Not
a smidgen of corruption:
The new emails also raised new questions for some lawmakers about Ms. Lerner, the now-retired head of the IRS exempt organizations division who has become a focus of the inquiry. The emails show her urging colleagues to be cautious about what they say in their emails, because Congress had previously tried to obtain them.
“I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails—so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails,” Ms. Lerner wrote. “Someone asked if [instant messaging] conversations were also searchable—I don’t know, but told them I would get back to them. Do you know?”
“[Instant] messages are not set to automatically save as the standard; however the functionality exists within the software,” the technician wrote back. “My general recommendation is to treat the conversation as if it could/is being saved somewhere, as it is possible for either party of the conversation to retain the information and have it turn up as part of an electronic search.”
“Perfect,” Ms. Lerner replied.
It is perfect -- you can get away with anything if you choose membership in the right gang. John Hayward, yet again,
making the salient point:
Crime almost always involves some cost/benefit analysis – from robbery, to violating the U.S. border, to high government officials taking bribes or abusing their powers. The potential rewards are balanced against the risk of detection and prosecution. The rewards for what Lois Lerner did were vast – it is quite possible she helped turn the 2012 election, as the entire U.S. media would be loudly explaining to you every single day, if this was a story about Republican operatives using the IRS against left-wing groups. The risk of detection and prosecution is essentially zero. The next Lois Lerner will shred hard drives, conveniently fail to print hardcopies, and take the Fifth. The next Tax Exempt Organizations bureaucracy will drag its feet for years and dribble out subpoenaed documents to frustrated congressional overseers, while Party hacks scream that the whole thing is a phony scandal. The next John Koskinen will claim he doesn’t know anything about anything. Therefore, it will happen again.
Of course it will. We do not have public servants. We have rulers.
7 comments:
That is why I propose a simple and expedient solution: pass the FAIR tax and the IRS simply goes away, with no possibility for corruption or incompetence.
Even with the FAIR tax, the IRS would not go away, unfortunately.
Could we try acid, fire, and a vaporiser of some sort?
Of COURSE the IRS, as now constituted, would go away. Gone would be the 10s of thousands of pages of the code, all the forms, all the audits, payroll withholding and corrupting influence on the economy. The States would collect the taxes and remit direct to the Treasury. Poof! problem solved, and our economy and society would benefit greatly.
No bureaucracy goes away, Jerry. Ever.
I'll settle for phasing it out (after all, 38 states have to ratify it first) until it becomes a mere shadow of its former self. I know, we still have a tea tasting Board, I think, but its budget and influence are very small. If we can get the IRS down to something like that, I'll be happy.
Pol Pot managed to rid himself of an old bureaucracy, as did Josef Stalin. Granted they were replaced by new ones, but....
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