This:

A Fox News poll released Wednesday finds that while 26 percent of voters say their health care situation will be better under the new law, twice as many — 53 percent — say it will be worse. Another 13 percent say it won’t make a difference…

That helps explains why a 56-percent majority wants to go back to the health care system that was in place in 2009. Some 34 percent would stick with the new law. 

I’ve watched the congressional hearings on the IRS scandal, and like others, have been appalled at the glib performance of former IRS Commissioner, Douglas Shulman. Shulman isn’t taking an ounce of blame for the mess even though he headed the agency from 2008 to 2012. Dana Milbank reviews his slippery and rather arrogant performance in the Washington Post today.

Unfortunately, we can’t fire the Bush-appointee and Democratic-donor Shulman because he’s already escaped to the private sector. But we can fire other misbehaving IRS workers when we unravel the mystery of who ordered the political targeting.

Politico wrote yesterday that “heads won’t roll at the IRS.” The article is right that it is very difficult to fire federal workers, and I’ve written about the extremely low federal firing rate. The article says that 8,755 people were fired last year. But that was out of 2.1 million civilian federal employees, or just 0.4 percent of the total.

Politico notes that strong civil service protections are a big hurdle to firing. But just as important, I think, has been the unwillingness of federal managers to put the time and effort into removals. It’s much easier for managers to move troublesome employees off to a quiet office to get them out of the way, or to transfer them out of their section.

Also note that it is the firing rate of poor performers that is especially low in the federal government, meaning workers who are lazy or produce poor work. One barrier to their firing is that managers often give these workers good performance reviews because they don’t want to rock the boat.

However, a larger number of federal workers are fired for misconduct—such as willfully ignoring laws and regulations—and that is what we are talking about with the IRS scandal. Recent incidents in the beleaguered Transportation Security Administration (TSA) indicate that federal workers can be fired for misconduct:

• 400 TSA workers have been fired for stealing items from passenger bags.
• 5 TSA employees in Fort Myers were fired for violating screening rules.
• 28 TSA workers in Honolulu were fired for violating screening rules.
• The TSA proposed firing 25 workers in Newark for screening failures, and 4 were eventually removed.
• The TSA proposed firing 12 workers at the Charlotte airport.

Aside from the thefts, the other TSA firings seem to have been for actions no more troublesome than that of IRS employees. IRS employees were apparently not just failing to follow proper protocol, but were proactively inventing new procedures that undermined fundamental rules for nonpartisan, neutral, and fair treatment of taxpayers.

So far President Obama has “fired” acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, although Miller had planned to retire in June anyway. But more heads should roll in the IRS scandal, and despite Politco’s cautionary note, I’m guessing that they will roll.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that according to the latest Bureau of the Census figures there was a 0.4% drop in nominal U.S. public school operating spending from 2010 to 2011. The story then makes this unobjectionable factual observation:

Education officials say decreased spending will make it more difficult to prepare U.S. students for an increasingly competitive global marketplace. Some critics argue that public education costs are skyrocketing while academic achievement has not kept pace. They want the system overhauled before more money is spent.

What the story does not provide readers is any measure of student achievement that would allow them to determine who is right. Let’s see if we can help out. Below is an updated version of a chart some of you will already be familiar with. It shows the performance over time of U.S. 17-year-olds on the “Long Term Trends” testing program of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The spending line corresponds to the trend in the total cost of a complete K‑through-12 public school education (i.e., what it cost to send a high-school graduate all the way through public school). For good measure, it shows how the number of public school employees has roughly doubled since 1970–from about 3.3 to about 6.4 million people. 

So, who seems to be right: “Education officials” or “some critics”?

Incidentally, the WSJ only gives the partial “operating” figures for per-pupil spending. Actual total per pupil spending in 2010, adjusted to today’s dollars, was $13,871. That was down from the all-time inflation-adjusted high of $14,090 in the previous year. Still, $346,767 per class of 25 kids doesn’t seem too shabby.

As the IRS scandal thickens, targeted groups are coming out to describe their ordeals in dealing with that most-reviled of government agencies. The Ohio Liberty Coalition was one of the groups targeted by the IRS, and Tom Zawistowski of the OLC recently sat down with Cato’s Caleb Brown to discuss the experience.

