The Silver Lining of This Dark Cloud

They say that every dark cloud has a silver lining, and after watching the big shots at the IRS testifying before Congress yesterday, I’m starting to believe it.

As a small business owner I live in fear and trembling of only one thing, an IRS audit. I pay my taxes, file my returns on time, and pay my accountant lots of money to make sure it’s done right. So on paper, I have nothing to fear. Yet, I still fear the IRS for one simple reason; they have the power to destroy me, and my ability to fight back is extremely limited. Despite the best efforts of my highly paid accountant, the chances that I am in full and complete compliance with our 74,000 page tax code are slim if not impossible. Eventually, my number will come up, and I will be hauled in front of the most powerful agency of the federal government where I will be considered guilty until I prove my innocence.

But, after watching the three stooges yesterday, Douglas Shulman, Lois Lerner, and J. Russell George, I have been greatly relieved. Using their testimony as a guide, I now have much less reason to fear an audit. I have taken extensive notes from their testimonies and if I’m ever audited, I’ll know exactly what to say. It might go something like this:

 

Soulless IRS Apparatchik:  Mr. Dunnevant, do you know why you’ve been asked to appear here today?

Me: Yes, I believe that you guys want to audit my 2010 tax return.

Soulless IRS Apparatchik: Actually we already have. It’s actually quite impressive, 24 pages long, all the appropriate schedules attached. Unfortunately, you neglected to properly account for the carried interest multiplier on your accelerated depreciation form for the month of February, and I’m afraid that will prove to be an extremely costly mistake.

Me: Well, let me be the first to publically apologize to the IRS for my accountant’s error. I am truly sorry.

Soulless IRS Apparatchik: I’m afraid you can’t simply blame this on your accountant. How do we know that this wasn’t your idea to avoid paying your fair share, and not some accounting error?

Me: Well, there’s no way you’ll ever know, because…I can’t recall. Again, sorry about that.

Soulless IRS Apparatchik: Wait a minute, according to our records, you met with your accountant no less than 13 times in the months leading up to the filing deadline. Do you expect me to believe that in all those meetings this issue never came up?

Me: Look, just because I met with Carl 13 times doesn’t mean we talked about taxes.

Soulless IRS Apparatchik: What DID you talk about…with an accountant…who does your taxes??

Me: Mostly just about every day stuff, how are the wife and kids, the weather, the Red Sox bull pen…

Soulless IRS Apparatchik: Mr. Dunnevant, I find that very hard to believe.

Me: I know, right?!

Soulless IRS Apparatchik: Mr. Dunnevant, defrauding the United States Treasury is a very serious offense.

Me: And I am really, really bummed about it, so once again…I’m sorry.

Soulless IRS Apparatchik: I’m afraid that an apology isn’t good enough, we will need more information.

Me: Well, you’re not gonna get it, because I can’t remember anything, and even though I didn’t do anything wrong or break any laws, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to invoke my 5^th amendment right against self-incrimination and respectfully decline to answer any of your questions.

Soulless IRS Apparatchik: In that case, I have no choice but to drop the audit against you. You are free to go.

Me: Saweeet!

Where Is God In Moore, Oklahoma?

“ If you are waiting for the federal government to help it’s going to be a while, but the Baptist men will get it done tomorrow.”

                                                                              Brian Williams, NBC news

 

I so want for this quote to be true. I ran across it on Facebook this morning. Several of my friends reporting that Mr. Williams had said it while reporting from Moore, OK. I have not been able to find a clip to confirm it, so I’m just going to hope that it’s true. Too many times in my life I have seen terrible human tragedies followed up by some Christian leader saying something idiotic about God’s judgment on homosexuals, or some such thing. Now, to see a group of thirty local churches rushing to the scene of such devastation with meals and comfort, to see men and women of faith volunteering their time, money and resources to minister to the hurting, and to see that effort acknowledged by the national media might be something close to a miracle in its own right. Yesterday I followed the activities of my friend and former youth pastor Jeremy Welborn, who now lives in Oklahoma, as he and his son went into a devastated community to offer whatever help they could provide to the hurting. To now learn that they were just two of many who had rallied to give comfort, and that so many of the helpers were men and women of faith is a huge comfort and encouragement to me.

Ultimately, the rebuilding of Moore will require some level of government assistance and support, which after all is one of the legitimate functions of centralized governments, but long before the machinery of government even gets cranked up, it will be the good people of Oklahoma, believers and unbelievers alike who will save the day. That Baptist organizations and volunteers are playing so visible and valuable a roll is gratifying, and has helped restore some of my confidence in the institutional church.

