Sharkskin Suits
by digby
While the government is digging around in your bank accounts for god knows what reasons, they have also decided that it’s better to let corporations off easy when it’s determined that they owe taxes.
The country is going broke and they are doing this:
Top officials at the Internal Revenue Service are pushing agents to prematurely close audits of big companies with agreements to have them pay only a fraction of the additional taxes that could be collected, according to dozens of I.R.S. employees who say that the policy is costing the government billions of dollars a year.
“It’s catch and release,” said Douglas R. Johnson, an I.R.S. auditor in Colorado for three decades who said he grew so frustrated at how large corporations were allowed to pay far less than what he thought they owed that he transferred to the agency’s small-business division.
This is free market theology in action: corporations should not have to pay taxes because it’s “taxing the money twice.” For some reason they think there is a law of nature that says you can’t do that when, in fact, it happens all the time all over the place and it’s factored into the economy quite efficiently. But free market fundamentalists are just like the biblical literalists. It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s all faith based.
What this shows though is yet another agency that’s been infiltrated by wingnut sharks who just mindlessly circle, biting off pieces of their agenda, programmed to just keep killing and eating no matter what. The government may be deeply in debt, the war may be sucking up hundreds of billions, six years of corruption and pork has sucked every bit of fat from the treasury, but by god they will not question whether it might be wise to boost revenues. The agenda says that taxes should not be levied on rich people and corporations and if they are they must not be collected. Keep circling and eating, circling and eating.
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