It’s always fun to make controversial yet very forward viewing statements that everyone thinks is crazy only to be clarified as truth later. Glenn Beck is going through a bit of that now as part of his downfall at Fox News was over the conspiratorial controversy of his caliphate proclamations. Well, guess what—he was right about every bit of it. ISIS is now raping the world with the full intention of complete destruction of Western Civilization and Beck was the first to call it. So he is presently going through the kind of validation that is satisfying, yet at the same time mind-boggling agonizing—because if people only listened…………………………………..so much could have been avoided. Well, I made similar statements about the IRS well before the corruption scandal broke out centering on Lois Lerner and her antics against conservative groups. When she was caught lying and took the fifth to avoid testimony I along with many others smelled the smoke and knew there was a larger fire concealed out of sight and we called for prosecution and jail time. Boehner talked tough about it, but dropped the issue in favor of more investigation. Well, after a few years of such analysis it has been discovered that the IRS did attempt to conceal evidence of their conspiracy against conservative oriented groups and the contents of their attempts has been uncovered.

The IRS will never regain any form of respect from the American people. They are permanently a damaged and perceptually corrupt organization. There is no way to clean up the mess now with fancy press releases and a feel good campaign. They are a thug oriented organization under the best of circumstances that takes money from people and puts them in jail if they fail to pay. So there is no sympathy for them when they are caught being every bit as bad as the people they have sent to jail due to their mechanisms of deception. The IRS with the same swagger of the typical tax dodger trying to hide their funds to prevent paying them away to the IRS has shown the same level of criminal activity in using the tax enforcement agency to conduct illegal actions against people they personally don’t like. And one of them was a personal friend of mine—Justine Binik Thomas.

Now it’s been discovered that within the last two weeks investigators were able to recover 424 backup tapes that were previously claimed by the IRS to be irretrievable. On those backup tapes was an email from Lerner saying, “No one will ever believe that both your hard drive and mine crashed within a week of each other.” IRS Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that they are investigating “potential criminal activity” surrounding the case and of course Lerner is at the center of the storm. But it also means that IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is involved as well because he arrogantly provided congressional testimony that the IRS had done everything it could to provide evidence. At a minimum the he is guilty of an obstruction of justice, and perjury—but it looks like the situation is much, much more systematic. These people are just the tip of a very corrupt organization.

The IRS obviously has become an arrogant, union driven organization that has lost its moral compass. If there is such a willingness to lie under oath by people like Lerner and Koskinen—or are willing to just take the fifth and deny everything without providing any testimony hoping that the cover-up they were involved in will be sufficient to keep them from prosecution—then there is equal, or even greater detriment at all levels of the organization. The IRS reputation will never be recoverable.

The only way I see out of the situation is that the IRS has to be eliminated and replaced by something much simpler so that enforcement and collection can be greatly consolidated. Interpretation of the tax laws needs to go away as well, which is bad news for all the lawyers, accountants, and government employees sucking off the system presently—but it’s the only way out.   What comes to my mind is the Forbes plan of a flat tax which is based on a standard that would likely create more federal revenue than less. But the progressive system that we currently have is just garbage. It allows the economically poor to not have any skin in the game—so to abuse the system of wealth redistribution, and it penalizes the rich—and it just needs to be wiped away completely along with every federal job out there. Hey, McDonald’s is hiring—there are jobs out there for people who want to work. The unionized IRS employees make too much money as it stands and their jobs aren’t in service of the American people—but are against it. Their entire function at this point is to serve a criminal organization no different from the mob.

Steve Forbes has tried to propose such a flat tax for years, and it never gets any traction because he’s a wealthy guy, and in American schools led by the same corrupt labor unions that drive the IRS employees is a hatred for the rich with the hope that the IRS can continue stealing from them to give to the poor and unproductive. Nobody is saying that people should be doomed to life as a poor person—but in America poor conditions are a decision, not a fate. We don’t live in Europe where a family name gets people access to upward mobility. There are even those presently in America who still believe such things and they act as gate keepers to success—but they can easily be outmaneuvered and out-worked. In America if you want money—you can get it if you are willing to work for it.