Among the many lessons we can take from this scandal is to realize how bureaucrats enforcing vague government regulations can chill free speech. Campaign finance laws are filled with vague regulations–such as whether an ad is the “functional equivalent of direct advocacy”–and they are anything but harmless to political speech.

In assessing applications for (c)(4) status, the IRS looked for whether political campaigning was an applicant’s “primary activity.” Due to the vagueness of this term, “rogue” IRS agents were free to harass applicants for the “content of their prayers” and other uncouth requests.

Advocates for campaign finance restrictions often do not understand how political speech can be killed by a thousand cuts as much as it can by one fatal blow. Some FEC regulations clearly prohibit certain types of spending. Others tell would-be speakers to judge whether their ads “in context, can only be interpreted by a reasonable person as advocating a candidate’s election or defeat.” Complying with these regulations ultimately comes down to a silly “magic words” test–that is, a search for words such as “vote for,” “elect,” “support,” etc.

Some campaign finance advocates who understand what Citizens United was actually about–that is, a non-profit corporation prohibited from showing a movie critical of Hillary Clinton on Pay-Per-View–concede that Citizens United should have narrowly won the case. Rather than allowing all corporations to spend independently in elections, as the case turned out, they argue the Court should have carved out an exception for “genuine ideological organizations,” “voluntary media choices” (Pay-Per-View), or some other vague criterion that would ultimately have been enforced by bureaucrats at the FEC. We can now can see how such vague standards are applied and abused. 

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Earlier this year, Senator Carl Levin (D‑MI) announced that he will be retiring after many, many, many decades of lawmaking when his term expires in January 2015. But he doesn’t intend to make for the exits without sealing his legacy of disdain for America’s wealth creators. After holding hearings last September to shed light on the “loopholes and gimmicks” employed by U.S. multinational companies to avoid paying their “fair share” of taxes, Levin resumed his inquisition today by holding a hearing intended to publically shame one of America’s most successful and most bountiful companies:

Apple sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance. It has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars, while claiming to be tax resident nowhere. We intend to highlight that gimmick and other Apple offshore tax avoidance tactics so that American working families who pay their share of taxes understand how offshore tax loopholes raise their tax burden, add to the federal deficit and ought to be closed.

Man, the spite in those words is palpable.

At the outset, it is important to note that no illegalities have been alleged, nor have any likely been committed. Like most other U.S.-based multinational corporations, who face tax rates of 35 percent on profits repatriated from abroad, Apple has tax avoidance specialists on its payroll to figure out the most effective ways to minimize their tax burden. They’d be sued for corporate malfeasance by their shareholders if they didn’t.

Unlike foreign-based multinationals whose governments don’t tax their profits earned abroad (or do so very lightly), U.S multinationals are subject to double taxation—first in the foreign countries where they operate at local tax rates and then by the IRS, at up to 35 percent, when profits are brought home. Well guess what? That system discourages profit repatriation, depriving the economy of working capital, and it encourages elaborate, legal tax avoidance schemes.

Oddly, Senator Levin’s problem is not with these perverse incentives, but with the act of following them. Thank you, sir, may I have another! But even worse, Senator John McCain (R‑AZ) acknowledges the faults and disincentives of the system, but still casts the blame on those following Congress’s incentive structure:

I have long advocated for modernizing our broken and uncompetitive tax code, but that cannot and must not be an excuse for turning a blind eye to the highly questionable tax strategies that corporations like Apple use to avoid paying taxes in America. The proper place for the bulk of Apple’s creative energy ought to go into its innovative products and services, not in its tax department.

A company that found remarkable success by harnessing American ingenuity and the opportunities afforded by the U.S. economy should not be shifting its profits overseas to avoid the payment of U.S. tax, purposefully depriving the American people of revenue. It is important to understand Apple’s byzantine tax structure so that we can effectively close the loopholes utilized by many U.S. multinational companies, particularly in this era of sequestration.

Apple’s byzantine tax structure?

Should Apple be blamed for optimizing according to the legal incentives created by the likes of Senators Levin and McCain? Rather, the public would be better served if Senators Levin and McCain were hauled before a public panel to explain why the tax system they helped create and have failed to reform penalizes U.S. companies, and discourages domestic reinvestment.