Where is God in Oklahoma? He is covered with mud and sweat carrying bags of sandwiches and serving up hot coffee among the rubble that used to be Moore, that’s where.

Idiots on Parade

Apple CEO, Tim Cook will be hauled in front of cameras today in Washington DC to answer accusations that he and his company have ruthlessly taken advantage of loopholes in the tax laws of both the United States and Ireland, and paid no corporate income taxes on over 74 billion in profit over the past four years.

Something hilariously called the “U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations” will publish the findings of their lengthy study into Apple’s tax avoidance strategies in a hearing chaired by two fossils, D- Carl Levin and R-John McCain, making this a bi-partisan circus.

OK, So Apple Inc, a company that makes products that make our lives more efficient and fun, a company that has created over 80,000 permanent jobs worldwide, a company that in 2012 earned 156 billion in profit will be accused of breaking zero laws. That's right, the fine folks on the USPSI will declare that in cleverly avoiding the payment of the 35% corporate tax rate on 74 billion over four years, Apple not only broke no US tax laws, but also broke no Irish laws. In other words, Apple is guilty of doing what any person or company in their right mind does, minimize, or in this case eliminate taxes in every legal way possible.

But Doug, you say, isn't it Apple's duty to pay their fair share in taxes? No. It is Apple's "duty" to make great, world class products, providing value to it's customers and shareholders. In doing so, it has completely fulfilled the purpose and reason for its very existence. Is it Apple's fault that our tax system was written by idiots? Is it Apple's fault that said tax code is 74,000 pages long? Listen, if our politicians are stupid enough to create a system that says that if you create a foreign subsidiary and earn money overseas, you don't have to pay taxes on that profit until you bring that money back into the country, they shouldn't be shocked to discover American companies taking them up on their offer!

What I would like to see at today's hearing would be Tim Cook sitting behind the Senator's panel, and Senators McCain and Levin being called as witnesses. First question would be something like this:

Cook: Senators, could you tell me why you wrote the tax law in such a way that makes it easy for me to move profits overseas to avoid them? Oh, and as a follow up, if you guys ran Apple, would you have just forked over the 25 billion in taxes that we avoided by moving that office to Ireland? And if you did, how would you explain that decision to our shareholders?

Idiots.

My Weekend Adventure

So, Doug, how was your weekend?

Left the house at 6:30 Friday morning heading for a Kohl’s parking lot in Wake Forest, NC, not to be confused with the university of Wake Forest which is actually in Winston-Salem, NC, but used to be in the actual town of Wake Forest until 1950, when for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the school decided to pull up stakes and move 2 hours away, confusing the hell out of everybody ever since. We arrived at the Kohl’s parking lot without incident whereupon Pam and I along with my sister Paula, her husband Ron and my nephew Ryan begin a casual stroll through the sparking clean store trying to look like eager shoppers looking for a bargain, when in fact we are desperately looking for a working bathroom. We escaped this excursion without falling prey to the impressive sales all around us and the siren song of  $100 worth of Kohl’s Cash burning a hole in Pam’s purse.

Right on time, my daughter arrived, having made the drive from Winston-Salem where the new Wake Forest resides. We all pile into Ron’s battle tank of a Buick and make the short drive to a gravel parking lot, a convenient two mile walk from the graduation festivities for our sweet Jessica Stroup, who cheerfully received her Master’s degree from Southeastern Theological Seminary, the happy beneficiary of Wake Forest University’s bizarre decision 61 years ago to leave town. After a marathon session of picture taking, we drive back to Kohl’s, exit the tank, hop in our own vehicles and make the drive to downtown Raleigh for lunch at a fabulous BBQ restaurant called, “The Pit”. An awesome meal was enjoyed by all. After Rick and Linda graciously paid the bill for our feast, we all gather outside to say our goodbyes, but Pam, Kaitlin and Jessica are nowhere to be found. Naturally I assumed they were all in the bathroom, but after ten minutes, which is a long bathroom stay even for Jessica, I began to worry, unnecessarily as it turned out since they were across the street, taking ironic pictures of the girls standing in front of the scruffy brick walls of abandoned tobacco warehouses. Well, of course they were. Who could resist that?

