Hitler had his SchutzStaffel (SS) and his Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) to keep people in fear of their government. According to the New York Times the United States Government through the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has engendered a similar type of fear among its citizens.
Representative David Camp, Kentucky's Hal Rogers and a number of democrats are quoted in the NYT article saying much the same thing.
“There isn’t a person I come into contact with back home — or anyone in this country frankly — who does not fear the I.R.S.,” Mr. Camp said last month in opening the first hearing into the agency’s targeting of conservative groups for special scrutiny. “They fear getting something wrong on their tax filings. And they fear the I.R.S.’s ability to audit them and wreak havoc in their lives.”
“People are outraged with I.R.S. more than I’ve seen about anything else,” said Representative Aaron Schock, Republican of Illinois and a Ways and Means member.
House Republicans are determined to stoke the anger, and Democrats are in no mood to stand in their way. At a hearing Monday of the House Appropriations Committee, lawmakers from both parties flailed Daniel I. Werfel, the newly appointed acting I.R.S. commissioner, demanding drastic change.
“It seems we have a new misstep every day at the I.R.S.,” said Representative Harold Rogers of Kentucky, the committee’s chairman. “I’m very troubled with what might come to light next.”
Representative Nita M. Lowey of New York, the panel’s ranking Democrat, pronounced herself “furious.”
“What was the I.R.S. thinking?” she asked.
But some people think that the IRS targeting of TEA party and Liberty groups needs to stay focused on the abuses of the IRS and not turn this situation into a call for tax reform.
Kevin Kookogey, president of Linchpins of Liberty, a one-man organization in Williamson County, Tenn., said any effort to jump from I.R.S. targeting to tax-code simplification “would be a misstep.”“I do not like the complexity of the tax code, but this is political targeting, as simple as two plus two,” he said Monday. “If this is used as a political ploy to change the tax code, we will have missed the moral issue here, and nothing much will have changed.”
I agree that the abuses of the IRS need to be handled as a separate incident of government over-reach and the abuse of power, but there may be no better time to eliminate the IRS and repeal the income tax than there will be when the smoke clears from this explosive scandal.
We should strive to have both results in play. Curb the abuses of power but at the same time get rid of the henchmen who will still be there for the next guy to use as his personal army against the people.
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