Originally published at NewsReal’s That’s What She Said

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Four Afghan women have achieved something that would have been unimaginable a decade ago: they are training alongside male recruits to become pilots in the Afghan Air Force. Amidst headlines about poverty, illiteracy, and breathtaking levels of violence against women, their accomplishments are beyond heartening.

Second Lt. Sourya Saleh hopes to serve as a role model for other Afghan women after completing her aviation training in the United States.

“We are very happy to be going to open these doors for the other women to come and join the military, to show them you can do this and make our country proud,” she said. “We want for all Afghan girls to know they can do anything.”

Another newly minted officer, Second Lt. Mary Sharifzada, told the Air Force Times that becoming a pilot has been her dream since she was a little girl:

“I want to show the people of Afghanistan that women are strong,” Sharifzada said. “We want to show the people of the world that the women of Afghanistan are strong and they can do anything they want.”

“They said I’m as brave as a man,” said Second Lt. Masooma Hussaini.

As brave as men, and according to Lt. Col. John Howard of the Thunder Lab training program, as capable as their male counterparts. But these women and future recruits may not get the chance to prove “they can do anything they want” if the United States selects Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer to supply turboprop planes for the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan.

In the April 2011 issue of Smart Girl Nation, my friend Ashley Sewell explains how the Brazilian plane would bar skilled female pilots from flying Light Air Support (LAS) and light attack and armed reconnaissance (LAAR) missions:

The front-runners are the American-made Hawker Beechcraft AT-6 (a plane like the T-6 training aircraft that would accommodate 95% of women pilots) and the Brazilian-made Embraer EMB-314 (a plane that sticks to older standards thus eliminating the possibility of being flown by a woman).

Those older standards exclude more than 80 percent of women (and small men) from safely flying the planes that will be used to train and equip the Afghan Air Force.

There’s no question that operational performance and pilot safety should be the primary criteria in choosing between the Embraer and Hawker Beechcraft planes. But if the two aircraft perform comparably, can we afford to indulge the Commander-in-Chief‘s childish love affair with Brazil, forcing the struggling Afghan Air Force to sideline much needed talent?

That’s not the only reason the Hawker Beechcraft proposal is superior. The assembly of the Hawker Beechcraft AT-6 planes would result in an estimated 1,400 American jobs, while the Embraer proposal will create a comparatively paltry 50 assembly line positions in the U.S.

And even more compelling are the risks of contracting with a company controlled by Brazil, a country that doesn’t have especially warm and fuzzy feelings about American foreign policy. Embraer’s corporate by-laws give Brazil a controlling interest known as the “Golden Share.”

The Golden Share allows the Brazilian government to maintain direct control and veto rights over the “creation and/or alteration of military programs, whether or not involving the Federative Republic of Brazil” as well as the “interruption of the supply of maintenance and replacement parts for military aircraft.”

Next month, the Department of Defense will make its decision. Will we put the Afghan Air Force at the mercy of a foreign government that has, at times, been hostile to the War on Terror? Will President Obama exchange friendship bracelets with Brazil as he promises them even more American jobs? And will the ambitious and capable women of the Afghan Air Force be relegated to second-class status before they’re given a chance to shine?

These are the women whose dreams of flying could be crushed by the “most feminist administration ever” before they even leave the ground:

I Now Pronounce You Wusband and Hife
The editor-in-chief of a women’s lifestyle site is so fearful of gender stereotypes in marriage that she’s decided to abolish the terms husband and wife. I’m not joking, and neither is she.

Obama is Not What a Feminist Looks Like
On International Women’s Day, the president had plenty of time for shout-outs to celebrities and Communist activists.  But when it came to voicing his support for the struggles of women outside the United States, President Obama had nothing to say.

More to follow.

Oh, and do yourself a favor: don’t play any of the State of the Union drinking games that require you to take a drink every time President AllAboutMe says “I” or “me.” Your liver will thank you.

Democratic consultant Karen Finney called the Stupak amendment “an attack on our personal freedom and liberty as guaranteed by the constitution.” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) said the amendment “attempts to dictate to women how to spend their own money.” And liberal columnist Michelle Goldberg lamented, “Health-insurance reform was supposed to end the sort of hideous cruelties our system inflicts on patients, not create them.”

To call Finney, Lee, and Goldberg tone deaf would be a grand understatement.

