by Gary Snyder
I have written extensively about the silence of charity leadership that wants to deny the existence of charity fraud that is so endemic to philanthropy. It is a secret that no one wants to talk about.
Now the Congress wants to take a same tactic by keeping actions hidden from the public’s sight. Here's the way it works:
Senators..."are working on the first rewrite of the tax code since 1986. Instead of revising the existing tax law, they’re taking what they call a “blank slate” approach. They proposed sweeping away the tax code’s thousands of loopholes, then asked their colleagues to submit written requests for the deductions they want put back in, assuring them that the requests would be kept private.
The response: silence. Senators didn’t want word to leak that
they’d supported special tax breaks.
It’s easy to see why. Many of the
loopholes that have crept into the law—for oil companies, private equity
managers, Hollywood—are hard to defend. There’s no way to pretend they help
kids, or create jobs. They just go to people and corporations that donate
money. So to get lawmakers to hand over their wish lists without fear of
reprisals from voters, lobbyists, and other senators, the committee’s staff has
come up with a novel way to let senators do their donors’ bidding in secret. In
a July 19 memo obtained by Bloomberg BNA, the committee assured senators that
their loophole requests will be locked up—physically locked up—for 50 years.
Assured that their wish lists will be
buried, more than 60 senators have now submitted tax proposals to Senators
Max Baucus and Orrin Hatch, according to Sean Neary, a committee
spokesman, who says committee staff has received more than 1,000 pages of
secret suggestions. “I think it was just a good offer to get people to open up
more,” says Hatch. “I’ve had a lot of people open up.”
Only in the U.S. Senate would hiding information
the public has every right to know be considered “opening up.” Then again, any
senator with an idea so potentially damaging to his reputation that it has to
be locked away probably wasn’t working for voters anyway."
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