The IRS

This morning as I drove through blisteringly cold 40-degree roads to
get to work I listened to an NPR call-in show featuring the
Commissioner of the IRS. I only got about 20 minutes but it was pretty
good! My dominant impression was that the IRS is evil but that the
some of the people they deal with are largely insane (this latter
opinion developed after listening to some of the callers). Of course
you are not able to specify that your particular bundle of tax money
be used only for humanitarian purposes. If you could, who would
specify that they wanted theirs to be used solely for bullet casings?
And anyway, what the fuck would it matter, since those bullet casings
would still be bought? It's not like the government is etching your
name on your contribution, so that some soldier in the wasted nowhere
is cracking open the wrap on a new field knife and saying Thank you,
Tim Dicks. I am glad that your specific tax dollars bought this knife,
which I will now sink into some heads. If you could divert your money
to some sort of donuts-only fund, it would just mean that someone
else's money was sluiced into the blood gutter. The IRS guy astutely
pointed out that the only way to direct where your tax dollars go is
to put effort into electing officials whose policy decisions align
with your own ideals.

Of course you're fucked if the opposing politician wins but really, come on now.

To address my first point though, the IRS sounds totally crazily
machine-like. You could almost hear the glee in the guy's voice when
he spoke about ferreting out tax evaders. A listener called in and
then emailed in to address the issue of some charity misusing its tax
breaks to fund middle east violence and the response was basically
that the IRS is very careful about monitoring the behavior of anyone
claiming to be a charity. There was almost a robocackle in his voice.
It really made me want to work for those people, roll around in a dark
car threatening small businesses, knocking out windows, throwing
flaming briefcases full of tax forms into small clinics.

Anyway, all that is to say that it was a fairly interesting twenty
minutes that I had no idea I would be interested in and you can read
about it here: http://wamu.org/programs/dr/