This is largely because the IRS has to send out refunds as quickly as possible. It does some checks that can be automatic quite quickly (for example you can't send in a return with wrong W2 or SSN information because the Social Security database is quite good), but other info simply can't be checked in any reasonable time-frame.

For example a lot of people have businesses that aren't big enough to require full-scale accounting services. Their income is fully taxable, but the IRS has no idea which bank account is used for the business, or even if a bank account is used for the business at all. I know a nanny in NYC. Her business is a purely cash affair, she's got no bank account, and she doesn't keep very good records; so how the fuck could the IRS verify whether her income is $15k or $50k?

Which means they can either take her at her word (which is almost certainly wrong, because she doesn't know what the real numbers are, even tho she isn't actually trying to cheat them), and send her check or they can delay her check and send an accountant to grill her for a few hours. Since they don't have the budget for the accountant, they go with the first option.

Which means that if I have a scam filing fake returns I can file a whole lot of the damn things before the real people involved notice their name/SSN has already been used and the IRS realizes there's a fucking problem. It's very hard to get away with this for more then a year or two because the IRS knows exactly which house got the damn check for that guy, but until I get caught I can have a lotta fun.

BTW, combating this was part of the reason the IRS tried to make all paid tax preparers take an official exam last year. Professional tax preparers (like me IRL) are unlikely to file 80 returns for the same scammer because we know that the IRS will get our asses eventually, OTOH some dude who took a class and now has a business opening up accounts on Turbotax for all his buddies is not likely to deal with the poor schmuck who tried to stiff the IRS of $15k 7 years ago and didn't realize he'd been caught until 2/3 of his pay check disappeared. The Courts ruled the IRS did not have the statutory authority to do this.

Note that all these problems are actually Congress's fault, because it's Congress that decided sending the nanny a check was preferable to sending her an accountant; and it's Congress that wrote the statute that did not allow the IRS to force people to take the Tax Professional exam.

The laws are complicated as hell, but very few individual returns are terribly complicated. The ones that are complicated tend to be the same complicated year after year, so if they get audited once and an IRS agent sits down with the paperwork and verifies it's all cool in 2007 then nobody human needs to look at it for a decade or two.

OTOH we have checks and balances, a small-c-conservative form of government, and a Legislature where every legislator has a lot of power. That means that if in 1975 Congressman Dingell decides to help retirees he can probably get that done, but only if he helps a limited number of retirees (because helping a lot would be expensive). So some department gets a tweak boosting their pensions. If in 1995 Congressman Souder decides Federal pensions are a too expensive then he can probably do something about that, but (again) only by gently tweaking the rules for a small number of retirees.

And since the only guy with the power to force the system to be rational is the President himself, and the President himself generally has a bigger vision then rationalizing Federal retirement benefits, it all ends up crazier then the tax system.

At least with the tax system the Congressman who invented the 1040EZ can boast about doing something most people actually liked.

Privacy rights in US Federal law basically boil down to how much the Court is willing to BS itself because the Constitution doesn't have an Amendment directly (and clearly) intended to address the issue. This is largely because when those Amendments were written in the 1790s privacy rights weren't something that governments had figured out how to abuse, and since then the Courts have managed to stretch other Amendments to cover a lot of the gap. The Fourth is usually mentioned, but all it explicitly bans are "unreasonable searches" without warrants. The Third is almost never referred to in US law. States can be better, but they can also be worse.

The bill I'm talking about, and I thought you were talking about, is the Posse Comitatus Act. It is intended to stop the Army from enforcing US Laws. This sounds really good on paper, because who would want that? But in practice it was basically a response to the post-Civil War Republicans attempts to force the South to treat black people like people. The local authorities did not want to treat black people like people, so they resisted, and eventually they were able to a) get the troops withdrawn, and b) get a law saying that the Army could only be used in aiding law enforcement under certain very strict conditions. One of those conditions is "if the Governor asks for it." And if South Carolina has decided to join the system then it follows the Governor (or one of his lawfully appointed representatives) asked for that shit.

Note that the Posse Comitatus Act is a perfect example of why it's very complicated to protect freedom in the US. Keeping the big bad Army from arresting people sounds like a pro-freedom position, but IRL the Act's major effect was to show everyone that Reconstruction was truly over, and Southern states could no longer be forced to treat black people like people.

And which Constitutional clause says the government can't retain data?