The only reason the abortion restrictions in the Stupak amendment are so intrusive is because health care reform is so intrusive. When we increase the role of government in health care, our freedoms and choices become more vulnerable to politics. Period.

Funding for every aspect of the doctor-patient relationship, every medical test and procedure, and every health care guideline becomes susceptible to pressure from special interest groups and moral scrutiny by taxpayers.  If guys who can’t get it up have enough money to throw around, erectile dysfunction drugs make the cut.  If taxpayers think acupuncturists are predatory quacks, no reimbursement for them. And after the reconciled bill is signed by the president, an unelected body will make these decisions for all of us.

Liberals cheered when President Obama appointed an executive pay czar, reasoning that companies like AIG have no right to determine pay packages if taxpayers are footing the bill.  But somehow they missed the obvious lesson.  There are always strings attached to government handouts.

Welcome, liberals, to the hazards of government subsidy.  Either private insurance is restricted by health care reform, as with the Stupak provisions, or abortion receives some form of federal funding, thus changing the status quo.  There’s no in between.

Objectionable restrictions abound when we seek increased state participation in our lives through regulation or subsidy.  Just ask members of a United Methodist Church group that refused to make a beachfront pavilion available to a lesbian couple for a civil union ceremony.  The group lost its state property tax exemption for failing to make the venue available to everyone on an equal basis.  But that’s how it works: if you want state subsidies, you have to play by the state’s rules.

We’ve seen the impact on coverage in states that are experimenting with models of universal health care.  In Massachusetts, legal immigrants no longer have state-subsidized coverage for dental, hospice, and skilled nursing care. And if you’re a Medicaid patient, prisoner, or public employee in Washington state, don’t expect your government to cough up the cash for knee arthroscopy for osteoarthritis – it’s one of several treatments no longer covered.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that “the power of Congress to regulate health care is essentially unlimited.”  Do liberals really believe that those regulations will exist to make their wildest dreams come true, now and forever?

When you invite the government to become more deeply involved in health care, you’re also inviting greater government interference in personal choice. Medical decisions become political decisions. That’s how it works, and it’s why philosophical opposition to the growth of government isn’t the crazy-eyed wingnuttery progressives make it out to be.

Proponents of liberal health care reform deliberately lured a bloodthirsty vampire over their thresholds, and now they’re shocked – SHOCKED – to find they have fangs buried deep in their necks.  I’m not one to blame the victim, but it sounds like they might be getting exactly what they were asking for.

Alienating the millions of Americans who watch Fox is strategic buffoonery of the highest degree. But why focus on solid strategy when you can engage in some good ol’ fashioned spite?  And why settle for popular news networks when you can make your petty resentments known to an entire state, like say, South Carolina?

U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said Friday that a conversation with White House staff left him with the sense that a hostile environment in South Carolina is keeping the first lady from visiting.

The high-ranking South Carolina Democrat said he has received more than 100 invitations for Michelle Obama. But this summer when he brought one of those requests to her staff on behalf of his alma mater, South Carolina State University, Clyburn said her security was an issue.

The conversation came after former Richland County GOP activist Rusty DePass suggested on Facebook in June that an escaped zoo gorilla was not harmful because it was probably one of Mrs. Obama’s ancestors. DePass’ comment was coupled with a remark in July from U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, a Republican. DeMint said that beating the president’s health care plan would be a ‘Waterloo’ moment for Obama.

Congressman Joe Wilson’s ‘You lie!’ outburst during Obama’s joint address on health care reform last month didn’t help either, Clyburn said.

‘A lot of it has to do with the fact that the climate in South Carolina just is not good, and that’s a shame,’ Clyburn said at a roundtable discussion at his Columbia office.

‘I do believe it is keeping her away from this state,’ he said.

Emphases mine.

Yes, a moronic South Carolina GOP grunt wrote something shameful about the first lady and a couple of politicians made bold statements about the president and his policies.  How do those comments indicate a statewide climate hostile enough to jeopardize Mrs. Obama’s security?

Simple answer: they don’t.

The White House isn’t keeping Michelle Obama out of South Carolina to protect her from assassins in white hoods.  South Carolina is being kept off her itinerary to send a message: embarrassing the president will not be tolerated.  (Are you listening Joe Wilson?) Dissent will be contorted into proof that racist backwater bumpkins in the south are undermining Obama’s presidency and endangering the very life of the first lady with their dangerous coded rhetoric.

