Did the President under estimate the People's disdain for the IRS?

If your question is for the President, then perhaps you should ask it of him. Did you have a question for us?

So far I haven’t heard any evidence of the President actually “using the IRS as [his] goons”. The IRS investigated some Tea Party groups, and they did it during an election year. It didn’t necessarily occur at the President’s instigation- it’s hardly surprising that the IRS would be interested in groups that are named and style themselves after a famous tax revolt and which routinely characterize taxation as “theft”.
Of course, the President is ultimately responsible for what happens in his administration. We all know where the buck stops, even if some Presidents have not. We will just have to wait and see how the administration responds to this latest “scandal”.

A lot of these party members are trying to avoid paying taxes. It’s common sense to look at them. I just wish Obama had the balls not to cave to them.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could underestimate the generally low regard for the IRS as an agency, and its policies and practices in particular, though it’s certainly possible to live with or near a particular IRS agent or auditor and realize that they’re just regular folks doing a difficult job as well – and as honestly – as they can.

However, if you’re extrapolating to “how much trouble could this cause for the President”, you have to realize how apathetic most of his supporters are regarding this kind of abuse, and how toothless (and often hypocritical) are his detractors in government. In addition, what brought down Nixon was not that he directed low-level burglars to break into the Democratic National Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, what brought him down was the deliberate attempt to cover up the scandal after it had occurred and he was informed.

Obama knows this. That’s why he seems to have gotten so adept at feigning ignorance: “I only found out the same way you folks found out on the news, just last Friday” ... on stories that have been unfolding behind the scenes for months, if not years. When it finally comes to light just how much he has been hiding and lying about, and how transparent his lies are – which probably wasn’t what he had in mind when he promised “the most transparent Administration ever! – then he might meet his comeuppance.

Did you see the Jon Stewart take on this recently? You’d enjoy it as much as I did, I’m sure.

Are you saying you believe the president was involved in the decision that some low level IRS agent made to figure out how to choose which of the shit load of new non profit applications should be audited?
Personally, I would question any group that claimed to be non PARTISAN but had the word “PARTY” in their name.

This happened under G.W. Bush as well. It’s a weird thing. I can’t believe either president was actually responsible for this kind of harrassment. It’s way too risky for exactly the reasons you mention – a lot of people resent the IRS, and a lot of them feel that it targets people unfairly. It’s not worth the political backlash that would ensue. To me, it sounds like the action of someone who wants to ingratiate himself with the party, or with the president. Someone with power, who isn’t particularly bright.

Don’t really see what all the fuss is about. Those groups are all in the high risk of abuse category and all needed to have a little extra scrutiny so I see this as a case of a federal worker actually doing his/her job well.

@rojo As far as we currently know, however, that’s not the reason the IRS went after these groups. So even if we grant that there was a good reason to give these groups extra scrutiny, it’s still a scandal if that was not the actual reason the extra scrutiny was given. Just because something is justifiable doesn’t mean it was, in fact, justified.

The most charitable explanation I’ve seen so far is that IRS employees chose to go after certain groups because they were not given any official guidance on how to sort through the various applications and thus came up with a discriminatory makeshift procedure instead. This may have been partially based on the belief that tax protest groups were the most likely to abuse US tax laws, but the way they went about it still appears to be a case of unfair targeting.

I always get in trouble answering your questions, so I ain’t saying nuffin!

@rexacoracofalipitorius
If your question is for the President, then perhaps you should ask it of him. Did you have a question for us?

If it was simply a matter of going to the source for every inquiry, then there would be no such thing as Q and A / opinion sites like Fluther. Plus, it’s in social.

But I gotta give you credit as a newbie for catching on to the Fluther culture of condescension pretty quickly. GA

Really, this read as a “Did you hear about the new outrage since Benghazi was a bust.”

I don’t really care. But if I was the IRS I would focus on groups that want to avoid taxes since they are anti-tax (tea-party). Profiling by name seems reasonable.

If you think about it, it is like asking a brown person for a Birth Certificate in Arizona. It is profiling to keep us safe from tax cheats.

I think a whole bunch of American citizens want the IRS to come down on organizations that are tax exempt that shouldn’t be. What we also want, no matter what party, is for it to not be a witch hunt, but to be done in a systematic, fair, way.

Focusing the IRS on “Patriot” groups is a good idea because most of them are created by people like the Kock brothers and other billionaire despots. There sole purpose is to gain and keep power away from the Citizens of the U.S. Most of them should also be investigated by the FBI as criminal activities.

@rexacoracofalipitorius Welcome to fluther. Nice lurv score.

Ans: I don’t know, nor care.

I don’t necessarily think Obama ‘gave the order’ for the Tea Party witch hunt. It will be interesting to hear what the investigation produces though.

What do you call a “witch hunt” if witches are actually found?

Every time I am “invited” to join a Tea Party group, the invitation is accompanied by a suggested donation. Since political action groups are not the same as no-profit charities, it makes sense to take a close look at “Tea Party” organizations.

I hope people realize that donations to candidates, political parties, and political action groups are not tax deductible. Since I consider myself a patriot, I looked into a number of groups. Every thing I found was traceable back to some deep pocket individual or corporation.

