What's the point of a revolution without general copulation?

Roberts: Politicians are "falling all over themselves" to endorse same sex marriage so gays and lesbians have to be "politically powerful"

— AdamSerwer (@AdamSerwer) March 27, 2013

There's a lot of buzz at and around the Cool Kidz table today because, glorioski, there's actually another budget proposal out there, the one put together by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and it not only seems to make more sense to more people than, for example, Paul Ryan's exercise in Magical Unicorn Math, or even than the principles underlying the president's proposal, which seem to be that, before we act on it, we should carefully check the Magical Unicorn's work before appointing the unicorn to the Council Of Economic Advisers. Moreover, that budget is certainly more consonant not only with the blog's First Law Of Economics — Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money — but also with the results of the latest Gallup Poll, the sub-themes of which latter is, quite clearly, "Why In Hell Are We Listening To Joe Scarborough On This Stuff Anyway?"

That's 77 percent of the respondents who want some sort of WPA 2.0 to make sure the bridges don't fall down while we're driving to work. That's 75 percent who want a federal jobs creation program. These two numbers include, respectively, 63 percent and 56 percent of Republican respondents. You could poll Paul Ryan's immediately family and not get these numbers. Neither Mr. Simpson nor Mr. Bowles could score this well on Christmas morning with the grandkids. You could ask Americans the question, "Would you favor immediate federal action that would provide you with unlimited whiskey and the sexual favors of your favorite movie stars?" and come close. Maybe. Does the House progressive budget, which proposes programs that track these numbers, have a chance in hell of passing? Of course not. It's barely in the conversation.

Lobbying for special tax treatment produced a spectacular return for Whirlpool Corp., courtesy of Congress and those who pay the bills, the American taxpayers.

By investing just $1.8 million over two years in payments for Washington lobbyists, Whirlpool secured the renewal of lucrative energy tax credits for making high-efficiency appliances that it estimates will be worth a combined $120 million for 2012 and 2013. Such breaks have helped the company keep its total tax expenses below zero in recent years.

The return on that lobbying investment: about 6,700 percent.

These are the sort of returns that have attracted growing swarms of corporate tax lobbyists to the Capitol over the last decade — the sorts of payoffs typically reserved for gamblers and gold miners. Even as Congress says it is digging for every penny of savings, lobbyists are anything but sequestered; they are ratcheting up their efforts to protect and even increase their clients’ tax breaks.

The Senate approved tax benefits for Whirlpool and a host of other corporations early on New Year’s Day, a couple of hours after the ball dropped over Times Square and champagne corks began popping. A smorgasbord of 43 business and energy tax breaks, collectively worth $67 billion this year, was packed into the emergency tax legislation that avoided the so-called “fiscal cliff."

In the days that followed, the tax handouts for business were barely mentioned as President Obama and members of Congress hailed the broader effects of the dramatic legislation, which prevented income tax increases on the middle class and raised top marginal tax rates for the wealthy.

In the absence of meaningful change, corporations like Whirlpool continue to pursue the exponential returns available from tax lobbying. The number of companies disclosing lobbying activity on tax issues rose 56 percent to 1,868 in 2012, up from 1,200 in 1998, according to data collected by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

In a low-income neighborhood in Bozeman, Mont., taxpayers helped pay for the construction of a grocery store, Town and Country Foods. They are doing the same in New Orleans, with federal dollars helping to build new groceries, including a Whole Foods, in an area still suffering after Hurricane Katrina.

The Bozeman project relied on tax credits, while New Orleans is using federal grant money. To economists — and to taxpayers — that makes no real difference. “These are at some point arbitrary distinctions between taxes and spending,” said Donald Marron, the director of the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington research group.

But to Congress, it makes all the difference — and is something worth fighting over. As lawmakers struggle to narrow the government’s deficit, every dollar taken away from the block grant program used in New Orleans counts as a budget cut. Every dollar taken away from the Bozeman tax credit program — part of a vast array of so-called tax expenditures that cost the federal government more than $1 trillion in lost revenue every year — counts instead as a tax increase.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington State, the shepherd of the Senate Democratic budget proposal, proposed raising nearly $1 trillion in new revenue over the next 10 years by cutting tax expenditures and using the money to reduce the deficit. The White House has said it supports her plan.

In contrast, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, in the House Republican budget, insisted that any money generated from curbing tax expenditures must be offset with lower tax rates, so that overall revenue remained the same. Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee echoed that argument. “Eliminating tax exemptions is a tax increase,” said Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama. “You can’t spin it any other way.”

