Votes are only for sale when voters don't care about the issue. Politicians don't want money - they want power, when voters don't really care money buys ads and the like which translates into votes. Then voters care though no amount of money can buy off a "wrong" vote and they get voted out - lose their power.
Government jobs don't work like the private sector. Furthermore, it's not at all clear from this sentence that it's incompetence or corruption in the first place. It could be that they e.g. felt they might get a worse deal if they tried to push for a better one.
People tolerate bad inputs when the outputs are good. They ignore the sausage-making process specifically because they don't want to give up the yummy sausage.
But this particular sausage isn't yummy. It's gross, and the packaging is deceptively labeled, and it steals from veterans.
If I was being handed a yummy sausage, I might not want to ask many questions. But this one smells funky; so now I want to know what's in it, and what went wrong cooking it, and I'm even thinking I might want to get my sausages made by someone else from now on.
To continue this analogy, the problem is that if you ignore how the yummy sausages are made you don't really know what is normal and what is off when you examine the process behind the rotten ones.
People naively think the problems will be obvious. The issue at the heart of the analogy, though, is that those same people would find what they define as problems with the process for making the yummy ones. Thus, the "problems" are not as obvious as they think.
I don't think anyone is directly paying the IRS officials or corrupting them, they're paying lobbyists and donating to political campaigns. Intuit spends a LOT on lobbying, 6.6 million just in 1 year or something like that.
If we fire everyone involved in the IRS, the new folks who go against the same political diktats will be fired by the President.
It’s not just this administration. The Lois Lerner fiasco happened during the previous administration. I think the IRS has been corrupt for a long time without any help. Ken Corbin, the person in charge of this filing nonsense, is a 27 year employee of the IRS.
Every administration has its share of corruption. This one has it deeply embedded and comes from the very top. I welcome refutations from supporters of the current administration.
Let's be perfectly clear: there was no Lois Lerner fiasco. A massive number of 501(c)(4) organizations started forming with (typically right-leaning) political names, despite the fact that 501(c)(4) organizations aren't allowed to operate as PACs, because "the net earnings of which [must be] devoted exclusively to charitable, educational, or recreational purposes." 26 U.S.C. § 501(c)(4) available athttps://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/501.
This phenomenon was much more common among Tea Party groups and libertarians (many of whom fundamentally dispute the legitimacy of the tax code) than among paleoconservatives, neoconservatives, or any brand of liberal or progressive. See generally Jᴀɴᴇ Mᴀʏᴇʀ, Dᴀʀᴋ Mᴏɴᴇʏ: Tʜᴇ Hɪᴅᴅᴇɴ Hɪsᴛᴏʀʏ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ Bɪʟʟɪᴏɴᴀɪʀᴇs Bᴇʜɪɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ Rɪsᴇ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ Rᴀᴅɪᴄᴀʟ Rɪɢʜᴛ (2016).
Having a 501(c)(4) with a political term like "Tea Party" in the name is per se probable cause for an investigation. The ability to spin that into some kind of partisan witch hunt was a major propaganda victory. This was conduct by principally one side of the political spectrum, and the IRS had no more an obligation to treat the parties equally than the ATF does when investigating Second Amendment fringe groups or the DEA does when investigating head shops or the FBI does when investigating eco-terrorism.
TLDR: If you don't want to be investigated for unlawfully using your non-profit for political purposes, maybe don't put political terms in the name of your non-profit.
> Having a 501(c)(4) with a political term like "Tea Party" in the name is per se probable cause for an investigation.
It is perhaps reasonable suspicion (at most) but I can’t see how it’s per-se probable cause.
Imagine a cause that you support instead. Would you want Alabama to be able to treat any charity with “Family Planning” or “Pride” in it standing alone to be probable cause for the authorities?
Is this a serious argument? It seems very obvious to me that "Tea Party" has very few (if any) other reasonable interpretations than a political party, while "Family Planning" and "Pride" have many possible non-political uses.
> the IRS had no more an obligation to treat the parties equally than the ATF does when investigating Second Amendment fringe groups or the DEA does when investigating head shops or the FBI does when investigating eco-terrorism
I'm sorry, but I think you must fundamentally misunderstand the right against self-incrimination if you believe that invoking it is, in and of itself, incriminating. Cf. "you don't need privacy if you have nothing to hide."
That’s the issue. Choosing which names are “political” is a political action in itself. How often were names investigated that mentioned “environment”, “social”, etc?
The Sierra club is extremely political and the name indicates nothing.
Unless these investigations were all equally applied to orgs regardless of name, your argument holds no water.
This alone should be grounds enough to fire everyone involved for incompetence, even if corruption can't be proven.