Who cares about smearing the people of South Carolina?  After all, it’s just a red state.

Update: Michelle Malkin links.  Thanks, Michelle!

Update 2: My very first Instalanche. Thanks, Glenn!

Or something.

I know those are the right wing talking points on the president’s planned address, but I’m having trouble raising my conservative ire to the expected levels.  Here’s why:

1. The text of President Obama’s speech is innocuous.  Released by the White House on Monday, it looks a lot like a commencement address, sans the humorous one-liners and witty anecdotes. And at 2,540 words, this painfully long speech is almost 10 times longer than the Gettysburg Address.  Kids’ eyes will glaze over, their lids will grow heavy, and they will absorb nothing substantive from the president’s vapid string of platitudes and abstractions because it contains nothing substantive.

2. Varying degrees of indoctrination are rampant in American schools.  If you’re thinking of keeping your kids out of the classroom today, you might as well keep them home everyday.

I attended public elementary school in New York City in the 1980s. My second grade class was taken around the corner from our school to the gates of the USSR Mission compound to protest the incarceration of Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. This was done without parental permission.

In 1984, after Walter Mondale selected Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, my teacher excitedly handed students items from campaign headquarters. My classmates and I spent the remainder of the year with Mondale/Ferraro bumper stickers affixed to our canvas loose leaf notebooks.

From what I gather, partisan bias and philosophical indoctrination are just as flagrant in today’s schools.  That’s why conservatives are intuitively wary of a liberal president speaking directly to children.  So yes, I guarantee that in some classrooms there will be bias evident in the exercises and lessons that follow President Obama’s speech.  But I also assure you that there is informal indoctrination taking place in those classrooms all day, every day.  Shielding your children from political bias in the classroom is a laudable goal, but unfortunately, keeping your kids home today is like fixing a leaky pipe with a roll of Bounty.

3. President Obama’s address to the nation’s schoolchildren is a distraction.  Conservatives need to remain focused on the health care debate and the far more important speech the president will make to a joint session of Congress Wednesday night.

In the interest of moving on from this particular distraction, I propose that President Obama cancel his speech to kids and instead run the following video with the same message trimmed down to a succinct 30 seconds or so:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the United States, mammography is recommended for breast cancer screening every one to two years beginning at age 40.  The best available evidence suggests that mammography screening among women aged 40 to 74 reduces breast cancer mortality.

But due to a few minor risk factors, three doctors have suggested I undergo a baseline mammogram at 35. I’m not thrilled with the idea of having a technician I’ve never met manipulate my breasts into squishing position, but being felt up and flattened out sounds a lot better than being dead, so I’ll take my chances.

Of women who receive annual screening mammography beginning at age 40, six out of 10,000 over a decade will have their lives saved.  Breast cancer will be detected and cured in many more, but regular mammograms will only make a life or death difference for six of every 10,000 women in that group.  Mammograms are of extremely high value to those women and their families, but don’t offer much bang for the buck when it comes to the other 9,994 women.

And wringing more bang from every health care buck is reason enough for Canadian and British recommendations that women wait until age 50 to begin receiving screening mammographies.  In these countries where cost-effectiveness studies influence health policy and medical practice, six saved lives aren’t worth the substantial costs associated with all those extra mammograms and the false positives they sometimes produce.

Canadian women are offered routine mammograms every two years, but only from age 50-69 because “evidence is not conclusive” that routine mammograms benefit younger and older women.  Doctors have some leeway with regard to high risk patients.

In the United Kingdom, mammograms are recommended every three years beginning some time between age 50 and 53.  Based on guidelines developed by the Orwellian-named NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence), the National Health Service insists that for women under 40, “mammograms should only be used as part of clinical trials into screening and that they shouldn’t be used under age 30 at all.”  According to NICE, “Healthcare professionals should respond to women who present with concerns but should not, in most instances, actively seek to identify women with a family history of breast cancer.”

It is hardly shocking that the breast cancer mortality is 9 percent higher in Canada and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom.  Nine of 10 middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to less than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).  And British and Canadian patients wait for care about twice as long as Americans.

There are indeed valid criticisms American health care, but one area in which we excel is that we don’t base guidelines for care on cost-utility analysis. That’s why the U.S. ranks first in providing the “right care” for a given condition and has the best survival rate for breast cancer.

Obamacare may force Americans to give up those bragging rights.

