First Your Taxes, Then Your Health

The Foundation

“The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.” –James Madison

Government

“It turns out that Sarah Hall Ingram, who served as head of the IRS office handling tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012 — when the targeting was going on — is now head of the IRS division in charge of the IRS office policing Obamacare. … The IRS is assigned a lot of work by the Obamacare law. It will impose penalties on Americans who can afford health insurance but choose not to buy it. It will impose penalties on companies with more than 50 employees who work 30 hours a week and don’t provide government-mandated policies. It will give tax credits to non-affluent purchasers of health insurance on state exchanges. The IRS says it can also give tax credits to such people in states that have federally run exchanges, though many argue the law does not authorize that. In other words, the IRS is going to possess and process a large amount of information not only on your income but on your health insurance and perhaps your health. The IRS was given these tasks by the drafters of Obamacare because no other government agency had the capability to gain access to people’s personal financial information. They may have thought that taxpayers would trust an agency that they had gotten used to dealing with. That level of trust may not be as high as it was 10 days ago. Chilling effect, indeed.” –columnist Michael Barone

Essential Liberty

“The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He’s shocked, it’s unacceptable, he’ll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you. But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. … It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved. … What happened at the IRS is the government’s essential business. … Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don’t, the politicization of the IRS will continue — forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn’t stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again. … This is not about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.” –columnist Peggy Noonan

Re: The Left

“Imagine for a moment if black civil rights organizations, gay groups or teachers unions loudly complained to members of Congress and the press that the IRS was discriminating against them. How long would it take for the White House to investigate? Answer honestly: Minutes? Hours? … [Y]ou can be sure that the moment [Obama] heard credible allegations of political persecution of liberal groups — outfits with ‘progressive’ or ‘civil rights’ in their names — he would have moved heaven and earth to make things right. But when such allegations came from the right, the response from the president — and from a press corps that until recently acted like a king’s guard — ranged from smirks and eye-rolling to flat-out lies or virtual applause. … The time for democratic debate is always behind us with an administration that began with the mission not to let a crisis go to waste, for as Obama said in his second inaugural address, ‘Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.’ Moreover, President Obama often insists we live in a country where the ‘government is us,’ where there’s no need to fear tyranny ‘around the corner’ because we could never be tyrannical against ourselves.” –columnist Jonah Goldberg

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