Friday, May 1, 2015

The Out-of-Control IRS, Rewriting Laws



he Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in King v. Burwell shines a light on the Internal Revenue Service’s practice of rewriting the Affordable Care Act to suit President Obama’s political agenda. What is lesser known is that this is becoming standard operating procedure for an agency that puts politically connected special interests above the written letter of the law.

Nowhere is this truer than in the IRS’s repeated expansion of the controversial wind-production tax credit, which provides federal subsidies to wind-energy producers. Over the last two and a half years, the agency has shown how a slow-but-steady watering down of federal law can completely reshape its original scope and intent — alarmingly, without any congressional action....