The Fourth stops certain kinds of searches, but has nothing to do with retention. "Search" in legal terms only applies to things that aren't public, so if the Navy is compiling publicly available police reports the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply.

As for their limited police powers, the limit is they can't be local/state cops unless the local cops ask for help using a set procedure. If the local cops query the Navy database then they are (by definition) asking for help. They actually can't be totally limited from law enforcement because they have Constitutional authority over their personnel and their military bases.

The bill reads like it's a lot more, but (like pretty much all broad-sounding limits on US Law Enforcement), it includes multiple innocuous-sounding "buts" that make it useless to protect anybody who isn't running a private militia enforcing white supremacy with the connivance of the local government.

You're exaggerating the social conservatism of black pols. In the 43-strong black caucus there are three people who oppose gay marriage. As you get down to a more local level social conservatism gets stronger. It's probably exaggerated in Mississippi because the only way to get anything done is to get buy-in from extremely socially conservative whites, which means that a black pol who gets things done in the statehouse has to pander to them. Black pols in a more normal situation (ie: New York State) tend to be on the cutting edge of the gay rights movement because they need to build coalitions with secular white people.

You're closer on the number then I thought (it's 37.3% black, and I thought it was about a third), but Mississippi is a bit of an insane example. They keep their elections from being a lot closer by having an extremely high incarceration rate, particularly for blacks, and making it virtually impossible to regain your right to vote after being imprisoned. Everybody else is 25-30% or so black, and a 10-15% gain in the black population nets to about 8 points for Democrats, which makes most southern states go from impossible wins to Ohio.

It's not that surprising. All the states involved are coastal states except New Mexico. The Counties shaded dark blue are almost all in areas with a lot of Naval activity (ie: SoCal includes San Diego). A lot of very red states don't even have a County participating. Wyoming, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma aren't in it.

My best guess is that in 1952 some low-level Federal Agent in a jurisdiction where drunk driving was a fine squished some lady, the media found out he'd kept his job despite multiple tickets, and there was a massive controversy in which several of his bossed were Named in the Paper (the Civil Servants motto: "Don't get your name in the Paper.") and now they're paranoid it'll happen again.

Police reports are public record. They have to be, otherwise journalists could never find out whether the young man bitching he's being unfairly targeted because he's black is actually being targeted because he's black.

The government is not a business. It has different rights then businesses. For example, a business can get away with all kinds of discrimination that a governmental unit could not -- prayer at meetings, mandatory hours on Saturday, etc. The government can't do those things. OTOH the government can arrest you as long as they file the right paperwork (mostly warrants).

Which means that unless there's a specific Constitutional clause, or Congressional statute on data retention in play here the Navy can keep whatever data it wants.

It probably should have some statute restricting the time it keeps info on some of this stuff, but if that law hasn't already been passed then it isn't currently in effect.

That's designed into the system.

The theory is that the Executive will always be nibbling at Congressional authority, and Congress will always be nibbling at the President's authority. Nobody ever gets all the authority, therefore freedom is protected.

If Congress wants to make a huge deal about something it can by either a) refusing to fund the government, or b) impeaching him. If Obama wants to make a huge deal about something he can veto budget bills. Since they don't do that the Courts can't really intervene very much.

One of the better features of the system is that it allows the amount of authority the various players has to change based on the situation. Clearly during the middle of WW2 Congress should have given up a lot of it's power to the Executive because FDR was kinda busy. Equally clearly during the mid-90s Clinton didn't need that kind of authority. If the Courts were wont to intervene in Executive/Legislative disputes then WW2 would probably have died in Committee.

Separation of Powers can't mean separation of authority if the Power-holding-entities are also supposed to check and balance each-other. If the President had clear, 100% control of everything the military did and Congress had clear 100% control of everything the Department of the Interior did then they couldn't check each-other. Obama would be Army-King ant give a shit about Interior, and vice-versa. This leads to an extremely intricate, complicated, procedure up-top for doing everything because everyone has to be involved at some step in the operation. It requires a lot of intricate dancing between the various entities concerned to keep running, and a certain amount of legal bullshittery that can only be described as "hacking."

The National Guard is actually the perfect example. The Feds needed the state militias to all have the same equipment, training, etc. or they wouldn't be able to fight effectively as Army units; and Constitutionally they are supposed to be most of the Army. So in the early 20th the Feds started paying for the damn things on condition that they could use militia units whenever they felt like it. But the courts ruled that was wrong. If Sergeant Bob (Kentucky militia) does not want to help flood victims in Ohio then the President can't make him leave Kentucky.