This is where it gets complicated. Pam and I, Ron, Paula and Ryan then leave Raleigh, along with Kaitlin, to make the 2 hour drive to Winston-Salem, leaving Rick and Linda in Wake Forest for the night. The next day Kaitlin will be getting her Master’s hood from Wake Forest University. Her boyfriend Jon will be arriving along with Rick & Linda who will be picking up my son Patrick at the Raleigh airport where we have flown him from Princeton NJ, where we tell all of our friends he is attending grad school, which is a delicious half-truth since he does in fact attend grad school in that famous town, but at Westminster Choir College, NOT Princeton University, but why quibble with details?

Thus began a 36 hour adventure in cat-herding; four cars, three families, five different GPS devices, strange town, and schizophrenic weather conditions, combining to give the proceedings a spastic Keystone Kop quality. The centerpiece of the chaos was provided by this infamous 4AM text message from my son to his mother, “OK, I’m running a little bit late. I had to stop and get gas”, never a good thing to hear. Of course he misses his flight by two minutes, potentially sending the enter weekend down in flames, until he was miraculously rerouted to another flight which arrived in Raleigh a mere five minutes later than his original flight, praise be to Almighty God!

Somehow, all of us managed to be united at a Panera Bread right up the street from Kaitlin’s rental house for lunch at noon. Rick, Linda and Patrick, Ron, Paula and Ryan, Kaitlin and Jon, and Pam and I all got to witness Rick’s very first trip to Panera Bread. Who knew?

From there it was all relatively easy. The ceremony was lovely, the rain held off long enough afterwards for all the pictures to be taken. There was a lovely dinner together at the West End Café, where they serve a world class pot roast. Then we all went to see The Great Gatsby, since the great Fitzgerald novel was a major theme of Kaitlin’s dissertation. The Roops hated it; everyone else loved it, proving for the millionth time that there truly is no accounting for taste.

Sunday morning saw the Roops head back to Richmond. We stayed to attend Kaitlin’s church, have lunch together and take a walking tour of the campus that has been Kaitlin’s home for the past two years. Then we said our goodbyes and drove back to Richmond, our 72 hour journey over.

I spent the entire weekend with tears in my eyes, partially a result of the pride I felt in the accomplishments of my girls, and the importance of the moment, and partially from the searing pains shooting through my rapidly deteriorating left shoulder. The pain was such that I found myself going long stretches without saying anything, for fear that if I did open my mouth, out would fly an embarrassing string of salty epitaphs, inappropriate for the occasion. So I observed the proceedings mostly in proud silence, but proud I was. Next year this time, we will be in Princeton doing it all over again. My kids are at that stage where they provide me with an endless source of proud moments, moments when I am so thankful to be their father.

So, that’s what I did for my weekend. How about you?   

A Thursday Thought Experiment

Here’s a little thought experiment for your Thursday morning:

If you worked for a bakery, if your livelihood depended on the sale of delicious pastries packed with fat and calories that are terrible for you but nonetheless scrumptious, then you would have a vested interest in promoting the increased popularity of said pastries, wouldn’t you?

If your ability to feed your family depended on the survival of the newspaper business, you would most likely not be a huge fan of the new media of internet news sites that are killing your industry. You would quite naturally be a rather passionate defender of the good old fashioned “dead tree” media.

Similarly, if you ran a large energy company whose fortunes were made extracting oil and natural gas from the ground, your biggest nightmare would be to discover that some teenager in a garage in Buffalo had just discovered how to power a car engine for 500 miles on a single drop of some substance he invented by accident one day while fooling around with some junk he found behind a storage shed out back. For although the world would be a far better, cleaner place because of this kid’s discovery, your energy company, and its fortunes would be thrown in the dust bin of history.

I say all of this to illustrate a point about the IRS scandal now consuming Washington. Why should any of us be surprised to learn that the Internal Revenue Service, the most powerful and feared agency of our government has been harassing organizations who are ideologically opposed to big government? Why should we be shocked that the one agency of government charged with the relentless collection of taxes, the unquenchable pursuit of the fuel that powers the mechanism of the State would be hostile to groups whose goal it is to reduce the size of said government?

This quaint notion that government employees are completely apolitical, evenhanded administrators of the public trust is a delusion and always has been. By and large, the great hordes of public employees who run the bureaucracy have an unavoidable bias towards keeping their jobs. Like all other workers in this country, they have a vested interest in their own prosperity, and why shouldn’t they? When I hear about survey after survey after survey that finds that 60 or 70%, or whatever the latest number is, of public employees vote Democrat I always think, “well…DUH!” I know very few conservatives or libertarians who sat around as kids thinking, “Boy, when I grow up I want to go to work for the Department of Housing and Urban Development!!”

