IRS Still a-Targetin’

What’s news, but not necessarily in the news, today?  Well, there’s this:

In a redacted transcript from the committee provided to Secrets, a Ways & Means investigator asked: “If you saw — I am asking this currently, if today if a Tea Party case, a group — a case from a Tea Party group came in to your desk, you reviewed the file and there was no evidence of political activity, would you potentially approve that case? Is that something you would do?”

The agent said, “At this point I would send it to secondary screening, political advocacy.”

The committee staffer then said, “So you would treat a Tea Party group as a political advocacy case even if there was no evidence of political activity on the application. Is that right?” The agent admitted, “Based on my current manager’s direction, uh-huh.”

Uh-huh.  If we’re reading between the lines of action (that is, looking at reality and inferring that which is hidden by what’s being said), we might conclude that the Obama administration and the bureaucracy under its control have looked at the landscape and felt assured that their allies in the news and information segments of the ruling class intend to continue providing cover. In the few short months since the Tea-Party-targeting scandal broke, initial statements of outrage and apologies have given way to talk of “phony scandals.”  Why?

Because the information gatekeepers for the masses have sent the message to the powerful not to worry; they aren’t going to behave as disinterested transcribers of what’s happening.  That is, as professionals with integrity.  (Perhaps, in their defense, we can qualify that the question depends somewhat on the activity in which they truly are professionally engaged.)

Those gatekeepers should pause a moment, though, and take full consideration of the risks that they are accepting.  If the declining value of newspapers is not enough evidence, perhaps polls indicating that reality is leaking should do.

Persuading People of Their Own Lack of Ignorance

James Taranto has highlighted an interesting finding.  It’s an instruction manual for Democrats on how to manipulate tragedies in order to advance gun-control policies.  The most surprising thing about the document may be that it’s evidence the liberal Borg mind still requires the use of words and printed materials.

The strategies are predictable: Stoke emotions. Use logical fallacies to box in opponents.  Apply social pressure.  But this part is worth pulling out for special notice (emphasis added):

The booklet explicitly urges foes of the Second Amendment to abjure rationality in favor of the argumentum ad passiones, or appeal to emotion. “When talking to broader audiences, we want to meet them where they are,” the authors advise. “That means emphasizing emotion over policy prescriptions, keeping our facts and our case simple and direct, and avoiding arguments that leave people thinking they don’t know enough about the topic to weigh in.”

Anybody who’s interested in not being manipulated should keep an eye out for that strategy in any public debate.  Basically, if the outcome you want is inaction, you’ll want to play up the complexity of an issue.  By contrast, if the outcome you want is for people to act on emotion regardless of facts, you’ll want to give them the impression that the facts don’t matter because everything that needs to be known is embedded in the emotion.

I’m reminded of a Tweet, yesterday, by state Representative Linda Dill Finn (D, Middletown, Portsmouth), which progressive RIFuture founder Matt Jerzyk retweeted, as did former RIFuture contributor, now WPRI reporter, Dan McGowan:

how many shootings do we need to have before people wake up and notice how many guns r in the wrong hands?

Finn’s comment brings into relief an important aspect of the how-to-manipulate-the-public booklet: It’s mainly effective because of the core political theory of the Left.  To vary the booklet’s language only slightly, the sentiment is “we know how to fix this,” and the easy answer is “get government involved.”

After all, the simplest resolutions are those that require nothing more complicated than good intentions, and the progressive promise is that government technocrats can be trusted faithfully to enact precisely the policies that will do what the public intends.  They just need a little more power.  A few more resources.  A bit more access to private information.

 Moving the Housing Marble to Another Shell

The corollary to needing a bit more power, resources, and access is needing a bit more time.  And if more time is perpetually needed, no solution can ever be said to have been fully implemented or tried.  So, the changes that the public sees will tend to be inconsequential — not changing the underlying dynamics that created the problem.

In brief, that’s what Edward Morrissey suggests is behind President Obama’s call to “wind down” affordable-housing government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which surprised some people with its free-market rhetoric:

That the White House has finally taken some notice of the lingering wrecks of the 2008 collapse is encouraging. However, Obama proposes to get rid of Fannie and Freddie while transferring the government’s ability to distort the mortgage markets to the FHA. “We’ve got to keep housing affordable for first-time homebuyers,” Obama said, “[a]nd that means we’ve got to strengthen the FHA so it gives today’s families the same kind of chance it gave my grandparents to buy a home.”

The FHA began that process in 2009 as borrowers flocked to its doors after the GSEs went into government receivership, and the results are less than encouraging. FHA’s former chief credit officer Edward Pinto wrote last November that the FHA’s capital position turned negative nearly overnight, and that the FHA itself might need its own taxpayer bailout. The FY2012 actuarial study showed that the single-family program’s valuation dropped $23 billion in a year when the housing markets improved significantly, a serious red flag about the stability of its operation.

The reason the GSEs were so central to the market collapse is that they gave implicit government backing to risky mortgage loans, ultimately making them not much more risky than, say, municipal bonds, because the government has the power simply to take money away from people in order to pay its debts.  Ideologically mandated government backing of investments is the problem; changing the agency that offers investors access to taxpayers doesn’t fix the problem.

Goodbye Good Healthcare

How can I resist ending with another example of government involvement’s not fixing problems?  This one’s from Beth Braverman:

Actually, even the average health plan costs more than the Cadillac thresholds mandated by Obamacare – about $10,522 per employee, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. (The law includes premiums paid by both the employer and the employee.) At that price, employers would pay a 40 percent tax on the $322 difference — about $130. For a company with 10,000 employees, that equates to a $1,300,000 tax bill. …

The “Cadillac” thresholds are indexed to inflation, but healthcare costs have historically increased at a faster pace than inflation, so it will hit an increasing number of employers each year. The intent of the tax is to force consumers with the best health plans to have to pay more costs out of pocket, which, in theory, would force them to make more cost-conscious decisions when it comes to expensive tests and frequent doctor’s visits.

There’s that word again.  It was the intent of ObamaCare to “fix” the healthcare system (meaning to provide coverage to those without it and to stop the rocketing prices of insurance products).  It was the intent of the Cadillac tax to prevent people and their employers from making a fair trade of premiums for the liberty not to make “cost-conscious decisions.”

And if the intent doesn’t match the outcome?  Well, the good folks in government just need to make some more adjustments, perhaps by taxing people directly and just providing adequate care through government.  It’s really not that complicated, you see?

One can’t help but suspect that it’s somebody’s intent to increase his or her own power and personal wealth.  I’m just reading between the lines, here.