These were my related, but more comprehensive, thoughts back in September:

Like too many other long-reigning fixtures on Capitol Hill, Senator Carl Levin (D‑MI) doesn’t appreciate the magnitude of the challenge to the authority he presumes to hold over America’s job and wealth creators. Or maybe he does, and frustration over that fact explains why he besmirches companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard.

Levin presided over a Senate hearing last week devoted to examining the “loopholes and gimmicks” used by these multinational companies to avoid paying taxes – and to branding them dirty tax scofflaws. Well here’s a news flash for the senator: incentives matter.

The byzantine U.S. tax code, which Senator Levin – over his 33-year tenure in the U.S. Senate (one-third of a century!) – no doubt had a hand or two in shaping, includes the highest corporate income tax rate among all of the world’s industrialized countries and the unusual requirement that profits earned abroad by U.S. multinationals are subject to U.S. taxation upon repatriation. No other major economy does that. Who in their right minds would not expect those incentives to encourage moving production off shore and keeping profits there?

Minimizing exposure to taxes – like avoiding an oncoming truck – is a natural reaction to tax policy. Entire software and accounting industries exist to serve that specific objective. Unless they are illegal (and that is not what Levin asserts directly), the tax minimization programs employed at Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard are legitimate responses to the tax policies implemented and foreshadowed by this and previous congresses. If Levin is concerned about diminishing federal tax collections from corporations (which, of course, reduces his power), the solution is to change the incentives – to change the convoluted artifice of backroom politics that is our present tax code.

Combine the current tax incentive structure with stifling, redundant environmental, financial, and health and safety regulations, an out-of-control tort system that often starts with a presumption of corporate malfeasance, exploding health care costs, and costly worker’s compensation rules, and it becomes apparent why more and more businesses would consider moving operations abroad – permanently. Thanks to the progressive trends of globalization, liberalization, transportation, and communication, societies’ producers are no longer quite as captive to confiscatory or otherwise suffocating domestic policies. They have choices.

Of course many choose to stay, and for good reason. We are fortunate to have the institutions, the rule of law, deep and diversified capital markets, excellent research universities, a highly-skilled workforce, cultural diversity, and a society that not only tolerates but encourages dissent, and the world’s largest consumer market – still. Success is more likely to be achieved in an environment with those advantages. They are the ingredients of our ingenuity, our innovativeness, our willingness to take risks as entrepreneurs, and our economic success. This is why companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Hewlett-Packard are born in the United States.

But those advantages are eroding.

While U.S. policymakers browbeat U.S. companies and threaten them with sanctions for “shipping jobs overseas” or “hiding profits abroad” or some other manifestation of what politicians like to call corporate greed, characterizing them as a scourge to be contained and controlled, other governments are hungry for the benefits those companies can provide their people. Some of those governments seem to recognize that the world’s wealth and jobs creators have choices about where they produce, sell, and conduct research and development. And some are acting to attract U.S. businesses with incentives that become less necessary every time a politician vents his spleen about evil corporations. Not only should our wealth creators be treated with greater respect from Washington, but we are kidding ourselves if we think our policies don’t need to keep up.

I’m not convinced that any of the recent scandals roiling the Obama administration constitutes an “impeachable moment,” but, as I argue today in the Washington Examiner, there’s something wrong with a (post-?) constitutional culture where opinion leaders treat the very invocation of the “I‑word” as akin to screaming obscenities in a church.

Impeachment talk is “industrial strength insane” says the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky; “serial madness,” per Richard Brodsky at the Huffington Post; Rachel Maddow compares it to incontinence; and for the Atlantic’s Philip Bump, it’s like the inevitable idiot in the comments thread invoking Hitler. True, Salon’s recent listicle of 14 “crazy times” right-wingers have called for Obama’s impeachment consists mostly of frivolous, even loopy proposals; but it also includes Bruce Fein’s 2011 call to impeach Obama “over the military intervention in Libya, alleging that it violated the Constitution’s mandate that only Congress can declare war.” Crazy talk!

Also in the Atlantic, “communitarian” godfather Amitai Etzioni moans “I see no way to protect the president and all of us from the second term curse” in a piece titled, “Why It Should Be Harder to Impeach a President.” 

