Saturday, January 18, 2014

Bruce Bartlett Concerned About IRS "Underfunding"

Bruce Bartlett was once an aide to Ron Paul, but he long ago went over to the big government dark side.

This is what happens when you go Keynesian. You get concerned about the state not being efficient in its tax collections.

"Republicans have been playing this trick with the Internal Revenue Service for years," Bartlett writes in the Fiscal Times. "The agency has become the all-purpose whipping boy to excite Tea Party members and divert attention from the performance problems resulting directly from Congress's failure to fund it properly." And not just Republicans: "The Obama administration has stood by passively, doing nothing whatsoever to counter Republican attacks."

Bartlett sees all this coming to a bad end. Lack of enforcement breeds scofflaws. "Once people begin to evade taxes it tends to multiply," he writes. "No one likes to think they are a schmuck for paying what they owe when their friends and neighbors brag about making up phony deductions or hiding taxable income."

He concludes with the line from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to the effect that taxes are the price we pay to have a civilized society. "Republican scapegoating of the IRS is reprehensible," Bartlett writes, "and ought to end."


11 comments:

  1. Meanwhile, The US is the envy of the world with is 83% tax compliance rate.
    Personal Income Tax Compliance Rates
    United States: 83.1%
    United Kingdom: 77.97%
    Switzerland: 77.70%
    France: 75.38%
    Austria: 74.80%
    Netherlands: 72.84%
    Belgium: 70.15%
    Portugal: 68.09%
    Germany: 67.72%
    Italy: 62.49%

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  2. "Republican scapegoating of the IRS is reprehensible," Bartlett writes, "and ought to end."

    Your former Boss would say: The IRS ought to end

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  3. "He concludes with the line from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to the effect that taxes are the price we pay to have a civilized society."

    I hear this quite a bit. Maybe people should be reminded that civilized society existed in the US prior to them Income Tax and the IRS.

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  4. I believe the Justice made that statement prior to the institution of the income tax.

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    1. OK, but civil society still existed before the Income Tax and the IRS.

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  5. Chickenshit selling out to the Empire ought to end.

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  6. That Oliver Wendell Holmes quote is etched on the marble on the outside of the IRS building in D.C. Yes the IRS building and most of the other government building have marble facades and marble floors. That is the price of a civilized society, to live like the ancient Greeks and Romans.

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  7. Are you morally required to be truthful to the tax collection agency of a rogue, immoral government?

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  8. Give me a break!! This guy is a total crank!!

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  9. Stealing is taking someone's property without their permission. Stealing is immoral. Taxing is taking someone's property without their permission. Taxing is immoral. The State taxes it's citizens therefore the State is immoral. At this point in time there is no place on earth to live that is not immoral.

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  10. Taken from Bruce Bartlett's Wikipedia page...

    "In a 2013 article for The American Conservative, Bartlett explains that after conducting research for the book, he "came to the annoying conclusion that Keynes had been 100 percent right in the 1930s," that "we needed Keynesian policies again," and that "no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy's problems than Paul Krugman," a prominent Keynesian economist."

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