The hue and cry that applications for nonprofit status from conservative political groups may have received extra scrutiny from the IRS is obscuring the real scandal: political groups masquerading as nonprofits to avoid having to disclose their donors. Here's an excerpt from a PRWatch.org story from February 2012:

501(c)(4) non-profits are limited in how much they can participate in electoral or partisan politics. According to the IRS, "political intervention" cannot be their "primary activity," which has been construed to mean that no more than half of their staff time or financial resources can be directed towards political endeavors (depending on how they report to the IRS).

The IRS rules on what constitutes "political intervention" are murky and rarely enforced, and groups like [Karl Rove's] GPS have been involved in a significant amount of activities that would reasonably be considered "political."

Noting that academic studies that "supposedly justified austerity" had recently lost some credibility, Paul Krugman observes:

Families earn what they can, and spend as much as they think prudent; spending and earning opportunities are two different things. In the economy as a whole, however, income and spending are interdependent: my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. If both of us slash spending at the same time, both of our incomes will fall too.

Public enterprise consultant Mark Green has a neat compendium of charts and statistics that show in factual detail how Republican economic policies and talking points are nonsense.

In his recent column "The Dwindling Deficit", Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman criticizes the disproportionate focus in Washington and the media on the federal budget deficit.

... [Y]ou’re actually supposed to run deficits in a depressed economy to help support overall demand.

This article appeared originally in the Dutch journal Volkskrant. Translation by The Dubya Report

Mitt Romney's tax loopholes also run through the Netherlands. The private equity fund Bain Capital, in which the presidential candidate participates, may have hidden some 80 million euros in dividends by routing them through the Netherlands.

The NY Times is reporting that the Congressional Research Service (CRS) — Congress's nonpartisan research arm — found "no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth," contradicting what the Times terms "a central tenet of conservative economic theory." The CRS withdrew the report, however, "after Senate Republicans raised concerns about the paper’s findings and wording."