ObamaCare is not just a web site, they tell us. Those technical glitches will be fixed, and once they are, ObamaCare itself will be wonderful because its design is wonderful and the implementation will be fantastic. That is the promise.
But there is this problem: It turns out, government does not actually do things very well. Most of the time you don't have any reason to find out about it, because the internal operations of government are just that, and the general public rarely has the opportunity to be touched directly by it. And if it is, the screwups that happen within government often accrue - or so it seems - to the benefit of the general public, in the form of spending that should not be happening.
Such is the case with the Earned Income Tax Credit. The EITC is designed to supplement the incomes of the working poor with direct payments that theoretically provide relief from their income tax obligations. There are supposedly tight requirements as to who can qualify for the EITC, and for how much. But the theory only matters to the extent that the government actually executes the design correctly. And when it doesn't? Oh well! The Wall Street Journal reports on just how badly the IRS has fouled this up:
It is "refundable," which means you get the credit even if you pay no income tax. In 2011, more than 27 million families received EITC payments of nearly $62 billion.
But here's the catch: The IG report says that in 2011 at least 21% of those payments and as much as 26% were "improper." The percentages in 2012 were 21% and 25%. In other words, at least one of every five dollars, and maybe one in four, of EITC payouts were in some way undeserved.
The IG report attributes the erroneous payments to the complicated structure of the EITC and the overall tax code, confusion and turnover among claimants, "unscrupulous tax return preparers" and fraud. The nature and scope of this problem have been known for years, and President Obama issued a 2009 executive order instructing the IRS to reduce the bad payments.
But the IG reports that the IRS has made little progress, has not even established reduction targets "as required," and is not in compliance with the executive order. Perhaps the IRS chiefs were too busy monitoring the tax returns of tea-party groups.
That last line may or may not have been a gratuitous shot, but here's why there's real truth to it. Government agencies choose their priorities like everyone else. There is no incentive to make sure unqualified members of the "working poor" don't get improper payments via the EITC, because it benefits Democrats politically when they do. See Clark's Daily Briefing this morning, which reports that 49.2 percent of Americans are now getting some type of government benefit. There's a term Democrats use for those people: Our voters, baby! The more people who are dependent on direct payments from the government, the better as far as they're concerned.
It's not that the IRS has been specifically directed to make improper payments. It doesn't need to be. The IRS knows that the path of least resistance is not to worry that much about whether people are really qualified. Hey, the tax code is complicated. Hey, you never know if these tax preparers are scrupulous. Well, yeah. So just cut the checks. You just flushed $11 billion down the drain? Oh no you didn't. You just satisfied the dependency habit of millions of families who vote Democratic. Obama's covered because he issued a worthless executive order. Republicans probably won't crow too much because they're scared of getting portrayed as anti-poor.
This will continue to happen.
And this speaks to the problem with just about everything government does. Laws are written to say things must work in a certain way. If you criticize a law and cite the likely real-world result, Democrats and the media say, What do you mean? The law doesn't say that!
Of course the law doesn't say that. It doesn't need to. The actual implementation doesn't need to reflect what the law really says, because when there are major screwups, no one will do anything about it.
I bring you back to ObamaCare. When premiums soar beyond what was promised, when the cost of subsidies explode, when millions of people get subsidies who weren't supposed to, when health care is rationed and people die - hey, didn't the media "debunk" all the predictions that this very stuff would happen? Didn't defenders of ObamaCare post links from Politifact and Snopes on Facebook to "prove" conservative forecasts of disaster were wrong?
Problem. Nothing the government does ever works the way government says it will, and government is ill-equipped to do anything about it - often because, as in the case of the EITC, it really doesn't even want to. Government-run health care should be fantastic.