Here’s the truth. The Democratic Party in this country is the party of government. People who are invested in government tend to work FOR government. It is an irrefutable, undeniable fact of life. Since conservatives and libertarians generally support some form of rolling back of State power and all its accoutrements, few of them go to work for the State. Sure, there are exceptions to every rule. I’m sure there is come cadre of conservative, low-tax, low-regulation types huddled secretly at the water cooler somewhere in the bowels of the Justice Department, but as a rule, displaying a Tea-Party flag in the cafeteria of any agency of the federal government would probably be a bad career move.

I'm sure that there are some very fine people who work for government, and God bless them everyone, but, the next time you hear any politician describing a government agency as “independent”, just remember, that’s not how the people running the place vote.

Barack Obama vs. Thomas Jefferson

This week’s newspapers are being dominated by three stories:

1.     The IRS targeting of “conservative” groups for harassment, particularly groups with the words “tea party”, “government debt”, and “constitution” in their names.

2.     The 12 separate revisions and re-writings of the infamous talking points on Benghazi.

3.     The Justice Department’s seizure of phone records of over 40 reporters from the Associated Press.

The Left in this country constantly accuses their enemies, especially we Libertarians, of political paranoia. We are told by the party of government that those who distrust the State are simply rubes and anarchists. Indeed, those who cast aspersions on State power secretly loathe the concept of self-rule, and long I suppose for the salad days of nomadic tribes scouring the fruited plain for food and shelter unhindered by taxes. The President said as much in a commencement address at Ohio State University:

     “Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.”

The headlines this week seem to suggest that our “brave, creative and unique” experiment in self-rule could use a few grown-ups. To equate, as the President does, self-rule with a gargantuan, bloated beyond recognition, bureaucratic leviathan that is involved in every area of its citizen’s lives from the size of our Big-Gulps to the size of our paychecks is a rhetorical reach of epic proportion. So, if we observe a government racking up over a trillion dollars a year in debt, watch it harass unfriendly reporters, then discover that its tax collecting agency is singling out dissident groups for special harassment, we are to simply rejoice in the miracle of self-rule?

For me, suggesting the very real possibility of tyranny in our future is not a repudiation of self rule, but an acknowledgment of the record of history. The previous century was a blood-soaked nightmare brought about by governments convinced of their infallibility, and endowed with great power over their citizens. To warn of mankind’s awful tendency towards the totalitarian impulse is not to “gum up the works” as our President so eloquently described it, but rather, the faithful tradition of the wise skepticism of our Founders, one of whom, Thomas Jefferson, said this:

 “Even under the best form of government, those entrusted with power, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

With all due respect to the current occupant of the White House, human nature in 2013 is unchanged from the 1776 variety. I’ll take Jefferson’s skepticism over Obama’s Pollyannaish optimism any day of the week, especially a week like this one.

A Thank You to Frank and The Count

This morning I was in the mood for some music when I arrived at the office. No one had arrived yet, so I could play it as loud as I wanted. I have an iPod with several hundred songs on it attached to a Bose sound dock thing sitting on the top of a filing cabinet. I pressed “shuffle” and sat down to start on some paperwork.

I have a rather eclectic musical collection since there are very few styles of music that have no appeal for me. The first tune that popped up was “Can’t Buy Me Love” by the Beatles, then came a Lenny Kravitz tune, followed by a Felix Mendelssohn piece capped off by “When the House is a-Rockin’, Don’t Bother Knockin’” by Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Then a song played that stopped me in my tracks. Considering everything I’ve been through recently, the lyrics of this song seemed meant for me and me alone. Frank Sinatra teamed up with the Count Basie Orchestra in 1962 to record an album of American standards. Among them was the Johnny Burke classic, “Pennies from Heaven”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z6vVv9MbMg&feature=player_detailpage&list=PLB6849D6754C22732

I didn’t have to “google” the lyrics for this blog, because Frank’s diction is perfect. It’s a song about looking on the bright side of life, turning lemons into lemonade, the sort of lyric that no one writes anymore because it’s considered too corny. We would rather hear tales of woe from which the writer is a hopeless victim. Frank sings,

         “Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven.

           Don’t you know each cloud contains pennies from heaven?

           You’ll find your fortune falling all over the town.

           Be sure that your umbrella is upside down.

           Trade them for a package of sunshine and flowers

            If you want the things you love you’ve got to have showers.

            So, if you hear it thunder don’t run under a tree,

            There’ll be pennies from heaven for you and me.”

Then the Count’s amazing band rips through a tight riff, with Basie’s slick, understated piano keeping rhythm. This 51 year old virtuoso performance was just for me this morning. Thanks guys.