Taking Up The Tax, by Mike Gold Brainiac On Banjo #329 | @MDWorld

June 10, 2013 Mike Gold 8 Comments

O.K. Let’s take a poll. First, everybody who likes paying taxes, raise your hand.

Hmmm. I never felt the air so still.

O.K. Now, raise your hand if you are in favor of any four of the following: 1) having a local fire department, 2) having a local police department, 3) having an adequate defense, 4) having roads, 5) having sewage systems, 6) not having airplanes fly into one another, and 7) not having the butcher’s knuckles pop out from your knockwurst sandwich.

Let us set aside Ronald Reagan’s great lie, damning it for the cheap stunt that it was. Our government is no more inefficient and is far less corrupt than Big Business. Reagan maliciously slandered hundreds of thousands of good, honest, hard-working Americans, and he did so for his own personal gain. No, let us instead talk about taxes.

If you are in favor of most or all of the above, who the hell is going to pay for it? Sure, we can replace taxes with user fees, if you want to take a crap on the poor some more. But before you vote for that, make certain your neighbors have paid their fire department fees because conflagrations do not care about that. And if your mama gets mugged, have Mike Hammer on speed dial.

The hypocritically named Tea Party should have stuck with their original name. They are as ignorant about the IRS as they are about the Boston Tea Party.

They’re not getting much traction on this IRS scandal. You know, the one where right-wing groups (successfully) sought to obtain tax-free 501(c)(4) status by passing themselves off as “social welfare organizations” when, in fact, they are political action organizations. In its benevolence the IRS has permitted such organizations to engage in lobbying and political campaign work as long as such political works are not the organization’s primary activity. When it comes to the overwhelming majority of right and left-wing organizations, this is complete nonsense. None deserve non-profit status.

If you listen to the “lame-stream media” – any of it, not just Fox – you’d think this current scandal is limited to the IRS discriminating against the right. This is a lie: they investigated left-wing political groups as well. Since 2010 they checked out the right far more than the left because of the simple fact that the Tea Party was just getting off the ground and there were a hell of a lot more of right-wing groups seeking IRS welfare than those on the left. Amusingly, it was only a left wing organization that actually got denied. The lengthy approval time was the same for everybody.

The fact is, whether you agree with these exemptions or not (and I do not, for either side), we need the IRS to investigate these applications. We want to make certain that this isn’t just another tax shelter for those who want to steal use of otherwise free roads.

But, and this will come as a surprise to some, I blame all this on Barack Obama. No kidding.

Instead of apologizing and conducting all sorts of investigations and driving up Cincinnati’s hotel rates, Obama should have come out and said “Damn straight! We’ve been checking the left out too! You want to apply for tax-exempt status, we’re going to take a hard look to see if you really deserve it.”

Obama’s a wienie, and he deserves the heat.

Lucky for him, outside of the hard-core 23% über-right, nobody really cares. Well, except the media… when they don’t have anything new on Amanda Bynes, Jodi Arias, or Michael Douglas’s tongue.

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check the website above for times and streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.

Dollars, Taxes. Watch Duck Soup – today!