Some conservatives and libertarians long suspected that the IRS may be targeting Tea Party and limited government groups. The conservative news outlet The Blaze questioned whether the Obama administration was using the IRS to silence liberty-minded groups due to their outrageous demands and scrutiny over a year ago.  According toThe Blaze, The Ohio Liberty Council’s (OLC) President Tom Zawistokowski wrote that the IRS had been demanding very detailed information on the OLC’s activities back in early 2012. The liberty group had to almost stop their activities just to find time to comply with the IRS.  In the letter, Tom states:  My own Portage County TEA Party has been waiting for over a year just to get a response from the IRS so we can file our 2010 tax return! In the attached PDF … Read entire article »

As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your representative and urge him or her to vote YES on H.R. 45, a bill to fully repeal ObamaCare. Introduced by Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), it would repeal both the full Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the additional health care provisions that were added in the Health Care Reconciliation Act later. It is critical that ObamaCare be fully repealed as the first step to implementing real, patient-centered reforms that will let the market drive health care prices down. With full implementation coming in just over seven short months, it is more urgent than ever to repeal ObamaCare. It will kill jobs, bankrupt the government, drive up everyone’s health insurance costs, put bureaucrats in charge of … Read entire article »

In nearly every state across the country, legislators are looking for ways to maintain vital services to the neediest among us. Education, police, fire and health services have been cut in efforts to trim government budgets, so what does it say about a state’s priorities when the top paid public employees are athletic coaches? A recent study shows that, in all but ten states, the highest paid employee is an athletic coach. Usually this is a football coach, although a few states reserve the top-paying spot for basketball and, in one state, it’s the hockey coach. In the ten states in which there are state employees which make more than a coach, the position is held by another college or university position. In most cases, this is a department chair or … Read entire article »

In the wake of allegations that the Internal Revenue Service has been extensively used as a weapon by the Obama Administration against political foes, many have reflected on the frightening notion that the IRS will soon be in charge of your health care and what services you are provided under Obamacare. It is worth remembering that it has been proposed to nationalize the tax preparation process under the IRS – you know, because nationalizing health care, the student loan industry and large swaths of the automotive industry has worked out so well already. Recent articles by the American Enterprise Institute and Americans for Tax Reform point out that this idea has been floated recently inside the beltway. As AEI put it, Today, the majority of individual tax returns are filed electronically, rather … Read entire article »

The American Heritage Medical Dictionary defines ‘superiority complex’ as an exaggerated feeling of being superior to others.  McGraw-Hill defines it as any number of behaviors, including self-aggrandization.  What better defines feelings of superiority and self-aggrandizement than the claim of former vice-President Al Gore, who once famously proclaimed to have taken the “initiative in creating the internet”. Perhaps the Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful from Massachusetts, Ed Markey, is trying to channel Gore’s self-aggrandizing approach, taking some level of credit for every technology-based invention under the sun – from satellite dishes, to Skype, to Facebook, and even Google.   In a newly released ad, Markey, who is running against Republican Gabriel Gomez to replace John Kerry in the U.S. Senate, takes legislative credit for having brought the world these technological advances. The ad opens by running through … Read entire article »

Paul Krugman is at it again. The Nobel Prize-winning, devoutly Keynesian economist argued in a recent column that the thing needed to cure the sluggish American economy is, wait for it, more inflation. This is the classic Keynesian view that the Federal Reserve can stimulate the economy by inflating the currency. Krugman is doubtless basing his reasoning at least partially on the well known, but now outdated Phillips Curve, which demonstrated a historical inverse correlation between inflation and unemployment. What the Phillips Curve fails to demonstrate, however, is any causal relation between rising inflation and lower unemployment. No doubt, prices tend to rise during periods of robust economic activity due to increased demand resulting from increased wealth, and prices fall during contractions simply because people have less money to spend. It … Read entire article »