The “right care” may soon be defined in part by how much that care costs. Health care reformers acknowledge the impossibility of implementing universal health care without introducing cost containment measures, and Democrats are enamored with a method used by the British called “comparative effectiveness research” (CER.)

AARP CEO and CER proponent Bill Novelli describes comparative effectiveness research as “a wonky term that just means giving doctors and patients the ability to compare different kinds of treatments to find out which one works best for which patient.”  And at its best, that’s just what CER does.  CER is not inherently bad.  For example, it can help doctors cut through seductive pharmaceutical advertising to identify older, less commonly prescribed drugs that are just as effective as newer, more expensive ones.

But with CER, the devil is in the details.

CER can lead to one-size-fits-all medicine and encourages a purely analytical approach to care that is not always beneficial to the patient. The mythical average patient overshadows the individual patient, leaving most of us with about as many options as a public school cafeteria at lunchtime.

And in the UK, NICE includes cost as a determining factor in the comparative effectiveness studies that inform clinical guidelines.  Determinations about whether citizens will have access to drugs, tests, and procedures are based on cost per quality of life year (QALY.)

The QALY score is a fairly crude metric that takes into account both the number and quality of years a medical intervention is expected to add to a patient’s life.  Here’s the upshot of using QALYs to determine cost effectiveness:

On the QALY scale, 0 means you’re dead, 1 means you’re in perfect health, and varying levels of debility fall in between. Imagine two groups of people, one with a QALY of 1 and the other with a score of 0.5. An expensive technology brings a year of life to both groups. But in the second, that technology would be counted as having provided only six months, and thus be twice as expensive. It may be deemed too costly for that patient group.

The older you are, the sicker you are, the more disabled you are, the less cost effective it is to treat you.  And if the cost per QALY of a medical intervention you need exceeds £20-30,000 (around $32,000 – 48,000), you’re out of luck.  Drugs, particularly end-of-life treatments, are routinely rejected for use due to poor cost-effectiveness.  And screening tests, like the mammograms American women take for granted, are severely restricted to ensure expenditures remain under the cost per QALY threshold.

Liberal proponents of health care reform accuse conservatives of paranoia and fear mongering about health care rationing.  Critics of CER are demonized as extremist spewers of far right talking points who don’t care about improving clinical effectiveness.  Surely a uniquely American flavor of a CER board would never become as proscriptive as NICE.

But it seems conservative anxiety (and perhaps a bit of healthy paranoia) is more than warranted by Washington Democrats singing the praises of cost-cutting comparative effectiveness studies.  Bear with me while I review some of the health care rationing talk in CER clothing coming from inside the beltway.

The stage for CER to become a significant component of health care reform was set when President Obama’s stimulus bill passed with a $1.1 billion appropriation for CER.  In April, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) introduced a budget amendment to ensure that CER would be used appropriately:

Statement of Purpose:
To protect all patients by prohibiting the use of data obtained from comparative effectiveness research to deny coverage of items or services under Federal health care programs and to ensure that comparative effectiveness research accounts for advancements in genomics and personalized medicine, the unique needs of health disparity populations, and differences in the treatment response and the treatment preferences of patients.

The amendment was defeated 54-44.

Last week, members of the New Democrat Coalition proposed HR 2505, a bill to establish a new government bureaucracy called the Health Care Comparative Effectiveness Research Institute.  The Institute would prioritize research based on both clinical and economic factors, including “the effect or potential for an effect on health expenditures associated with a health condition or the use of a particular medical treatment, service, or item.”  This would not be a problem if there were safeguards to ensure that best practices are not interpreted to mean the least expensive practices.

Officials at National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced a stimulus-funded initiative to integrate cost-effectiveness into clinical research.   “Cost-effectiveness research will provide accurate and objective information to guide future policies that support the allocation of health resources for the treatment of acute and chronic diseases across the lifespan,” according to the call for proposals.

Back at the Whitehouse, President Obama has been paying lip service to the clinical benefits of CER.  At the same time, he recently lamented that “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill … there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place.”  That, he explained, was part of the need for “some independent group that can give you guidance” on the ethical dilemmas involved with rationing end-of-life care.

During her Senate confirmation process, Secretary of HHS Kathleen Sebelius declined to voice her support for prohibiting the use of comparative effectiveness data to withhold care from patients. Her ideas echo those of Tom Daschle, the tax-dodging health policy wonk who wrote in his book that the U.S. “won’t be able to make a significant dent in health-care spending without getting into the nitty-gritty of which treatments are the most clinically valuable and cost effective.”