“Harder”? A “reality-based” communitarian Etzioni ain’t. In our 224-year constitutional history, we’ve only managed the feat twice—three times if you count Nixon, who resigned before the full House got to vote. How much harder can it get?

And when did calling for—even musing about—a president’s impeachment become a form of secular blasphemy—the American version of Lèse-majesté? 

Given what the mid-’70s Church Committee hearings revealed about presidential abuses of power, at a minimum, all three presidents of the ’60s deserved to be impeached and removed from office. Of the seven presidents since Nixon, I can make a case for impeaching at least four.

As Ben Franklin put it at the Philadelphia Convention, the impeachment power is “the best way… to provide in the Constitution for the regular punishment of the Executive when his misconduct should deserve it, and for his honorable acquittal when he should be unjustly accused.”

Our problem isn’t too many impeachments, but too few.  

It’s not the culmination–that will come soon–but a major step in our work to improve government transparency has been achieved. I’ll be announcing and extolling it Wednesday at the House Administration Committee’s Legislative Data and Transparency conference. Here’s a quick survey of what we’ve been doing and the results we see on the near horizon.

After president Obama’s election in 2008, we recognized transparency as a bipartisan and pan-ideological goal at an event entitled: “Just Give Us the Data.” Widespread agreement and cooperation on transparency has held. But by the mid-point of the president’s first term, the deep-running change most people expected was not materializing, and it still has not. So I began working more assiduously on what transparency is and what delivers it.

In “Publication Practices for Transparent Government” (Sept. 2011), I articulated ways the government should deliver information so that it can be absorbed by the public through the intermediary of web sites, apps, information services, and so on. We graded the quality of government data publication in the aptly named November 2012 paper: “Grading the Government’s Data Publication Practices.”

But there’s no sense in sitting around waiting for things to improve. Given the incentives, transparency is something that we will have to force on government. We won’t receive it like a gift.

So with software we acquired and modified for the purpose, we’ve been adding data to the bills in Congress, making it possible to learn automatically more of what they do. The bills published by the Government Printing Office have data about who introduced them and the committees to which they were referred. We are adding data that reflects:

— What agencies and bureaus the bills in Congress affect;

— What laws the bills in Congress effect: by popular name, U.S. Code section, Statutes at Large citation, and more;

— What budget authorities bills include, the amount of this proposed spending, its purpose, and the fiscal year(s).

We are capturing proposed new bureaus and programs, proposed new sections of existing law, and other subtleties in legislation. Our “Deepbills” project is documented at cato​.org/​r​e​s​o​u​r​c​e​s​/data.

This data can tell a more complete story of what is happening in Congress. Given the right Web site, app, or information service, you will be able to tell who proposed to spend your taxpayer dollars and in what amounts. You’ll be able to tell how your member of Congress and senators voted on each one. You might even find out about votes you care about before they happen!

Having introduced ourselves to the community in March, we’re beginning to help disseminate legislative information and data on Wikipedia.

The uses of the data are limited only by the imagination of the people building things with it. The data will make it easier to draw links between campaign contributions and legislative activity, for example. People will be able to automatically monitor ALL the bills that affect laws or agencies they are interested in. The behavior of legislators will be more clear to more people. Knowing what happens in Washington will be less the province of an exclusive club of lobbyists and congressional staff.

In no sense will this work make the government entirely transparent, but by adding data sets to what’s available about government deliberations, management and results, we’re multiplying the stories that the data can tell and beginning to lift the fog that allows Washington, D.C. to work the way it does–or, more accurately, to fail the way it does.

At this point, data curator Molly Bohmer and Cato interns Michelle Newby and Ryan Mosely have marked up 75% of the bills introduced in Congress so far. As we fine-tune our processes, we expect essentially to stay current with Congress, making timely public oversight of government easier.

This is not the culmination of the work. We now require people to build things with the data–the Web sites, apps, and information services that can deliver transparency to your door. I’ll be promoting our work at Wednesday’s conference and in various forums over the coming weeks and months. Watch for government transparency to improve when coders get a hold of the data and build the tools and toys that deliver this information to the public in accessible ways.