IRS Targeted Donors To Tea Party Groups

jem said:
its a bullshit measure of prosperity when you make G bigger and biger.. but it is a damn good measure that the sequester worked if you cut the G part of the GDP and yet the GDP grew faster than expected.

are you going to tell us what GDP would have been using bullshit models again?
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I'm not even going to verify that GDP grew "faster than expected" under the sequester because I already know the CBO and others have done a good job estimating its drag on GDP, i.e. it is not necessary to show the former if the latter is true. Their models may have been a bit too pessimistic, but nobody thought spending cuts during this recession were going to, ceteris paribus, stimulate growth.
 
nobody thought that unless they already suspected the govt was too big and hurting the economy.

those of us who knew govt was too big were not surprised the sequester worked.
 
piezoe said:
My recollection of this is that the disagreement between the IRS and the Republican Party had nothing to do with the "gift Tax". My understanding is that the IRS concluded that these political PACS, both Liberal and Conservative, did not qualify under the section of IRS code they were seeking status under, because in the opinion of the IRS they were not bonafide "Social Welfare Organizations", but rather section 527, tax exempt, political organizations. Under section 527 their donors names would have to be revealed. This was the crux of the issue: Whether or not the donors names would be revealed, and that had to do with what section of the code they were allowed to file under. The issue was further muddied by the ratio of conservative to liberal political organizations attempting to file as social welfare organizations, being roughly 30 to 1. This made it appear as though the the IRS was "targeting" conservative "social welfare organizations" since the ratio of IRS investigations of these phoney social welfare organizations was heavily skewed toward the conservative groups.

(Of course the IRS, in their inimitable fashion, thoroughly fucked things up by pre-qualifying some organizations on the basis of trumped-up estimates of how the organizations revenues would be spent. These estimates, after the election!, turned out to be wildly wrong. On top of that the IRS had a political zealot, as it turned out, in charge of the IRS office that was to determine under what section of code these organizations qualified. The investigation quickly deteriorated into mud slinging and wild accusations, and veered off into questions of whether the chief witness, the political zealot, Louis Lerner, should be held in contempt. Nothing was ever settled, but politicians on both sides used the opportunity to grandstand on television. The IRS subsequently reviewed their procedure for qualifying organizations for social welfare status, and has revisited those sections of the code under question.)
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That was the general background. My posts have been about recently uncovered IRS emails that give some color to what they were doing, and incidentally show that obama and IRS officals lied about the scandal.

The IRS demanded the names of donors to Tea Party groups during the vetting process, which was in itself highly questionable, then attempted to put the screws to those donors by hitting them with gift taxes. There were also incidents of donor names being released or leaked to liberal groups.
 
jem said:
nobody thought that unless they already suspected the govt was too big and hurting the economy.

those of us who knew govt was too big were not surprised the sequester worked.
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There has been no crowding out during this recession.
 
Piezoe,
Thanks for you comments. My son's thesis is on the japanese economy. They now have , I think, a government debt load of 200% of the gdp, and almost no growth for the last 25 years, despite following keynesian principles. Any comments on that example?
 
roberk said:
Any comments on that example?
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They didnt print enough, if they just would have printed a few more trillion yen, the japanese economy would have had an explosion of growth the likes of which we have never seen.
 
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