So now all National Guard units are technically both the militias of their state AND Federal employees. If the Feds need Sergeant Bob of Kentucky to do something Sg. Bob (US Army) gets orders. If Kentucky needs him Sg. Bob (KY Militia) gets orders. Bob has two retirement plans based on State and Federal Active Duty days. Many states actually have a non-Federal component to their militias which is unarmed (states are too cheap to pay for insurance in case somebody gets accidentally shot at training, so they generally can't even bring their own personally-owned firearms to drill days), such as the Ohio Military Reserve or the Texas State Guard.

As for "lending" assets, that's perfectly legal. There's an exception to Posse Comitatus if the local cops ask for help in writing. It is actually intended to stop the US Army from coming in and forcing a state to prosecute crimes the state doesn't want to prosecute, not to allow an individual to escape prosecution by said state just because he's found a state that can't track his ass down without the Army's help. Specifically the law was intended to allow racist white southern states to oppress their black residents without fear of US Army retaliation, and since it can be made to sound like a very sensible limit on Federal power it has remained.

Finally somebody who has actually understood the law.

Now if only somebody else on this thread, anybody else, would pay attention to the "abuses" it was supposed to stop and acknowledge that, in practical terms, this is the law that legitimized the greatest evil the American government has ever perpetrated on it's citizens I'll be very happy.

So the agency that we use to fight terrorists is never allowed to fight terrorists? You just contr5adicted yourself.

The problem is that, while you have read plenty of interpretation of the Act by gun-nuts, and may even have read the Act itself, you don't understand what it means. It means the Federal military can't use it's troops to enforce local laws without the permission of local authorities.
In particular you do not know what a "posse comitatus" is, and you seem to think that the phrase "search, seizure, arrest, or similar activity" applies to databases of publicly available information. A posse comitatus is a bunch of guys who have legal authority to enforce the law. A database has nothing to do with posses. The "search, etc." clause could apply to data gathering, but it only applies to gathering the kind of data you need a Fourth-Amendment-type warrant to get. It doe3s not apply to publicly available records. So the Navy has every right to view these records, which means it has every right to record those records, and it has every right to tell people about those records.

Now let's say your dreams comes true, and the judges who have granted warrants allowing big-data-databases change their minds. Posse comitatus still doesn't apply because the military is allowed to help law enforcement if asked by the right guy (generally a Mayor, Governor, or his designees), and anyone searching the database on behalf of law enforcement would count.

WTF? This is so wrong on so many levels that I can't believe it.

Number one, the Posse Comitatus Act is the reason we had Jim Crow. In 1876 local gun-owners throughout the South want'd to lynch their way to segregation but the Federal goddamn Army refused to let them. Between the passage of this Act, and Eisenhower sending the Federal goddamn Army into Little Rock Schools racist terrorists managed to drive the black population of every southern state down by 10 points. In several it was more like 30. South Carolina and Mississippi, for example, were roughly 60% black prior to Posse Comitatus. The Confederacy as a whole had been 40% black. If it was 40% black today no Conservative candidate would ever win. The whole incident is by far the most evil thing the US has ever done to it's citizens, and you are implying it is actually useful in protecting freedom.

Number two, it has nothing to do with the Feds ability to compile information. It stops the Army from enforcing local laws. But a) that doesn't mean they can't compile info on whose been breaking said laws, and b) it doesn't apply if the Executive authority of the local jurisdiction asks for help. So if an officer of the Mayor, for example a Police Officer, walks up to a Federal soldier and says "please tell me everything you know about the bad things this person has done," the under the Posse Comitatus Act the soldier has every right to comply. This was quite effective in ethnically cleansing the South because a) southerners could typically arrange it so that a Mayor/cop/etc. who would ask the Feds for help was no longer Mayor/cop/etc. (in Arkansas there was actually a coup d'tat against the Governor), and b) it showed all Army officers that stopping racist oppression was a bad career move.

You hadn't heard that comparison before?

All the intellectual conservative activists were throwing that analogy around 8-10 years ago when Bush was trying to privatize the system. It was just accurate enough that no amount of ridicule would get them off it, but not accurate enough to convince the House to take up the Bill. See the thing about privatizing Social Security is that all the current tax revenue is used to pay for benefits, which means that if you want to put social security money into people's private accounts you have to raise taxes or cut benefits. And the only thing the grand old white people's party hates more then raising taxes is cutting benefits for retirees.