There’s been an awful uproar of late over the IRS investigations being conducted by our witch hunting congressional committee headed by that salivating bottom feeder, Daryl Issa,. The head of the IRS has been called a liar, which he probably is, and he has fired back with overwhelming hostility; The Republicans claim that the IRS was ordered by the President to break the chops of Right –Wing groups over their tax exempt status but Democrats claim that IRS did the same to them.
Of course the point of the whole mess is that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats nor any other political group should receive tax exempt status for any of their so called non-profit organizations. The whole point of organizing any kind of political organization is to get your party in office, This act, by its nature, will produce a benefit to the individuals involved. This benefit is contrary to the entire concept of tax exempt, charitable organizations. The whole point of charitable tax exempt status is that no one involved in the organization should get any benefit out of it. That’s why it gets a tax exemption. The benefits should go to uninvolved third parties who are in some kind of need.
Example: man gives money to Doctors Without Borders. The man is white and lives in NYC. The Doctors are in Africa trying to cure a plague in black communities. This is a real charity. The donor gets a deduction because the money he gave brings no benefit to him.
Example: The Koch brothers give Money to a foundation that supports certain GOP candidates. If the candidates win office they will vote in congress for bills that enrich the Koch brothers. There is a direct benefit to the donor. No tax deduction.
It’s that simple. One would think that all these people that we are overpaying to do nothing in congress would be able to cope with such a simple concept. In fact they can; they just don’t want to, because by evading the real problem they are able to create their own issues and make election year noise. They also can make a hell of a lot of money.
By not recognizing that the IRS is right in refusing tax exempt status to any of these groups, Issa and his rat pack can scream and whine about Obama using the IRS for his political purposes. The same is true of the Democrats. By refusing to address the real problem they are able, they hope, to get a couple of their campaign funding groups to achieve tax exempt status.
It’s all a scam that has been perpetrated by the Supreme Court’s ludicrous Citizens United decision that made corporations, people for the benefit of political contributions. This judicial stupidity has opened the floodgates of political money giving, but none of that money should, under any circumstances, be considered charitable or tax exempt. It all has as its sole purpose, the election of a candidate friendly to the donor.
The biggest problem is that political funding, which has gone on since the beginning of elections, is, by its nature in direct competition with the concept of a one man, one vote, democracy. One rich man can give his candidate one hundred thousand dollars and by doing so offsets the votes of one hundred thousand men who can only afford to give their candidate one dollar each. This is a functional perversion of all democratic principles and has already led to an oligarchy where the rich are more influential than our elected officials, because the elected officials depend on the rich’s money to get elected.
The IRS scandal is a phony one. Whether or not there has been influence in who gets investigated, the real problem is that political contributions should not be considered tax exempt and right now, some of them are.
If we really want to put the democratic principles back into our elections than we should eliminate all political funding, altogether. All electoral funding should come from the government and should be allocated on a somewhat equal basis. Everybody starting from the same place, that’s the democratic way, isn’t it? The Supreme Court’s concept that the ability to give away huge sums of money to influence an election, is free speech, is pure, unadulterated bullshit. What it actually is, is bribery, and it shouldn’t take all that accumulated brain matter stuffed into the justices heads to recognize that.