It's amazing to me how gullible people are. Don't they see they're being used as political tools to serve the agendas of various strains of republicans? Why would anyone want to be someone's tool?
Ron Paul, who exacerbated this rumor of armed agents enforcing health insurance laws, makes some good points occasionally, but too often he lets his extremism off the leash. Armed agents coming after you because you don't have health insurance--Really? See the fact check below.
Isn't that just fear mongering to get your way? What irks me is that some people know the truth and yet they manipulate it for their own benefit.
The problem is fear mongering works, especially on older people.
This rumor is just like other rumors we've heard, Obama was born in Kenya, Obama chowed down on lobsters in Montana, and the latest says Obama isn't allowing Catholic or private school kids into the Easter Egg Roll on April 5. Yet, people believe it without questioning. The facts are that 3,000 free tickets were given to DC school districts. Children from other schools could've gotten free tickets--27,000 were given away-- through the lottery system, which has always been in place, though starting last year, the White House put the system online instead of making people wait in line outside.
The argument could be made that those 3,000 tickets should've been available to all kids, but that's not what the rightwing is saying. They're saying Obama is banning them outright.
And now for the silly little rumor that IRS agents are going to be armed and dangerous:
Q: Will the IRS hire 16,500 new agents to enforce the health care law?
A: No. The law requires the IRS mostly to hand out tax credits, not collect penalties. The claim of 16,500 new agents stems from a partisan analysis based on guesswork and false assumptions, and compounded by outright misrepresentation.
FULL QUESTION
Can you explain if … the IRS will hire 16,500 new agents and spend $10 billion/year to audit who has [health care] coverage. I can not find any coverage that is not from the right on this … and I have been searching for a while. Thank you.
Hello,
I’d like to request a fact check on Ron Paul’s claim regarding the enforcement of the health insurance mandate, "16,500 ARMED bureaucrats coming to make this program work." at 3:53 of this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0lA6XCt3gM
I did a google search for "16,500" and there were a lot of hits on conservative websites stating something along the lines that the health care bill sets aside $10 billion for the IRS to hire up to 16,500 agents to enforce the mandate, but ARMED agents are another matter. Anyway, I couldn’t find anything about this from the national news outlets, so I’m just curious if this is just a scare tactic.
FULL ANSWER
This wildly inaccurate claim started as an inflated, partisan assertion that 16,500 new IRS employees might be required to administer the new law. That devolved quickly into a claim, made by some Republican lawmakers, that 16,500 IRS "agents" would be required. Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas even claimed in a televised interview that all 16,500 would be carrying guns. None of those claims is true. Read the rest at FactCheck
