As we recently noted, Americans are still paying a heavy price for mistakes by the Internal Revenue Service. These include a “Seizure Fever” campaign that rewarded IRS employees based on how much money they had confiscated. The IRS also handed out billions in improper payments and fraudulent tax returns, paid millions in bonuses to…
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The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which is often abbreviated as either PPACA or ACA, but which is most popularly known as “Obamacare,” is a very complicated law that stands as an prime example of how politicians will put the interests of their crony corporate contributors ahead of those of the American people….
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In celebration of the 237th anniversary of the signing of the United States’ Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, we thought it might be a good time to reflect on the portion of the Declaration that indicts King George III, whose policies ultimately led to the successful War of Independence for Britain’s 13 colonies…
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Seventy-one years ago, on July 1, 1943, the federal government first started withholding income tax from workers’ paychecks. For the first time, the government would get workers’ money even before the workers did. As a freerepublic blogger noted on the 60th anniversary, that’s not exactly an occasion for celebration. “Why is withholding so bad?…
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On July 4 many motorists will be heading over the new span of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge for destinations across the state and beyond. One who won’t be joining them is Abolhassan Astaneh-Asi, professor of structural engineering, mechanics and materials at the University of California at Berkeley. The professor does not believe the…
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As a showcase for speechmaking and stonewalling, the ongoing hearings on the IRS targeting campaign have generated more heat than light. Fortunately, a few moments of clarity emerged in a June 23 hearing by the House Oversight Committee. Rep. Thomas Massie, an MIT grad, explained the probability of Lois Lerner’s hard drive failing in…
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The way the Department of Veterans Affairs goes about providing health care to the veterans of the U.S. military, as it exists today, is an abject failure. In the words White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors, the federal government agency is possessed by a “corrosive culture,” one that is characterized by “significant…
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Believe it or not, there actually are people in the federal government whose job is to identify wasteful spending by the bureaucrats who operate federal government agencies. They work for an entity known as the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which publishes an annual report list the various types of wasteful activities that they’ve identified….
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The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a component of the Department of Homeland Security, deploys a budget of $12.9 billion, an increase of 6.45 percent from fiscal year 2013. CBP has an internal affairs division to deal with misconduct, but according to an investigation by McClatchy news service, CBP’s internal affairs division “is…
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Abuse of Americans by the Internal Revenue Service is nothing new. As Gary Klott wrote in the New York Times in 1987, the federal agency was basing promotions on how much money its agents had seized. An IRS office in Los Angeles bore a sign reading “Seizure Fever – Catch it!” and those who…
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