.7 million would pay a smaller share of its income in federal taxes than one making less than $18,000. This would give Warren Buffet severe heartburn.

As Howard Gleckman explains, Cain's "9-9-9" plan is actually "a 25 percent flat-rate consumption tax—not all that different from the FAIR tax that he says is his ultimate goal." Hmm...a flat tax doesn't seem all that bad, does it? Well, let's put those figures on an easy-to-understand graph.


Don't like what you see? That's probably because your income comes nowhere near the $200k-$500k threshold where the pain of Cain's plan turns into a bountiful bonanza of tax cuts. After all, someone's gotta pay for this stuff.

Cain’s triple tax would replace payroll and estate taxes as well as the corporate and individual income taxes as we know them. All deductions, exemptions, and credits (except for charitable gifts) would be eliminated from the individual tax. Because businesses could deduct all their capital purchases, capital income would be tax free. But wages would be taxed—again and again and again. First, directly through the individual flat tax and then, because firms can’t deduct wages as an expense, twice more through the business tax and the sales tax.

Because employers would be taxed on wages they pay, economists figure the levy would result in lower salaries. Not only would the combination of lower incomes and higher taxes reduce the current standard of living for many middle-class households, those lower wages would also result in lower Social Security benefits down the road.

Damn. Those working-class folk just can't catch a break, can they?

As it turns out, the GOP aren't all that adverse to raising taxes, after all. Even the Tea Party's patron saint of American conservative governance, St. Reagan the Gipper, often raised taxes despite allaying his fellow conservatives' concerns of being swept up in the demonic liberal tax-and-spend waves. Just not on the top 1% of earners in this nation. That remains sacrosanct as far as the GOP is concerned.

Instead, it will be the middle class and working class that ends up shouldering the tax burdens of this nation.

America’s presumably anti-tax party wants to raise your taxes. Come January, the Republicans plan to raise the taxes of anyone who earns $50,000 a year by $1,000, and anyone who makes $100,000 by $2,000. 

Their tax hike doesn’t apply to income from investments. It doesn’t apply to any wage income in excess of $106,800 a year. It’s the payroll tax that they want to raise — to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent of your paycheck, a level established for one year in December’s budget deal at Democrats’ insistence. Unlike the capital gains tax, or the low tax rates for the rich included in the Bush tax cuts, or the carried interest tax for hedge fund operators (which is just 15 percent), the payroll tax chiefly hits the middle class and the working poor.

While President Obama has made clear that he supports extending the lower 4.2 percent payroll tax rate for another year, to keep the economy from contracting further, congressional Republicans have made their opposition equally clear. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. Camp complained that it would push the deficit higher. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the man who’d have us scrap Medicare, concurred. “It would simply exacerbate our debt problems,” he said on Fox News Sunday this month.