Then there’s Peter Orszag, Obama’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and a major player in crafting health care reform.  For the most part, Orszag’s commentary on CER has been limited to lauding its ability to improve patient care while reducing waste.  But when asked a few months ago if the Obama administration has a position on empowering the CER board to make reimbursement decisions, Orszag said, “Not at this point.”

But perhaps of greatest concern is a January House report that included the following statement on CER funding:

By knowing what works best and presenting this information more broadly to patients and healthcare professionals, those items, procedures, and interventions that are most effective to prevent, control, and treat health conditions will be utilized, while those that are found to be less effective and in some cases, more expensive, will no longer be prescribed.

Sound familiar?  Cough, NICE, cough, ahem.

And as Jim DeMint explains, “CER is only one step in the Obama administration’s insidious plan to take over American health care … for our own good.”

But would CER really lead to health care rationing in the United States?  Of course.  That’s pretty much the point.  The debate is not about whether or not CER would be used for rationing, but rather, whether rationing is ethical and useful, and how far we’re willing to go to save a buck and level the economic playing field.

If health care reform shapes up as many Democrats anticipate, CER Institute guidelines will initially apply to the public insurance option expected to be the centerpiece of the Democrats’ proposal. But eventually they would slide down the slippery slope into the private sector. A public insurance option would also ride roughshod over the already anemic competition among overregulated private sector insurers, making the survival of private insurance unlikely.  As in the United Kingdom, recommendations will become rules and suggestions will become mandates in order to contain the costs of universal coverage.

To what extent will this result in government control of the doctor-patient relationship?  Ultimately, a bureaucratic board will determine when, how, and whether or not you and your family receive care.

Comparative effectiveness research will no longer be just a political hot potato; it will be the basis for the next great American culture war.  Instead of clashing over God, guns, and gays, we’ll battle over the monetary value of human life, the sanctity of doctor-patient relationships, the right to medical self-determination, and my favorite hot button issue, the duty to die.

Would cases like Terry Schiavo’s be decided based on financial considerations?

Where will fetuses fall on the QALY scale?  How about the elderly or people with Down syndrome?  Will they automatically receive limited treatment due to limited resources?

Will smokers be eligible for chemotherapy?  Will overweight people have restrictions placed on cardiac care?  Will we feel differently about those decisions when we’re footing the bill for everyone?

And you thought the abortion debate was contentious.

Obviously these questions address the most extreme examples of what could happen if we continue on our current path toward universal health care.  But government efforts at cost containment through CER may push us toward debating these issues sooner than we think.  Hopefully we’ll never see the day when questions like these go beyond an academic exercise.

Meanwhile, I’ll be saving up for a date with a mammography machine in one of those thriving medical tourism meccas.  I hear Costa Rica is a breathtaking location for a 35th birthday celebration.

Then I grew up, read the Bill of Rights, and married a gun nut.

Across the country in Phoenix, Meghan McCain was brought up with a more informed view on the right to bear arms.  Her brothers were avid hunters and she developed a deep respect for the Second Amendment.  Today she’s an NRA member with a lifetime of positive gun experiences under her belt.

I confess I have a soft spot for Meghan McCain.  I don’t agree with all of what she writes and I wish she’d add something new to the national political conversation instead of recycling a mishmash of talking points.  But I admire her practical decision to milk her campaign fame for all it’s worth, and I think she’s wise to go the contrarian Republican route.  Controversy sells, as evidenced by her six figure book deal.

McCain and I agree on the Second Amendment issue.  But while her devotion to gun rights confirms her bitter clinger bona fides, she appears to have absorbed a different kind of liberal humbuggery on the issue of gun violence.

The real solution to preventing gun violence is not taking away the tools, but tackling its causes: poverty, inadequate health care, mental illness, joblessness, inadequate housing, and poor education. Desperate people will make anything a weapon. We need to eliminate desperation, not guns.

Translation: guns don’t kill people, people with less money and education than Meghan McCain kill people.  (And sometimes the mentally ill do it too.)

Way to scapegoat the impoverished!