In the corporate code, expenditures are “just a hidden, ersatz, Soviet-style five-year plan,” said Edward Kleinbard, a longtime Congressional tax expert now at the University of Southern California. “We would never contemplate a world in which the government said, ‘We’re going to write out checks to Nascar because it’s an important resource and we’re going to pay for it!’ People would say, ‘They’re out of their mind!’ ”

Tax expenditures also make it harder to gauge the impact of the federal budget on such crucial activities as housing and retirement security. For instance, the home mortgage interest deduction costs the Treasury about $100 billion a year in lost revenue, and effectively encourages the mostly affluent families who itemize deductions to buy a more expensive home. In contrast, the annual budget of the Housing and Urban Development Department, which generally goes to aiding the poor, is less than $50 billion.

“If someone said, ‘Let’s have a voucher program on the spending side, giving high-income families vouchers to subsidize their mortgages,’ ” said Glenn Hubbard, the dean of Columbia Business School and a prominent Republican economist, referring to the home mortgage interest deduction, “I don’t think that would get through Congress.”

Spending through the tax code has also proved harder to scale back than spending through the regular appropriations process. Already, Congress has cut more than $2 trillion from health spending and the domestic and military budgets. It has hardly touched tax expenditures.

Early last year, after a series of frightening encounters with her former husband, Stephanie Holten went to court in Spokane, Wash., to obtain a temporary order for protection.

Her former husband, Corey Holten, threatened to put a gun in her mouth and pull the trigger, she wrote in her petition. He also said he would “put a cap” in her if her new boyfriend “gets near my kids.” In neat block letters she wrote, “ He owns guns, I am scared.”

The judge’s order prohibited Mr. Holten from going within two blocks of his former wife’s home and imposed a number of other restrictions. What it did not require him to do was surrender his guns.

About 12 hours after he was served with the order, Mr. Holten was lying in wait when his former wife returned home from a date with their two children in tow. Armed with a small semiautomatic rifle bought several months before, he stepped out of his car and thrust the muzzle into her chest. He directed her inside the house, yelling that he was going to kill her.

Ms. Holten, however, managed to dial 911 on her cellphone and slip it under a blanket on the couch. The dispatcher heard Ms. Holten begging for her life and quickly directed officers to the scene. As they mounted the stairs with their guns drawn, Mr. Holten surrendered. They found Ms. Holten cowering, hysterical, on the floor.

For all its rage and terror, the episode might well have been prevented. Had Mr. Holten lived in one of a handful of states, the protection order would have forced him to relinquish his firearms. But that is not the case in Washington and most of the country, in large part because of the influence of the National Rifle Association and its allies.

Ernst & Young LLP received the usual kid-glove treatment given to too-big-to-fail enterprises when it reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department over illegal tax shelters it sold more than a decade ago. The government chose not to prosecute the Big Four accounting firm, and Ernst is getting off by writing a relatively small check.

The $123 million that Ernst must pay is equivalent to the fees it charged for the tax shelters in question. About 200 Ernst clients used the shelters to try to avoid more than $2 billion in taxes. The firm doesn’t even have to pay interest on the ill-gotten proceeds, under the deal revealed last week.

Two Ernst tax specialists were sentenced to prison, while two others had their convictions reversed last year on appeal. Ernst was required to admit that some of its personnel engaged in criminal wrongdoing. All in all, the firm came out fine. The public had forgotten about the investigation years ago.

Yet there was one area where Ernst made out beyond all reason: A veritable love letter at the bottom of the statement of facts that Ernst and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York agreed to as part of their accord. It said: “The wrongdoing in this case by a small group of professionals at E&Y represented a deviation from the more than 100-year history of ethical and professional conduct by E&Y and its partners.”

To which one can only respond: What? I asked Julie Bolcer, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney, what the factual basis was for the statement. She declined to comment. Amy Call Well, an Ernst spokeswoman, declined to answer the same question.

[R]ather than cover 100 years, I decided to go as far back as the merger between Arthur Young & Co. and Ernst & Whinney that created Ernst & Young in 1989. The firm has been in trouble over ethical violations and professional misconduct on a regular basis ever since.

It would be nice to believe the prosecutors were on the public’s side here. Unfortunately it seems they were more concerned about protecting Ernst than they were anyone else.