False Fiscal Conservatives And Budget Crisis Realism
Dear Socially Liberal Fiscal-Conservative Friend,
That’s pretty toothy, so I’m going to call you “Bob.” But whatever specific name you go by, Bob, you know who you are. You’re the sort of person who says to his conservative friends or co-workers something like, “I would totally vote for Republicans if they could just give up on these crazy social issues.”
When you explain your votes for Barack Obama, you talk about how Republicans used to be much more moderate and focused on important things such as low taxes, fiscal discipline, and balanced budgets.
When Colin Powell was on Meet the Press the other day, you nodded along as he lamented how the GOP has lost its way since the days when it was all about fiscal responsibility.
And, Bob, you think Republicans are acting crazy-pants on the debt ceiling. You don’t really follow all of the details, but you can just tell that the GOP is being “extreme,” thanks to those wacky tea partiers.
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Government Accountability Office Audit Reveals IRS Service Bad — And Getting Worse
photo credit: 401(k)2013
It’s not much better for professional tax preparers seeking help, according to a new Government Accountability Office report on IRS taxpayer operations. The GAO found that just 73 percent of tax preparers who needed assistance from a live IRS official got through on the phone and their wait was an average of 22 minutes–19 minutes more than the wait in 2007.
And unfortunately for taxpayers, help is not on the way. The GAO found that the IRS doesn’t have a plan that can fix the service breakdowns fast enough and Congress isn’t expected to help out with more money.
The “IRS does not have a strategy to reverse declines in service,” said Uncle Sam’s auditor. “The federal government’s tight budget environment makes any meaningful increase in resources for taxpayer service unlikely,” it added.
There is good news, however, in their annual report.
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Senior State Dept. Climate Official Heads to Department Of Energy
photo credit: kevin m. gill
Jonathan Pershing will begin his new role as DOE deputy assistant secretary for climate change policy and technology on Tuesday, David Sandalow, DOE secretary for policy and international affairs, said in a Friday email to staff.
Pershing will oversee domestic climate and clean-energy initiatives for that office, Sandalow noted. He replaces Rick Duke, who left the agency in September.
At State Department, Pershing served as deputy special envoy for climate change under special envoy Todd Stern. He helped lead the U.S. envoy in United Nations global warming talks for the past four years.
Pershing defended U.S. and Obama administration efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions during a U.N. climate conference in November.
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Trillion-Dollar-Coin Fever
I was out of the country for a few days and news from this great republic reached me only fitfully. I have learned to be wary of foreign reporting of U.S. events, since America can come off sounding faintly deranged. Much of what reached me didn’t sound entirely plausible: Did the entire U.S. media really fall for the imaginary dead girlfriend of a star football player? Did the president of the United States really announce 23 executive orders by reading out the policy views of carefully pre-screened grade-schoolers (“I want everybody to be happy and safe”)? Clearly, these vicious rumors were merely planted in the foreign press to make the United States appear ridiculous.
And indeed, upon my return, it seemed to be business as usual. ABC News revealed that in 2007 President Bush’s secretary of the interior — oh, come on, it’s on the citizenship test: “Name a secretary of the interior. Any secretary of the interior.” Anyway, ABC revealed that Bush’s secretary of the interior spent 220,000 taxpayer dollars remodeling his (or her, as the case may be) office bathroom. Who knew the gig was really secretary of the interior design? I’ll bet the guy who made Saddam’s solid-gold toilets was delighted to get a new customer. But what can be done? If we changed the name to secretary of the exterior, he’d have blown a quarter-million on a new outhouse.
Meanwhile, hot from the fiscal-cliff fiasco, the media are already eagerly anticipating the next in the series of monthly capitulations by Republicans, this time on the debt ceiling. While I was abroad, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, a Harvard professor of constitutional law, a prominent congressman, and various other American eminencies apparently had a sober and serious discussion on whether the United States Treasury could circumvent the debt constraints by minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin. Although Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider called the trillion-dollar coin “the most important fiscal policy debate you’ll ever see in your life,” most Democrat pundits appeared to favor the idea for the more straightforward joy it affords in sticking it to the House Republicans. No more tedious whining about spending from GOP congressmen. Next time Paul Ryan shows up in committee demanding to know about deficit-reduction plans, all the treasury secretary has to do is pull out a handful of trillion-dollar coins from down the back of the sofa and tell him to keep the change.
The trillion-dollar-groat fever rang a vague bell with me. Way back in 1893, Mark Twain wrote a short story called “The Million Pound Bank Note,” which in the Fifties Ronald Neame made into a rather droll film. A penniless American down and out in London (Gregory Peck) is presented by two eccentric Englishmen (Ronald Squire and Wilfrid Hyde-White) with a million-pound note which they have persuaded the Bank of England to print in order to settle a wager. One of the English chaps believes that simple possession of the note will allow the destitute Yank to live the high life without ever having to spend a shilling. And so it proves. He goes to the pub for lunch, offers the note, and the innkeeper explains that he’s unable to make change for a million pounds, but is honored to feed him anyway. He then goes to be fitted for a suit, and again the tailor regrets that he can’t provide change for a million pounds but delightedly measures him for dress suits, silk shirts, and all the rest. I always liked the line Mark Twain’s protagonist uses on a duke’s niece he’s sweet on: He tells her “I hadn’t a cent in the world but just the million pound note.”
