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Transcription of interview with Dan Gainor on July 1, 2013.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP�, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
Dan Gainor is the director of the Business and Media Institute which is a free market
think tank.
Douglas Goldstein, financial planner & investment advisor, interviewed Gainor on Arutz Sheva
Radio.
Douglas Goldstein: You�ve been talking a lot about what would appear to be a quite
big controversy about the IRS targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny. Could you give
us the big picture about what is going on?
Dan Gainor: The big picture is we�ve had a series of scandals happened lately that
are dogging the Obama administration but one of the first that really set this up apart
was this report that allegedly only a couple of IRS employees and we�ve gone beyond that
they were digging in to or limiting the ability for conservative non-profits to become formal
non-profits. They were holding up their applications. They were asking too many questions. They
were saying things that were inappropriate. The scandal has gone far beyond that at this
point. The IRS itself is investigating to at least 88 employees, widely acknowledged
that they were targeting conservative groups, acknowledged even by the Obama administration.
The situation here with the Tea Party, some of them were targeted literally and took them
so long to get their applications so they gave up trying. Some other conservative groups
were asked inappropriate questions. One conservative media tracking organization applied under
its name, I think a year and a half later gave up applied under some touchy-feely left
wing name and got approved in like a week or two.
Douglas Goldstein: One of the things that I think a lot of the organizations that have
been rejected are trying to say is that the Obama administration itself is behind this.
Is that really true or is it simply that there were some people in the IRS who were not being
fair?
Dan Gainor: I don�t think anybody knows yet. If you go back to some of the great scandals
in history, one right now people were just looking at for a lot of things is Watergate.
Watergate started as a minor crime story and it took a long time to develop. What we know
is that almost everything the IRS has told us about the scandal has been a flat and underline
that�s been proved to not just be a scandal of two employees in the Cincinnati office
of the IRS. It has been proven to be employees in the different offices around the country.
Some higher-ups knew about it. The top level people knew about it. Hundreds of times when
you�re telling congress in some way former fashion that conservative groups have not
been targeted, in fact they knew all long conservative groups had been. To say, I trust
anything coming out of the PR office of the IRS, at this point, I don�t and I don�t
think anybody does.
Douglas Goldstein: Is this an important topic in terms of the average American citizen who
is not out there applying for 501(c)(3) status?
Dan Gainor: The idea that you can use the visions of the government to target American
citizens is scary. It is one of the impeachment points against Richard Nixon. It is something
that scares even media people, but putting context is as special as scary. Here we are
in a situation where we find out not only has our government been investigating journalists,
but they have also been monitoring the phone calls
in various ways of Americans to the point where you put all these scandals together,
that creates a very scary touch of it. People who are supportive of government security
like I am are bothered by some of the things our government is doing.
Douglas Goldstein: Is that the same as right-wing groups being targeted
by the IRS to not get 501(c)(3) status?
Dan Gainor: When you know that one of division of the government is actively targeting people
based on political beliefs to look at another division of government and seeing that they
have sweeping power to monitor everything you ever do online, your phone calls, maybe
even your credit card purchases, your TV watching, your email, that is the kind of the stuff
that secret police units dream about, that�s kind of stuff that the KGB used to do and
that�s kind of stuff [inaudible 00:06:22] used to do where they can do any profile on
you if they want detail in all of your friends, all of your contacts, emails you send them,
things you say, personal problems you�re having, work [problems], what you say about
your friends etcetera. That�s daunted.
Douglas Goldstein: It appears that George Soros is also somehow connected to this IRS
controversy. Could you explain how that is?
Dan Gainor: It�s not even just somehow, it�s pretty prominently. When you go back
to the origin of how this happened, what were the touch points, who encouraged the IRS to
do this? It was sort of a gentle push by a left wing think tanks and some left wing kind
of quasi-journalism organizations, non-profits and a host of them that supported this are
of course Soros-funded non-profits. One of the most prominent of those is ProPublica
which is a Pulitzer Prize winner journalism non-profit founded by left-wing pro-democrat
money The Sandler Foundation and also funded by George Soros. They were working on an investigation
back in 2012 just as this IRS scandal was heating up and they were pushing the IRS to
investigate conservative non-profits. They did two investigative stories about the issue.
