The IRS scandal is blowing up bigger every hour, but it’s important to remember why it’s important to rein in the government.
Take the Cary man who says he was harassed by the Internal Revenue Service because he was active in the tea party movement. Beginning now, such claims have much more credibility; in fact, now the claimants have more credibility than the government.
Even Jon Stewart admits that. I would link to the comedian’s clip lambasting the Obama crowd over the IRS scandal, but he uses language I’m sure many of our readers would like to avoid. In any case, he admits that now the critics of government on this and other matters have more credibility than ever before.
More important, it doesn’t matter how effective the IRS pressure was. Some apologists say that the IRS audits and hassles didn’t slow down the tea party.
That’s not the point. The threat on its own is in fact even more effective, because it touches everyone and the government doesn’t have to do anything.
Look at it this way: There are NBA basketball games almost every night, and in most you can see the effect of shot-blocking.
Take last night. The Heat smacked down the Chicago Bulls. The Heat blocked 9 shots.
Now, that’s a small percentage of the Bulls’ shots; they took 74. But that’s my point: in basketball, you don’t have to block all the shots, you just have to make the opponent afraid of getting their shots blocked. They hesitate, they shoot differently, or they don’t shoot at all.
In the Bulls case, they apparently decided not to get too close to the basket, where most blocks take place, and instead went to take 3-point shots, which are less often blocked but also less often made. They made only 2 of 17; overall, they made only 25 percent of their shots, which will doom any basketball team. The Heat didn’t have to block every shot; they just had to block enough to intimidate the Bulls and make them change the way they play.
The same is true with IRS intimidation. They IRS doesn’t have to audit everyone. They just have to audit enough people, and be ruthless enough, to make taxpayers afraid of them. It doesn’t matter what happens with any investigation, if, when it is over, taxpayers still think: I’d better avoid donating to this group or being involved with that group because I don’t want to be stuck in a hassle with the IRS for a year.
And here’s the kicker: The IRS will be the enforcement arm for Obamacare. According to Reason.org, the Affordable Care Act “relies on the tax collection agency to both enforce its individual mandate and administer the tax credits the law offers to subsidize the purchase of health insurance.”
So how do you feel today about having the IRS gain such power over the most intimate and important aspect of your life?
Especially since the evidence is also mounting that Obamacare will indeed be a trainwreck.
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