That’s Paul Krugman’s solution for America as it prepares to bust through another laughably named “debt limit”: We’d be a nation that hasn’t a cent in the world but just a trillion-dollar coin — and what more do we need? As with Gregory Peck in the movie, the mere fact of the coin’s existence would ensure we could go on living large. Indeed, aside from inflating a million quid to a trillion bucks, Professor Krugman’s proposal economically prunes the sprawling cast of the film down to an off-Broadway one-man show with Uncle Sam playing every part: A penniless Yank (Uncle Sam) runs into a wealthy benefactor (Uncle Sam) who has persuaded the banking authorities (Uncle Sam) to mint a trillion-dollar coin that will allow Uncle Sam (played by Uncle Sam) to extend an unending line of credit to Uncle Sam (also played by Uncle Sam).
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West Point: ‘Far Right’ Dangerous to U.S.
A new West Point study released by the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center is linking opposition to abortion and other “fundamental” positions to terrorism, and pro-life leaders say it’s just a way to paint them in a negative way.
The study, “Challenges from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right,” says the major far right threats are from, “a racist/white supremacy movement, an anti-federalist movement and a fundamentalist movement.”
Author Arie Perliger cites “anti-abortionists” as an active threat for terrorist activity.
“The anti-abortionists have been extremely productive during the last two decades, amassing 227 attacks, many of them perpetrated without the responsible perpetrators identified or caught,” Perliger wrote. “And while, in both cases, the 1990s were more violent than the last decade, in the case of anti-abortion, the trend is much more extreme, as 90 percent of attacks were perpetrated before 2001.”
American Life League President Judie Brown believes this is a smear tactic.
Read more from this story HERE.
Poll: 75 Percent Want Congressional Term Limits
Three out of four Americans support term limits for members of Congress, a new poll finds.
According to a Gallup survey posted Friday, 75 percent of adults nationwide back term limits for members of the House and the Senate, while 21 percent say they would vote against term limits. Term limits received bipartisan support in the poll: Republicans would back such a measure 82 percent-15 percent; independents would do so 79 percent-17 percent and Democrats favored term limits 65 percent-29 percent, even as most incumbents won their races again in November, Gallup noted.
This survey comes at a time when many Americans have a negative opinion of the Hill.
Read more from this story HERE.
New Stealth Clothing Line Hides Wearer from Drones
Surveillance cameras are ubiquitous, especially in the U.K.. and in the United States, Congress has already approved the use of drones for domestic surveillance. Then there’s the “Stingray” tool used by the FBI to track cell phones. It’s enough to make even those who’ve gotten nothing hide feel nervous.
New York-based artist Adam Harvey doesn’t like it one bit. So he’s taken it upon himself to design anti-surveillance clothing to foil government snoopers.
Harvey has been looking at the effects of such surveillance on culture for some time. Last year he designed a kind of face makeup called CVDazzle to avert face-recognition software.
In the spirit of fooling cameras – and messing with surveillance – Harvey has now come out in a set of hoodies and scarves that block thermal radiation from the infrared scanners drones use. Wearing the fabric would make that part of the body look black to a drone, so the image would appear like disembodied legs. He also designed a pouch for cell phones that shields them from trackers by blocking the radio signals the phone emits. For those airport X-ray machines, he has a shirt with a printed design that blocks the radiation from one’s heart.
The materials the clothes are made are specialized and expensive, so these aren’t the kinds of fashions that the local discount store will have – at least not yet. Harvey does plan to offer the clothes for sale, though.
Read more from this story HERE.
Egyptian Court Sentences Christian Family to 15 Years for Converting From Islam
The 15-year prison sentence given to a woman and her seven children by an Egyptian court for converting to Christianity is a sign of things to come, according to alarmed human rights advocates who say the nation’s Islamist government is bad news for Christians in the North African country.
A criminal court in the central Egyptian city of Beni Suef meted out the shocking sentence last week, according to the Arabic-language Egyptian paper Al-Masry Al-Youm. Nadia Mohamed Ali, who was raised a Christian, converted to Islam when she married Mohamed Abdel-Wahhab Mustafa, a Muslim, 23 years ago. He later died, and his widow planned to convert her family back to Christianity in order to obtain an inheritance from her family. She sought the help of others in the registration office to process new identity cards between 2004 and 2006. When the conversion came to light under the new regime, Nadia, her children and even the clerks who processed the identity cards were all sentenced to prison.
Samuel Tadros, a research fellow at Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, said conversions like Nadia’s have been common in the past, but said Egypt’s new Sharia-based constitution “is a real disaster in terms of religion freedom.”
“The cases will increase in the future,” Tadros said. “It will be much harder for people to return to Christianity.”
President Mohamed Morsi, who was elected last June and succeeded the secular reign of Hosni Mubarak, who is now in prison, pushed the new constitution through last year.
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IRS Loses Lawsuit in Fight Against Tax Preparers
photo credit: scott*eric
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington ruled against the IRS in favor of three tax preparers who filed suit last year with the help of a libertarian legal group, the Arlington, Va.-based Institute for Justice.
Since 2011, in response to what it says has been a growing problem of poorly done returns, the IRS has sought to impose a series of new regulations on tax preparers. That included a requirement to pass a qualifying exam, paying an annual application fee, and taking 15 hours annually of continuing-education courses.
Attorneys and certified public accountants would have been exempt from the regulations.
The Institute for Justice argued that the IRS lacked the statutory authority to impose the regulations and said they would put tens of thousands of mom-and-pop tax preparers out of business, because the regulations were onerous and create a competitive disadvantage to the attorneys and CPAs who were exempt.
Read more from this story HERE.