Steven Miller, soon-to-be former Acting Commissioner of the IRS, sounded a lot like a mafia caporegime so far today, when his answers to Ways and Means committee members' questions were "I don't know", "I don't remember", "I have to find out", "I don't have the names".
He tried to shift and dodge like Muhammad Ali in the boxing ring at the end of his career, and looked just as bad. He kept trying to give non-answers to very serious questions, in order to waste a representative's time in parliamentary parlance. He looked like a taxpayer facing a serious audit by an aggressive agent.
Instead of taking blame for systemic problems within a bloated bureaucracy, he tried to blame agents for their eager to please unsupervised probes of applications for tax-exempt status by conservative organizations. He tried to act appalled by the inference that this action was politically motivated, but instead, came across as annoyed and smug that Members of Congress would dare to impugn his integrity.
This hearing today reveals several serious issues concerning the IRS, and the reason most people have a fear of it. In 1956, there was an episode of the TV show, The Honeymooners, where Ralph Kramden received a letter to come down to the local office to see an agent about a matter concerning his tax return. The whole episode revolved around his fear of some mistake that would be serious enough to warrant his appearance, all done in a humorous way. In the end, he was summoned because he didn't sign the return. And that is the fear the agency holds over the American people that is worse now than it was in the 50s.
Fast forward 57 years. This is the agency our health care will be subject to review and compliance. Perhaps, the Congress should rethink this piece of the PPACA (Obamacare) and delay implementation until the current problems surrounding the IRS are resolved.
Surely, when the law was written, no one in the Congress envisioned such a problematic concern for the compliance by such a bureaucracy. Or maybe, it was dumped there until something better was developed. In any case, it is apparent that this is now a bad idea.
Once the IRS controls our health care, there will be no turning back.
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