Howard Gleckman for the Tax Policy Center: Congress has banned more low-income families who file erroneous tax returns from receiving refundable credits. If lawmakers think this is such a terrific idea, why stop at low-income households?
If Congress thinks this nuclear option is such a strong disincentive for poor people, why not use it to punish all taxpayers for deliberately filing incorrect returns? Surely, they would be an example to the rest of us.
That seems to be what Congress had in mind in its recently enacted tax and budget bill. The measure expands an existing provision that bans taxpayers from taking the Earned Income Tax Credit for two years if they improperly claim the benefits because of “reckless or intentional disregard” of the rules. Now the prohibition also applies to the Child Tax Credit and the American Opportunity Tax Credit. An individual who fraudulently files for any of these credits is banned for receiving that subsidy for 10 years. The cost can be significant: Losing the child credit would cost a family up to $1,000 per child annually. …
National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson reported that in 2011 the IRS banned nearly 5,500 families from taking the Earned Income Tax Credit. More than 2,100 were barred because they did not respond to written IRS requests that they substantiate their claims. Apparently, if you are poor, not opening your mail or not leaving a forwarding address when you move is sufficient evidence of intentional disregard of the law.
The government office that threatens free speech
Greg Lukianoff for Cato Unbound: The institution that is perhaps most responsible for exacerbating the problems of speech codes and hair-trigger censorship: the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
By the late 1980s, colleges were adopting “anti-harassment” codes that restricted protected speech. In the mid-1990s, the campus speech code phenomenon converged with the expansion of federal anti-discrimination law by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
Unfortunately, the Department of Education under the Obama administration has been much more aggressive, granting itself new powers and redefining harassment in such broad language that virtually any offensive speech could be considered a matter of federal oversight.
In May 2013, the Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice entered into a resolution agreement with the University of Montana that the agencies deemed “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country.” This “blueprint” mandates an extraordinarily broad definition of sexual harassment: “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including “verbal conduct”—i.e., speech. The blueprint holds that this conduct need not be “objectively offensive” to constitute sexual harassment. This means that if a listener takes offense to any sex- or gender-related speech, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker has engaged in sexual harassment.
Treating this resolution agreement as a “blueprint” puts public universities in an impossible situation: violate the First Amendment or risk investigation and the possible loss of federal funding.
Relax, technophobes
Michael Mandel for the Progressive Policy Institute: The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 created a profound new economic force. There are now almost 2 billion smartphone users globally, an unprecedented rate of adoption for a new technology. Use of mobile data is rising at 55 percent per year, a stunning number that shows its revolutionary impact.
And perhaps most importantly, Apple’s unveiling of the App Store in July 2008 ignited a global App Economy boom. This revolutionary notion enabled software developers to write mobile applications and easily sell and distribute them globally. Indeed, it’s remarkable how iOS and the App Store launched an entirely new industry in less than a decade. Arguably, no other innovation has had this transformative of an effect on the domestic and global economy in terms of scale and speed, achieving an unprecedented level of adoption in such a short time.
As a result, a flood of developers around the world are writing and maintaining the mobile applications that make smartphones profoundly useful. For the most part, these developers are not just hobbyists writing games in their basements. Instead, the App Economy is led by large and small companies that understand mobile apps are the wave of the future, as more people are linked to the Internet through their devices. Similarly, governments and nonprofits use mobile apps as an interface for contact with their citizens and members.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