The first one detailed information about two right leaning political non-profits 501(c)(4).
The next one mentioned 15 non-profits 501(c)(4), 14 right-leaning, one left-wing.
Douglas Goldstein: What if we just wipe the whole thing out?
Dan Gainor: The problem with wiping it out, when you wipe out non-profit status and you
get rid of the non-profit status for religious organizations etcetera, I don�t know who
said it but the quote is �The power to tax is the power to destroy.� We�ve got things
written in our constitution that says �Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, freedom of the press etcetera when you create non-profits. If government
can tax those, it can tax amount of existence. It can create a new tax regiment that says
this type of group just as it does right now, certain businesses might get taxed but certain
businesses don�t. You could say religious groups pay higher taxes and we don�t like
that so we�re going to make sure they pay 95% taxes.
Douglas Goldstein: How about the donations? If someone wants to donate to the Church Of
Scientology, why should they get the ability to write that donation off in the same way
that he personally get if he donated to his local synagogue or church?
Dan Gainor: I actually think they can in the case of Church Of Scientology, but when you
get into an issue by not giving it to them then the government really is picking and
choosing much like Germany has gone with scientology. German has gone on sort of a crusade against
the Church Of Scientology.
Douglas Goldstein: In the United States, this concept of separating, just separated. Otherwise,
there�s always going to be special interest groups fighting and this type of problem is
going to come up over and over again because someone�s got to decide who deserves the
501(c)(3).
Dan Gainor: But once you start taxing then you�re intruding the freedom of religion,
once you�re taxing people�s ability to donate to churches. There is a push though
to do this. Both locally and nationally, a lot of local jurisdictions have developed
procedures with different non-profits where in the non-profits make contributions
to the local governments in lieu of taxes. That�s a big issue. I think there�s a
lot up here particularly among conservative religious groups, both Jewish and Christian,
any group that they might be targeted, one the government gets involved in taxing those
contributions, they might be targeted for.
Douglas Goldstein: There are these political action committees like the ones you�re pointing
out are being discriminated against. On either side of the spectrum, why should they be exempted
in taxes?
Dan Gainor: One of the issues you get into there is the result of the 501(c)(4) is a
very important ruling where government was limiting speech. It�s called the Citizens
United Ruling so government was saying you couldn�t do certain things. The issue was
produced a movie involving somebody who was running for office because they said they
had violated election law. That got overturned and all these non-profits resulting from that.
I�m pretty sure there�s probably going to be further legislation and further purchases
sorting all these out. I have no problem with saying that political non-profits, that category
would go away as long as the freedom to spend that money doesn�t go away. That�s the
key point. I don�t think government has any right to tell me that I can�t produce
a book, a movie, a web video or whatever close to an election that has a point of view.
Douglas Goldstein: As libertarian, I would think that you would think that as much as
possible the government should be out of people�s personal lives and shouldn�t get prevented
to donate money to political parties.
Dan Gainor: They weren�t out of people�s lives. In fact, the government with the McCain-Feingold
legislation, the government really enacted kind of election speech codes. You weren�t
allowed to do certain things prior to an election that [amended] the free speech. I have no
problem with the non-profit status of these organizations going away as long as the free
speech element does not and that�s what had gone away under this election legislation.
Douglas Goldstein: Can you tell us how can people follow your work?
Dan Gainor: They can check me on couple of places. Newsbusters.org is our organization
blog. I also write a bunch for www.foxnews.com.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP�, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host
of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show (Monday nights at 7:00 PM on www.israelnationalradio.com.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S. and Israel. Securities offered
through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA, SIFMA. Accounts carried
by National Financial Services LLC. Member NYSE/SIPC, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered
at: www.profile-financial.com (02) 624-2788 or (03) 524-0942.
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