I was under the impression that identifying poverty as the root cause of violent crime was no longer in vogue – after all, that would let guns off the hook – but apparently President Obama feels otherwise.  Eight days after the 9/11 attacks, Barack Obama attributed the tragedy to the terrorists’ lack of empathy stemming from a “climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”  And in a 2007 speech, Obama called poverty “a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence.”  Obama’s first pick for Commerce Secretary, Bill Richardson, shared similar thoughts during the 2007 NAACP Presidential Primary Forum when he said, “the key in eliminating gun violence is eliminating poverty, eliminating hate.”

Perhaps Meghan McCain is simply repeating liberal talking points, but it seems to me that even among the political left, violent crime is usually approached as a complex phenomenon caused by a multitude of sociological and psychological factors.  Many recognize that it reeks of classism to suggest that poverty creates desperation-fueled violence.  It’s also unsupported by evidence.  While a correlation exists between certain crimes and poverty, research has not proven a cause and effect relationship.  There are simply too many variables.

Even Marxist criminologists don’t attribute crime to poverty, but rather to relative deprivation like income inequality.  But both are silly assumptions: if all of the poverty-stricken or people who find life unfair engaged in violent criminal activities, the world would be in chaos.  But clearly most of the world’s have-nots eke out their years without erupting into violence.

Instead, couldn’t it be that violent crime perpetuates poverty?  We see this on an individual level among both victims and convicted criminals.  It is also evident on the community level.  Neighborhoods decimated by gun violence fail to attract entrepreneurs who might help the areas prosper.  Crime also keeps property values low and drives up insurance premiums.

It may well be that poverty has little to do with being deprived, and everything to do with being depraved.  And it isn’t economic poverty, but moral poverty that is to blame for gun violence.

But somehow amidst these concerns of grave national interest, and before swine flu began dominating the news cycle, little coverage was given to the implications of a significant tax day announcement. President Obama revealed that a rewritten federal tax code will soon “make it easier, quicker and less expensive for you to file a return, so that April 15th is not a date that is approached with dread every year.”

A simplified tax code is something most Americans can get behind.  The federal tax code now stands at a whopping 70,000 pages.  85 percent of American adults say the federal tax code is complex, and 82 percent say the tax system needs to be completely overhauled.

So what can we expect from an Obama approved tax code revision?  The first phase of the administration’s plan, conceived during the presidential campaign by economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, aims to eliminate tax returns for 17 million  Americans.

Under the “Simple Return” plan, the Internal Revenue Service would complete tax returns for taxpayers whose sole income comes from one employer and whose interest income comes from one bank. The IRS would then send a copy of the return to the taxpayer. If the first wave of the program worked well, it could be expanded to other taxpayers.

The second and third waves of the Simple Return plan could bring the total to 52 million participating taxpayers.

The good news? Next year you may not have to file a federal tax return.

The bad news?  The IRS will prepare your return for you.

Forgive me for plucking off a bit of low hanging fruit, but it’s hard to overlook that the IRS is overseen by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, a man who failed to pay several several years worth of self-employment taxes until his finances went under the Senate microscope during confirmation hearings. His excuse was something along the lines of “TurboTax made me do it.”  Who better to oversee the team of bureaucrats charged with calculating your tax bill?

But easy targets aside, this “simplification” is a political cop out.  Many of the complexities in our federal tax code are there because some politician, special interest group, or narrow constituency has lobbied for their existence.  Some serve legitimate government interests, but many don’t.  President Obama, like those who preceded him, will not risk alienating powerful voting blocs by ordering a careful review of the tax breaks and incentives that contribute to the corpulence of the code.

Instead, he pretends that the solution to a bloated tax code is a bloated IRS.  The IRS has been serving up spoiled broth, and Barack Obama wants to hire more cooks.  That’s certainly a different way of doing things, but simpler?  I don’t think so.

Proponents of the Simple Return plan boast that it could save taxpayers 225 million hours currently spent on tax compliance, and $2 billion in tax return preparation costs.  But how many additional Internal Revenue Service agents will it take to complete returns on behalf of 52 million taxpayers?  How many millions of taxpayer dollars will it take to implement this program?

And even if Austan Goolsbee’s plan wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime, should the government encourage people to shift partial responsibility for their finances to the IRS?  What federal interest does it serve when citizens relinquish personal responsibility to become more dependent on the government for tasks they can accomplish themselves?  Shouldn’t we be wary when the federal government offers to permanently shoulder our burdens?

