THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Jesse Jackson's education fund took in twelve million dollars and only spent forty-seven THOUSAND of it on education. Maybe he cheated, do you think?

O'Reilly of Fox Cable News Network's "O'Reilly Factor" is demanding that Jackson's tax-deductible groups be investigated.

A tax DEDUCTIBLE organization is very different from a "tax-exempt organization." A tax-exempt organization is one that pays no corporate income tax. General Motors is a taxed corporation because General Motors is in business, it makes profits, and it pays corporate taxes on those corporate earnings.

The Democratic Party is a tax-exempt organization. The Democratic Party pays no corporate income taxes.

People often use the word "tax exempt" when they mean tax deductible. But if you give money to the Democratic Party, you can't deduct

that money from your income taxes. A tax-deductible organization is a church or charity given that status by the Internal Revenue Service.

If you want people's gifts to your organization to be tax deductible, you have to jump through a lot of hoops. The application is complex, and there are rigid rules about how your money can be spent.

Unless you're a liberal group, of course.

As you probably know, Jackson admitted to fathering a baby with his mistress, who worked for one of his tax-deductible organizations.

She got over forty thousand dollars in moving expenses and an undisclosed salary out of it. O'Reilly says that's a lot of moving expenses. He says Jackson has had his troubles with IRS before.

Tax-deductible organizations are supposed to be purely charitable or educational. They are strictly forbidden from engaging in political advocacy.

Unless they're liberal.

Since part of the money they are spending is tax money, everything about a tax-deductible outfit is supposed to be a matter of public record.

O'Reilly can't get any answers out of Jackson.

What a surprise, eh?

With all this, the IRS has not looked at Jackson's organizations in twelve years. O'Reilly says he is shocked by this.

Surely he is not that naïve.

A North Carolina Republican congressman was invited onto O'Reilley's show because he was the only congressman with the courage to ask for an investigation. But he was very frank about the prospects. He said Congress simply didn't have the stomach -- the guts -- to do anything of the sort.

We all know what happened to Jim Bakker, and we all know what would happen to Jerry Falwell if he did what Jackson has done. You may be sure the IRS looks at Falwell regularly, and any discrepancy would have been big news long ago.

Nobody ever demands that the political left obey any rules insofar as tax deductibility or even outright government grants is concerned.

All of our publicly financed universities are openly liberal seminaries, dedicated to propagating leftist ideology with student fees and in the classrooms. They are the origin and bulwark of Political Correctness.

National Public Radio and Public Television are unapologetically dedicated to leftist propaganda. Propaganda is strictly forbidden for tax deductible organizations and for organizations receiving public funds. But absolutely nobody takes that seriously in the case of liberal propaganda.

Ralph Nader will raise Cain about the relatively small sums given to Republicans by corporations. But that money is counted in millions. Nader will NEVER complain about the billions of dollars in PUBLIC money that liberals use to push their agenda and hire more liberals.

Certainly no one will accuse the federally financed Legal Services Corporation of ever taking a conservative case, or of ever turning down a fashionable leftist one.

Like the USSR during the Cold War, our enemies could not survive without our help. If it were not for government programs and tax-deductible organizations, most of the people on the left wouldn't have jobs.

But it will be a long cold day in the Bad Place before any conservative legislator dares raise the slightest protest to any of this.

At universities and in my time on the House Education and Labor Committee staff, I became accustomed to the simple fact that leftists rightly regard public money as their own. They never hesitate to use it freely to promote their ideology and to pay for their public jobs. They use public money to lobby for more public money. That is a good part of what the left is all about.

There is nothing Jesse Jackson is doing with millions that is any more flagrant than what the whole left is doing with billions of dollars and the special access we give them to our young people.

Jesse is not as smart about misusing tax-deductible money and federal grant money as are the other liberals, but he is no more blatant.

If we went after the leftists who pick our pockets, the left would collapse. You may be sure that no respectable conservative will even mention doing such a thing.