Lawmakers of both parties are desperately trying to stop the Internal Revenue Service from interfering with the most powerful political invention that ever fell into their laps: the use of non-profit groups as a source of unlimited and anonymous campaign money. If you want to understand why, consider an investigation now unfolding in Utah, which exposes in remarkable detail how profoundly the non-profit system can be corrupted for the benefit of a single industry and a single politician.

...

The politician involved was John Swallow, a former lobbyist for an empire of payday-loan and check-cashing companies (the kind of places known for their exploitation of the poor). When Mr. Swallow ran for Utah Attorney General as a Republican in 2012, his strategist established several social-welfare groups, which don’t have to name their donors, so that the payday-loan industry could support him financially without anyone knowing.

Mr. Swallow didn’t want the connection to the industry exposed, because of the poor reputation of the lenders. But he had no problem promising to protect the industry from greater federal regulation if he were elected. The groups collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret donations from the industry, and the money was used to run attack ads against Mr. Swallow’s opponent, who wanted to crack down on payday lenders. The ads worked, and Mr. Swallow was elected.

When the I.R.S. started looking into the non-profit groups and demanding documentation, his strategist changed the group’s records, which investigators described as a falsification. But the I.R.S. investigation was weakened when Congressional Republicans accused the agency (falsely) of singling out conservative non-profit groups. Eventually, a parallel state investigation drove Mr. Swallow from office; he resigned last fall, and last week a state legislative panel accused him of breaching the public trust by hanging “a veritable ‘for sale’ sign on the office door that invited moneyed interests to seek special treatment and favors.”

Ryan's comments, widely percieved as racist, did not hurt the Republican Party, Priebus said. And Priebus went further, defending Ryan as a model for other rich, white, Republican men who may have felt too shy to weigh in on the moral failings of poor people and the hazards of providing them with benefits like unemployment insurance and food stamps.

...

Whether he is voting for job-killing free trade deals that devastate his home town, or opposing the extension of unemployment benefits, school lunches, and food stamps that serve as a lifeline for his hard-hit constituents, Ryan has made his reputation as the brains behind the Republicans' most divisive, live-and-let-die economic policy proposals.

...

The biggest lie in Ryan's poverty report is that federal antipoverty programs actually create poverty. This is an old line of argument, and fits in with Ryan's invocation, in that same controversial radio interview, of Charles Murray, the Bell Curve author who delighted conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s by lending intellectual heft to their political arguments that the poor are lazy, that there may be a genetic explanation for racial inequality, and that heaping shame and punishment on single mothers, including by cutting off their food stamps, might help alleviate poverty by discouraging out-of-wedlock births. The notion that poverty is an attitude problem, and that inequality is perhaps linked to innate, genetic factors, is suddenly popular again, as the staggeringly rich suck up more of our nation's wealth than ever before.

Ryan and other Ayn Rand acolytes in the Republican Party are pressing home their efforts to repeal not just the Great Society and its anti-poverty programs, not just the New Deal safety net, but the Progressive Era itself and the foundational notion that the public must be protected from rapacious corporate greed.

Mary Burke retreats from former statewide voucher support

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke said Tuesday if elected she would eliminate the new statewide voucher program and private school tax deduction in the next budget.

...

In response to a question at a Wispolitics.com luncheon at the Madison Club about what she would cut in the next state budget, Burke went further, calling statewide vouchers “a new entitlement program we frankly don’t need.” She also identified the private school tax deduction as something she would cut. Note that she isn’t interested in rolling back anything in Racine and Milwaukee.

Burke said she does not support ending the Milwaukee voucher program, which was created in 1990 and has expanded to more than 25,000 students. Her spokesman also clarified that she would not cut the Racine program, which Walker and the Legislature created in 2011.

This is a major departure from where Burke stood in October of 2013. Back then Jud Lounsbury wrote, “…when Mary Burke finally made a promise and told the Wisconsin State Journal that, although she opposed Walker’s statewide expansion of vouchers, she nonetheless would do nothing to remove the statewide voucher program, jaws dropped throughout Wisconsin’s progressive community.”