Keep in mind, the vast majority of the tax returns we’re talking about are simple 1040EZ forms.  Even the IRS estimates a 1040EZ takes just a few hours to complete, but for anyone with a pulse and a modicum of aptitude with a calculator, the compliance time is more likely to be minutes, not hours.  The cost for individual taxpayers filing the 1040EZ is virtually nil – perhaps the nuisance of spending an evening in – except when they choose to hire a tax preparer.  Unless the filer is illiterate or disabled, tax preparation fees are completely optional.

Why should compliance costs that are voluntarily incurred by individuals become the collective responsibility of American taxpayers?

For the most conscientious among us, compliance costs will, of course, not change at all.  Even if our tax returns are completed by IRS bureaucrats, we will spend the same amount of time and money checking calculations as we do now.  Only the people willing to put absolute faith in IRS number crunchers will “benefit” from this new type of government dependence.  I’m betting those are the same people who place absolute faith in President Obama.

No weapon is off limits to this populist mob of angry legislators, outraged officials, indignant journalists and seething private citizens. Punitive taxation, public shaming, intimidation, and even threats of physical violence are all fair play if the greedy rich at AIG are to get their just deserts.

Among the recent threats against AIG executives and their families:

“Get the bonus, we will get your children.”

“I would be very careful when I went out side. This is just a warning. If I were ya’ll I would be real afraid.”

“Publish the list of those yankee scumbags so some good old southern boys can take care of them.”

“We will hunt you down. Every last penny. We will hunt your children and we will hunt your conscience. We will do whatever we can to get those people getting the bonuses.  Give back the money or kill yourselves.”

“The Revolution is coming. The family members of your executives are not safe. Your blood will run through the streets in the coming months.”

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo attempted to satisfy an increasingly bloodthirsty public by threatening to disclose the names of AIG bonus recipients if they did not return the payments.  And back in Washington, Rep. Barney Frank demanded the names of recipients and refused to keep them confidential in response to safety concerns.

To further address public cries for the heads of AIG executives, the House easily passed a bill to impose a 90 percent tax on executive bonuses at bailed out companies.  The legislation garnered support from most House Democrats and nearly half of Republicans, though it appears to be dead in the Senate.

Even President Obama wondered how AIG executives could “justify this outrage to the taxpayers” and with utter disregard for the sanctity of private contracts, asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to “pursue every legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole.”

One problem: block the bonuses and you lose the talent.

Why should you care if AIG suffers a blow to its executive workforce?

Forget your outrage that taxpayers are underwriting these bonuses and think for a minute.  Panicky legislators tossed barrels of cash at AIG many months ago and our only hope of getting those billions back is to ensure the company is skillfully dismantled by knowledgeable executives. If AIG assets aren’t sold off in an orderly, uninterrupted manner, your government’s investment will become your tax liability.

I know it hurts to say it, but keeping the remaining AIG executives at the company is in your best interest.

Many AIG executives worked for $1 salaries last year with the expectation that they would be compensated with bonuses if they remained at the beleaguered company.  This manner of structuring compensation helped AIG retain qualified employees to dismantle the company.  What we’re calling retention bonuses are essentially deferred salary payments postponed to ensure talent sticks around.

Even if you had the specialized knowledge, would you work for just a dollar a year?  Would you pass up a stable, high paying job at a solvent company out of sheer loyalty to AIG?  And where else should AIG management have looked to find expertise on dissolving these complex financial instruments and assets?  Could we spare the time for training and learning curves?

Unfortunately, the threats have worked and the strong-arming has paid off.   Jake DeSantis, an executive Vice President at AIG Financial Products, published his letter of resignation in the New York Times this week:

After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.

Like most current AIG executives, DeSantis was not responsible for the company’s massive credit default swap losses, but that hasn’t insulated him from the witch hunt conducted by Barney Frank, Andrew Cuomo, and others.  Rather than remain at AIG out of fear, he has elected to leave on his own terms.

News of two more AIG resignations was announced Thursday.   Mauro Gabriel, president and CEO of Banque AIG, and Jim Shephard, deputy CEO are leaving due to the hostile business environment at AIG.  There is some concern that a failure to find replacements could result in hundreds of billions of dollars in derivative contract defaults.

If that happens, good luck attracting qualified talent to help wrap up this AIG mess.

Will the rabble-rousing have been worth it then?  Will that pound of executive flesh fill the coffers at Treasury?  No, but that won’t stop the public hunger for class warfare from continuing to eclipse law, ethics, and even self-interest.