Sherry Chandler

Privatizing absolutely everything is not always a good idea. From the NYT:

Within two weeks, the I.R.S. will turn over data on 12,500 taxpayers — each of whom owes $25,000 or less in back taxes — to three collection agencies. Larger debtors will continue to be pursued by I.R.S. officers.

The move, an initiative of the Bush administration, represents the first step in a broader plan to outsource the collection of smaller tax debts to private companies over time. Although I.R.S. officials acknowledge that this will be much more expensive than doing it internally, they say that Congress has forced their hand by refusing to let them hire more revenue officers, who could pull in a lot of easy-to-collect money.

The private debt collection program is expected to bring in $1.4 billion over 10 years, with the collection agencies keeping about $330 million of that, or 22 to 24 cents on the dollar.

By hiring more revenue officers, the I.R.S. could collect more than $9 billion each year and spend only $296 million — or about three cents on the dollar — to do so, Charles O. Rossotti, the computer systems entrepreneur who was commissioner from 1997 to 2002, told Congress four years ago.

…

Under federal budget rules, money spent to hire tax collectors is treated as a discretionary expense, and Congress is cutting discretionary spending. In business terms, the rules treat the I.R.S. as a cost center, not as the government’s profit center.

The private debt-collection program, however, is outside the budget rules because, except for the start-up costs, the collectors are to be paid from the proceeds.

This amounts to taxpayers paying more money in order to be abused by collection agencies so that the government can collect less money but collection agencies get a big profit. Does that make sense?

It’s like our current bankruptcy laws that allow credit card companies to continue their predatory lending and then punish consumers for taking the bait. Double whammy. Catch 22.

For some notion of how collection agencies work, I suggest you check out the series Debtor’s Hell at the Boston Globe. It ain’t pretty.

This week Günter Grass, Nobel laureate and originator of the phrase “What did you do in the war, Daddy?”, revealed that he had been drafted into the Nazi war machine. Only it was not just Hitler Youth (as he had always claimed), it was Waffen SS. He was 17, and like the Pope, didn’t have a lot of choice. Grass though kept his service a deep secret while he became a holy man of the Left as the Pope became a holy man of the Right. It is Grass’s hypocrisy that is creating the outrage:

The reaction in Germany to this admission has been one of disbelief and indignation: not that a teenager should have been recruited into the Waffen SS as Hitler struggled to avoid defeat, but that the country’s most prominent writer should have hidden this while hectoring others for their political and social sins from the comfort of the moral high ground.

Some even go so far as to suggest that Mr. Grass made this revelation to sell copies of his new memoir, Peeling the Onion. If so, he seems to have succeeded.

The outrage is mostly on the right as outrage about the Pope was mostly on the left. Maybe we should call it a draw?

Two other observations come to mind. William Faulkner’s “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” And Dylan’s from “My Back Pages,” “Fearing not that I’d become my enemy in the instant that I preach.”

The NYT offers a couple of ruminations on that event today: A Prisoner of the Nobel by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin and The Fictions of Günter Grass by Peter Gay.

Mr. Grass himself has said:

“…I worked on the book for three years, and everything I have to say on the subject is in it. Whoever wants to judge me may judge me.”

Flints’ Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and horny talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like; — so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that he had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him, — him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed all the shore; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow, — there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes, — and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where every thing has its price; who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get any thing for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars.

— Henry David Thoreau, from Walden, chapter entitled “The Ponds”