In my life I have worked several full-time jobs and part-time jobs in tandem to get what I needed and it galls me every year to pay taxes to the IRS—especially when you see what they do with it. I’ve seen first hand the dependency culture they have created by taking my money by force and giving it to a bunch of lazy slugs’ content to be victims all their lives because they were taught to be that way by their government education systems. The IRS not only has created a culture of lazy good for nothing, docile, parasites, in America, but they seek to exploit them more for the power it gives them.

After Lois Lerner took the fall for the IRS and retired using the “fifth” to avoid providing testimony as to her guilt, she was paid $129,300 as a bonus to her already six figure salary. But she wasn’t alone, as of June 2013 according to Forbes magazine; the IRS paid $70 million in bonuses to their employees—and for what? They certainly didn’t earn them for performance, not in the way normal people think of performance. Rather the money is hush money to keep their employees quiet and compliant because there is no place else anywhere that worthless people like the government dregs at the IRS could work that would pay them that kind of money for containing lies and stealing money from people. The progressive tax culture established at the start of the 20^th century was a mistake and it has lasted now for a hundred years, and its time to redesign it with something more representative of the capitalist economy that we have in America instead of copying off socialist Europe—which was all the rage in 1862 when Lincoln signed the Revenue Act of 1862 into law repealing the previous flat tax which had allowed capitalism in America to give rise quickly to the fastest growing economy on earth. But the Civil War needed money to fight with, so a progressive tax was introduced and never again relinquished gradually increasing to the levels it is today.

The purpose of a progressive tax was to reduce income inequality, but that has been a miserable failure because it ignored the psychological prognosis which made people poor to begin with—it’s called laziness. The result of a progressive tax system was the Robin Hood Effect—the taking from the rich and giving to the poor without making the poor do anything to earn it. Because the money was just dropped into their lap, the poor didn’t feel they needed to do anything productive to earn it—so they never learned any value for the money that was represented by the exchange of someone’s productivity. The typical poor person sees a dollar bill and thinks of what they can buy with it. But the dollar bill is only a representation of some value created by a productive enterprise. That value was created by someone for some reason and that reason is lost in the wealth redistribution schemes of the IRS. So poor people take the money, and spend it not having any idea how the dollar was made or possessing an appreciation for the value of the energy expended to make that dollar. The person who made the dollar in the first place is tasked to keep doing what they did before to make more and the IRS then sweeps in to take more away as more dollars are made-and what they take, they keep some for themselves to give to people like Lois Lerner, then they give it to people like the crack addict on a slum street corner, or the typical buffet attendee at the Golden Corral.

The madness needs to come to an end. There needs to be people who go to jail over this latest IRS scandal. And the progressive tax collector itself needs to be abolished with something fairer to the people who make money—instead of skewing the system toward those who simply take the money and spend it. By continuing the current system we are all forced to support a corrupt organization in the IRS who is obviously involved in illegal activity that is politically motivated. And closing our eyes to it will only make it worse. Failure to punish those involved with this current scandal will be judged by history as a turning point if a failure to respond is not heeded. The best way to create income equality is to make everyone work for their money. It is OK to show compassion to those who have been taught to be lazy and are naturally un-ambitious if the plan is to yield from them more work as they are taught that the way to upward mobility isn’t by popping out more children so they can claim them on welfare benefits, but in working hard, and intelligently and saving some of the money they make to build assets in their life that leads to productivity. But before any of that happens, Lois Lerner and her buddy John Koskinen need a miserable prosecution that will teach others like them not to act in a corrupt way as a public employee. Before any proper decision can be made as to what to do with the IRS, that first prosecution must occur—because the evidence is overwhelming now. It’s beyond redemptive speculation on my part—its now part of our history, and we will be measured by how we conduct ourselves in the face of it.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT