posted June 01, 2013 03:36 PM            

Everyone loved the revenue agents when they put away Al Capone, the Chicago underworld's master of brutality and bribes, in a coup so spectacular it scared other gangsters straight.

In the year after, federal coffers swelled as delinquent taxpayers stepped forward to make good on their debts. Criminals came out of the woodwork to pay taxes on their ill-gotten gains. Authorities in what was then the Intelligence Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue nailed the slippery Public Enemy No. 1 when no one else could, scooped up New York City racketeers by the dozen and stood tall in the popular imagination as incorruptible, fearless stewards of the treasury and the law.

Fine, but that was the 1930s. What have they done for us lately?

Or to us?

The essential mission hasn't changed. The IRS still collects the money that goes back out to build roads, help look after people in their old age, fight menaces from Nazism to terrorism, and operate the vast levers of government. It still locks up a few thousand delinquents a year, among them drug kingpins who wouldn't be caught any other way.

But no one loves the IRS anymore, not for ages. It's our culture's king-sized pain that makes you do hard math, issues nonsensical directions, takes your money and gives it to politicians to waste even as they borrow unspeakable sums from China to waste even more.

On top of that overdrawn caricature, the agency now is saddled with its episode of tea party tumult, exposing IRS behavior that is memorably bumbling at best and criminal at worst.

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rest here ..... http://news.yahoo.com/irs-glory-days-checkered-past-131427658.html

posted June 05, 2013 08:13 AM            

quote:

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In the year after, federal coffers swelled as delinquent taxpayers stepped forward to make good on their debts. Criminals came out of the woodwork to pay taxes on their ill-gotten gains. Authorities in what was then the Intelligence Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue nailed the slippery Public Enemy No. 1 when no one else could, scooped up New York City racketeers by the dozen and stood tall in the popular imagination as incorruptible, fearless stewards of the treasury and the law.

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I remember my Grandfather talking of the heroism of the revenue agents.

That hardly is what they are called today as scandal after scandal erupts.

How did they go from there to here....

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely?