Would You Close the IRS or Gitmo? Survey Says: IRS

This past Thursday, June 6th, I went out and did another Man on the Street for WCBM. This time I went to Harbor Place in downtown Baltimore near the aquarium with much better success. I was never approached by any security or police officers and people were more than willing to talk to me as I walked around the harbor.

This week's question was quick and straightforward but for some it may have been a tough one: Which would you rather see closed, the IRS or Guantanamo Bay? As we all (should) know by now, the IRS (and possibly also the Obama Administration itself) is guilty of targetting Conservative and Tea Party groups with delays, extra scrutiny, etc. on their applications for tax-exempt status. On the other side we have Obama himself trying to dismiss this scandal and others and instead renew calls to close Guantanamo Bay, the facility at which we keep terrorist detainees. Jay Leno drew massive cheers from his audience last week by suggesting that the IRS should be sent to Gitmo.

Considering my location in Baltimore, itself a deep blue and incredibly corrupt city within deep blue and corrupt Maryland, I went in with the expectation that nearly everyone I talked to would side with Obama and favor closing Gitmo, a move which would most likely move terrorist detainees into U.S. prisons on home soil, while implying the IRS should be allowed to keep doing what it is doing now. I was pleasantly surprised when that didn't happen.

A majority of the people I interviewed on Thursday believed that the IRS should be closed over Guantanamo Bay. Despite all attempts to sweep this issue under the rug by Obama and his regime, that the average American still wants to see the IRS closed should speak volumes. It is a sign that Americans have finally woken up to realize the government and its agencies have overstepped their bounds and are out of control.

Now don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly acknowlegde the need for a government to levy taxes and maintain a revenue collection agency to assure those taxes are paid. What I and millions of Americans are saying here is that the IRS has now gone well over and beyond what its original purpose was. According to a quick Google search, the IRS now has in excess of 106,000 employees. Why does the IRS need over 100,000 people to help collect taxes? It doesn't. But the IRS still wants to hire thousands more agents so that it can enforce Obamacare! As a nation we're seriously still going to trust the IRS to enforce Obamacare when it can't even operate within the bounds of and execute current laws?

The targeting scandal, along with the new news of outlandish spending by the IRS for employee "training" to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, should be a wake up call that now is the time to start seriously looking at the size and scope of the IRS. Yes the IRS is a necessary government agency, but it is time to reign it in and bring the monster back under control.

Jimmy Williams