Author: Papa Giorgio

The 1099 Repudiation

Published by Papa Giorgio

Wallstreet Journal:

Democrats now claim that the infamous 1099 business reporting mandate that the Senate repealed this week was an accident, as if they were as surprised as everyone else to learn that this destructive provision had crept by itself into law. The truth is that the 1099 rule emerged from the same core ideology as ObamaCare, and its overwhelming repudiation by Democrats may be an important inflection point in the health-care debate.

The 1099 rule is the first of the ballast to go over the side, and Democrats hope that such “improvements” will be enough to ride out the public storm. Then again, they also claimed that voters would learn to love ObamaCare once it had been stuffed through Congress, among many other misjudgments. The political history is revealing and instructive.

Less than a year ago, liberals couldn’t see how anyone could possibly object to a rule requiring businesses to file 1099 tax forms with the Internal Revenue Service every time they spent more than $600 with a single vendor. Yes, this would result in a vast new paperwork and accounting burden for 30 million businesses and hit start-ups hardest, not to mention farms, charities and churches. But Democrats saw IRS surveillance of nearly all business-to-business transactions as merely an exercise in good government.

The point was to close the “tax gap,” the largely mythological difference between the estimated taxes due under the business tax code and what the IRS actually collects. During the Bush years, Democrats and more than a few Republicans convinced themselves that businesses were cheating the government out of revenues through deliberate under-reporting and various tax shelters.

This notion prevailed at the Senate Finance Committee under both Democratic Chairman Max Baucus and Republican Chairman Chuck Grassley. Budget Chairman Kent Conrad was another evangelist. In its first budget, the Obama White House promised “robust” tax compliance enforcement “to narrow the annual tax gap of over $300 billion,” in contrast to the lethargy of its predecessor.

The 1099 ObamaCare footnote thus received no scrutiny at first because it was so mundane. Everyone in Washington agreed that corporations were stealing billions of dollars every year that rightfully belonged to Congress to spend. (The issue only blew up when the IRS’s National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, followed by the GOP and the business lobby, made it a priority last summer.)

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Serious Saturday-Susan Haack

Published by Papa Giorgio

1. Using the words “science,” “scientific,” “scientifically,” “scientist,” etc., honorifically, as generic terms of epistemic praise.

And, inevitably, the honorific use of “science” encourages uncritical credulity about whatever new scientific idea comes down the pike. But the fact is that all the explanatory hypotheses that scientists come up with are, at first, highly speculative, and most are eventually found to be untenable, and abandoned. To be sure, by now there is a vast body of well-warranted scientific theory, some of it so well-warranted that it would be astonishing if new evidence were to show it to be mistaken – though even this possibility should never absolutely be ruled out.

Always remember that Ptolemy’s model of the solar system was used successfully by astronomers for 1200 years, even though it had Earth in the wrong place.

2. Adopting the manners, the trappings, the technical terminology, etc., of the sciences, irrespective of their real usefulness. Here, Hack cites the “social sciences”, quite justifiably, but evolutionary psychology surely leads the pack. Can anyone serious believe, for example, that our understanding of public affairs is improved by the claim that there is such a thing as hardwired religion or evolved religion? No new light, just competing, contradictory speculation.

3. A preoccupation with demarcation, i.e., with drawing a sharp line between genuine science, the real thing, and “pseudo-scientific” imposters. The key, of course, is the preoccupation. Everyone wants real science, but a preoccupation with showing that a line of inquiry is not science, good or bad – apart from the evidence – flies in the face of “The fact is that the term ‘science’ simply has no very clear boundaries: the reference of the term is fuzzy, indeterminate and, not least, frequently contested.”

4. A corresponding preoccupation with identifying the “scientific method,” presumed to explain how the sciences have been so successful.“ we have yet to see anything like agreement about what, exactly, this supposed method is.” Of course, one method would work for astronomy, and another for forensics. But both disciplines must reckon with evidence, to be called “science”.

5. Looking to the sciences for answers to questions beyond their scope. One thinks of Harvard cognitive scientist Steve Pinker’s recent claim that science can determine morality. Obviously, whatever comes out of such a project must be the morality of those who went into it.

6. Denying or denigrating the legitimacy or the worth of other kinds of inquiry besides the scientific, or the value of human activities other than inquiry, such as poetry or art. Or better yet, treating them as the equivalent of baboons howling for mates, or something. It discredits both arts and sciences.

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