Hank Kalet

From Walter Benjamin:

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.

From “One-Way Street,” One-Way Street and Other Writings, p. 65. Penguin Classics. London: 2009.

I’m at the car dealership today, getting some basic maintenance done when I overhear a conversation between a woman and an older man.

“I was brought up a Baptist, ” he said. “But I realized I had to find a different church to hear the real Word.”

“It’s so watered down now, from the Founding Fathers,” she said.

“And we don’t have Christian men leading us, when they endorse homosexuality.”

The Founders, of course, were nominally Christian — they were deists who believed in a creator and were careful to exclude overt mention of god in our founding documents. They were skeptics who understood the dangers of mixing politics with religion because they lived through the violence and intolerance that mixture breeds.

And yet, there’s nothing unusual or ahistorical about this overheard conversation. Since our beginnings as a nation, there have been men — and women — who have wanted to impose their conception of god on their neighbors and who have attempted to claim the Founders as religious zealots like themselves.

Gov. Chris Christie answers questions during a town hall meeting today in Sayreville.

The state got some good news today as its unemployment rate dropped for the third-straight month to reach its lowest level in four years. The rate now stands at 8.7 percent, the lowest level of the Christie administration.

Gov. Chris Christie, speaking to a packed house at a town hall meeting in Sayreville today credited his tax policies and touted his balanced budget. But it is unclear exactly what is driving the numbers.

According to the press release issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development, 4,100 jobs were added in April by the private sector, with a total of 131,500 being added since February 2010.

“The marked decline in unemployment over the last year mainly reflects the ongoing gains in jobs we are experiencing. April saw the largest 12-month gain in the number of employed residents that New Jersey has seen in seven years, with an increase of more than 60,000 compared to April 2012,” said Charles Steindel, Chief Economist for the New Jersey Department of Treasury.

New Jersey Policy Perspective, however, saw the report as mixed, at best. Its president, Gordon MacInnes, issues the following statement:

“While we’re certainly glad to see New Jersey’s jobless rate drop below 9 percent for the first time since 2009, it would be foolish to claim victory and to assume that the state’s economy has recovered. It hasn’t. There remain 400,000 people officially looking for work and many more who have given up, our jobless rate remains much higher than the nation’s, and New Jersey has still recovered less than half the jobs it lost in the Great Recession, while neighbors like New York have recovered all of them plus added even more. Add to that the relatively low-wage nature of our new jobs, and it’s clear: New Jersey needs to do more to create good jobs.”

What I find striking is how easy it is to use the numbers to prove nearly any point you need to make.
The fact is that the state’s economy, like the national one, remains badly flawed and in need of help. Just cutting taxes is not going to do it.
Send me an e-mail.

Context is everything, and David Cay Johnston, the nation’s preeminent tax-policy journalist, provides just that for the IRS scandal. As I said yesterday in a tweet, the issue is only partly about the targeting of GOP-leaning organizations. That, of course, never should have happened. But there also is a question about how 501(c)(4)s are treated more generally.

As Johnston points out, there is supposed to be a “distinction between groups that are ‘primarily engaged’ in politics and groups that really are primarily engaged in ‘social welfare'” and “‘promoting the common good and social welfare of the community,’” though the distinction is “kind of mushy.”

The issue, he said, is that

the social welfare tax exemption is being used by existing 501(c)(4) organizations, including some very large ones, to promote partisan political interests—the very activity Congress has explicitly prohibited for a century.

Of potentially greater concern, however, is that “the IRS is drowning,” with a 17 percent cut in its per capita budget since 2002 and a growing list of duties. Essentially, Congress, which has never been particularly friendly to the taxman, “is demanding that the agency do more and more with less and less,” which has left undermanned at a time it is faced with a surge in the number of 501(c)(4) — 2,774 in 2012, compared with 1,777 in 2011 and 1,741 in 2010.

None of this excuses the targeting of conservative political groups. All indications are that it was a mix of overzealousness in attempting to preserve the social welfare aspect of the 501(c)(3) status and incompetence by managers who failed to set functional policy. These failures, however, have placed the IRS squarely in the crosshairs of the GOP, which sees its chance to tar the Obama administration with scandal.

The Obama administration appears to have moved quickly on this, but it needs to be prepared for the expected — and necessary — Congressional hearings. It need to be open and truthful and the GOP, for its part, needs to avoid the temptation to grandstand and go for political points. The truth of what happened is much more important than the politics and needs to be uncovered so that this kind of thing can be prevented in the future. That likely will mean safeguards against IRS overreach,  but it also should include a reconsideration of the social-welfare tax exemption so that it is more tightly worded and less prone to political manipulation.

Send me an e-mail.