I am glad that the IRS is finally doing its job and hope they are not deterred by GOP propaganda. I like the idea of paying high taxes because it means that I made a lot of money. I would like to see a little redistribution since the highest 1% have had all of the profits from increased productivity. The middle class is essentially paying for the upper classes improved lifestyle and power. It is time to back off and revitalize the middle class and make sure that every citizen has proper health care and enough money to eat a proper diet. Unrestrained capitalism (Ayn Rand style) is just as dangerous and destructive as unrestrained socialism.

As I watch people line up with their usual factions and come up with knee-jerk criticisms or justifications regarding this situation, I honestly don’t know how to feel. Bewilderment might be the obvious choice, but I’ve watched politics for too long to be honestly bewildered at the fact that Republicans are saying this the worst thing to ever happen and Democrats are saying it’s no big deal. Amusement might work, except that it’s a serious issue that will likely be drowned by politicking rather than resolved in an appropriate manner. So perhaps frustration would be best, but I don’t know what good it would do.

What the IRS did is a textbook case of profiling. Profiling can be done well, and it can be done poorly.* One way to do it poorly is to do it on the basis of prejudices. This profiling of right-wing 501(c)(4) organizations is fundamentally the same issue as racial profiling, but with a different set of prejudices and a different set of targets. Yet so many of the people who would be up in arms at the slightest mention of racial profiling say that this was okay, while so many people who think there’s nothing wrong with racial profiling are up in arms over the IRS scandal. Is a little bit of consistency too much to ask of people?

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* Since this is sure to be a controversial claim, I should point out that the word “profiling” is ambiguous. It can be used to describe the practice of using known information about perpetrators to extrapolate further data for the purpose of locating them, or it can used to describe the practice of assuming someone is suspicious due to superficial traits. The former is the good kind; the latter is the bad kind. The latter is also what people are talking about when they criticize racial profiling: using someone’s race as an excuse for not affording them due process.

Colbert Report pointing out that the organizations who were supposedly victimized by this did not have to file for government permission in the first place.

If the information that they were not even required by law to file, if it is true, make any difference to anyone?

@rojo Why would it make a difference? The purpose of filing when not required is to preempt a later challenge to the claim of being tax exempt. It is a safety measure taken to prevent them from being targeted for political reasons—so if anything, this makes the abuse worse.

I fail to follow your logic @SavoirFaire why would it make any abuse worse?? I still have my doubts as to whether it was actual abuse in the first place. You have to have a criteria to work with and the IRS were just playing the odds.
I find it hard to believe you have me actually defending an organization that I despise. Lesser of two evils I suppose but still, I do agree with your statement about who would be up in arms if it were actual racial profiling (and who would be defending it I might add) against minority groups but then, that puts me in that category doesn’t it? I suppose we defend our own territory.

Imagine if it were blacks, LGBTQs, women…who were in the crosshairs of the IRS. Shameful. Absolutely shameful.

It is shameful but it is not the presidents fault. Do you think they fired everyone at the IRS when he took office? It was a beauracratic policy fail, trying to figure out how to sift through a surge of applications. There are all sorts of things that “flag” for scrutiny at the IRS. They should not have the appearance of partisanship but whoever created the policy screwed up this time. The president isn’t involved in this level of bureaucratic policy implementation. He has bigger things to worry about.

@rojo Note that I said “if anything.” I’m not saying that it definitely does make it worse, but that we should go with “worse” if we had to choose between “better” and “worse.” Why? Because the whole point of filing was to avoid the sort of targeting that they were subjected to for filing. In other words, these IRS agents perverted the entire process by choosing to focus on right-wing groups.

As for whether or not it was abuse, I don’t see how there can be any question. If these agents were not given guidelines for doing their jobs, they should’ve asked for them. And if they were told to come up with their own guidelines or otherwise decided that they had to do so, then they should have come up with one’s that weren’t based on prejudice and that wouldn’t pick out one particular group.

What I find so strange is that you seem to agree that this is profiling, but justify your blasé attitude towards it by saying that we all “defend our own territory.” Defending our own territory? How could partisanship possibly justify corruption? In fact, that’s precisely the attitude that causes so many problems these days: “it’s my guys this time, so it’s okay.” It’s not okay, and only a bad player lets his team get away with sloppiness.

Frankly, this is one of the many reasons I’m against political parties. As Voltaire said, “whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust”—words you have proved with your claim about defending your own territory. Why should we have territories here in the first place? It seems the only relevant territories we could come up with are the territory of the just and the territory of the unjust, and it seems pretty obvious where we should set up camp when those are the choices.

New information from the New York Times suggests that left-wing groups were also targeted. Does this change anyone’s opinions about the matter?

Not really. In all cases they were keying in on specific words and phrases that implied that closer scrutiny was needed.
I also noticed that the Right Wing Groups were saying that it didn’t matter if liberal groups were targeted as well because the liberal organizations had not complained.
WTF does that have to do with it? Just because you are a bigger whiner people should only pay attention to you?

All political action funds are supposed to be taxable. I’ve donated enough to know that you can’t write-off political donations to candidates or parties. Right wing and some left wing organizations not only profited from the secret money for their candidates and political action groups, they tried to get tax deductions for them. That means that in addition to the heinous religious organizations; I have to pay for heinous political donations and organizations. I am sick and tired of subsidizing organizations that drain resources from our republic. I think that there should be a very high bar for organizations that use their money to support their religious and political missionary work. We are NOT supposed to support ANY religion or political party with tax money.

If you truly believe in your religion or political opinions you should not expect the government to grant a tax deduction. We fought a revolution to get away from church taxes and it is a shame that the IRS lists them as charities. It is just stupid!