Quote of the day: Hey, your old Uncle Sammy, he sez you owe him money. He wants I should ask you, you wanna do this the easy way or the hard way?

"I used to say that conservatives want to take us back to the 1920s, but the Bush administration seemingly wants to go back to the 16th century."
--Paul Krugman, in his NYT column today on the new administration plan to privatize collection of unpaid taxes, "Tax Farmers, Mercenaries and Viceroys"*

Rachel Maddow told the tax-collection story cleverly this morning on her Air America Radio show. First she connected it to the recent announcement that the IRS is drastically cutting back on its personnel charged with auditing rich people. Then she pointed out that at present it costs the IRS 3 cents on the dollar to collect $9 billion annually. The estimated cost once the job is turned over to the "repo" guys, she noted next, is 23 cents on the dollar.

So now you figure you're going to hear some whopping--and no doubt lying--figure for the amount the bone-crushers, er, the collection guys are going to rake in. You figure, since it'll cost almost 8 times as much to collect each dollar, maybe they're going to haul in, oh, $70 billion? That would be a respectable chunk of change.

Uh, no. Not quite. When you hear the actual number, you have a momentary temptation to refigure--like how much would they have to collect for the government to come out ahead on the deal? Then you realize there's no point.

The projected amount is $1.4 billion.

That's right, it appears that the IRS is going to spend almost 8 times as much to collect not much more than an eighth as much. Presumably the personnel savings are supposed to make up for . . . oh, come on, this is too stupid an argument even for that bunch of hooligans and ideological wackos.

Professor Krugman, however, similarly deplores this move but also sees it in a larger context:

It’s an awful idea. Privatizing tax collection will cost far more than hiring additional IRS agents, raise less revenue and pose obvious risks of abuse. But what’s really amazing is the extent to which this plan is a retreat from modern principles of government. I used to say that conservatives want to take us back to the 1920s, but the Bush administration seemingly wants to go back to the 16th century.

And privatized tax collection is only part of the great march backward.

In the bad old days, government was a haphazard affair. There was no bureaucracy to collect taxes, so the king subcontracted the job to private “tax farmers,” who often engaged in extortion. There was no regular army, so the king hired mercenaries, who tended to wander off and pillage the nearest village. There was no regular system of administration, so the king assigned the task to favored courtiers, who tended to be corrupt, incompetent or both.

Modern governments solved these problems by creating a professional revenue department to collect taxes, a professional officer corps to enforce military discipline, and a professional civil service. But President Bush apparently doesn’t like these innovations, preferring to govern as if he were King Louis XII.

So the tax farmers are coming back, and the mercenaries already have. There are about 20,000 armed “security contractors” in Iraq, and they have been assigned critical tasks, from guarding top officials to training the Iraqi Army.

We're only too familiar, Krugman reminds us, with how four of those mercenaries wound up:

Remember the four Americans hung from a bridge? They were security contractors from Blackwater USA who blundered into Falluja--bypassing a Marine checkpoint--while the Marines were trying to pursue a methodical strategy of pacifying the city. The killing of the four, and the knee-jerk reaction of the White House--which ordered an all-out assault, then called it off as casualties mounted--may have ended the last chance of containing the insurgency.

Yet Blackwater, whose chief executive is a major contributor to the Republican Party, continues to thrive. The Department of Homeland Security sent heavily armed Blackwater employees into New Orleans immediately after Katrina.

What's more, Krugman points out, the mercenaries aren't answerable to anyone who answers to us the people of the U.S.A. He cites the example of a $10 million jury verdict against a U.S. contractor in Iraq, Custer Battles ("a symbol," he says, "of the mix of cronyism, corruption and sheer amateurishness that doomed the Iraq adventure"), which was thrown out by a judge, not because the case of blatant fraud wasn't proved but because he couldn't find any legal connection between good old Paul Bremer's dearly remembered Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S. government--you know, like Congressional authorization or a definable link to any legitimately endowed agency of our government.

So what was the CPA? asks Krugman.

Any premodern monarch would have recognized the arrangement: in effect, the authority was a personal fief run by a viceroy answering only to the ruler. And since the fief operated outside all the usual rules of government, the viceroy was free to hire a staff of political loyalists lacking any relevant qualifications for their jobs, and to hand out duffel bags filled with $100 bills to contractors with the right connections.

And so, Krugman points out, we've got 'em all: "tax farmers, mercenaries and viceroys."

Why does the Bush administration want to run a modern superpower as if it were a 16th-century monarchy? Maybe people who've spent their political careers denouncing government as the root of all evil can't grasp the idea of governing well. Or maybe it's cynical politics: privatization provides both an opportunity to evade accountability and a vast source of patronage.

But the price is enormous. This administration has thrown away centuries of lessons about how to make government work. No wonder it has failed at everything except fearmongering.

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*Since there don't even appear to be negotiations under way to free the NYT Op-Ed hostages, once again the full text of the Krugman column will be posted in a comment.


P.S. from the PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS DEPT.:

Sometimes you should be grateful for the failure of technology. As you may have noticed, the Blogger software (or maybe hardware?) has turned unfriendly to the uploading of graphics. In this case I had sought and actually found a shot showing a couple of the charred contractors hanging from the bridge in Falluja. It's not all that disturbing, really. Why, you can barely make out what it is--unless, of course, you know what you're looking at.

But it does serve to illustrate the high-water mark to date of Bush-era privatization. Onward and upward!

Wait, is that someone banging on your door? Sounds like someone named Big Louie, and he wants to talk to you about "when youse gonna pay youse taxes."

Uh, we have to go now. We'll check in with you later. Or maybe some other day.