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Paul L. Caron
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Sunday, January 5, 2014

The IRS Scandal, Day 241

IRS Logo 2People's Pundit Daily, Top 10 News Stories of 2013 That Affected Our Lives:

2. IRS Scandal

Most presidents pray with Pastor Billy Graham when they get elected, but President Obama audited him to get reelected. In May of 2013, the IRS scandal was revealed when officials admitted it had improperly targeted Tea Party and other conservative groups for audits who had requested tax-exempt status.

Democrats tried to calm the storm with the false claim that the IRS targeted “progressive” groups as well as conservatives. But rebuffing that ridiculous charge, the Treasury Department’s inspector general revealed that 292 – which is 100 percent – of Tea Party groups seeking special tax status were put under IRS review, while just 6 progressive groups were targeted.

The scandal appeared to be fading following the resignation of Lois Lerner, but a round of emails leaked by the Ways and Means to the Wall Street Journal, showed Lois Lerner and other Washington bureaucrats were involved in a huge partisan undertaking that was nearly impossible to execute on their own. But that was the end of the road for accountability, despite the worst aspect of the IRS scandal not even making it to a press room.

A research paper from Stan Vueger of AEI, Andreas Madestam of Stockholm University, Daniel Shoag and David Yanagizawa-Drott (both from the Harvard Kennedy School), took a look at how much impact the Tea Party had on voter turnout in the 2010 election. Their conclusions provide the most troubling element to this story, and everyone in the media ignored it.

According to the joint conservative-liberal scholarship paper: “The data show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5 – 8.5 million votes compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million.”

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/01/the-irs-scandal-2.html

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Comments

1. Recognition of tax exempt status is not required by the Code in order for a group, association, or club to claim tax exempt status. That the Tea Party groups sought recognition before claiming status was their own decision.

2. In any event, the Tea Party groups could have sought recognition under sec. 527, which is what Congress intended in the first place.

3. This study is, therefore, hogwash.

Posted by: Publius Novus | Jan 7, 2014 7:59:37 AM

feel the IRS LOL :)

Posted by: Sohbet | Jan 5, 2014 11:57:02 AM

Here is a link to the paper mentioned. Free copies from the authors can be readily found by googling the title.

Posted by: gs | Jan 5, 2014 10:26:40 AM