Originally published at: How DOGE’s Cuts To The IRS Threaten To Cost More Than DOGE Will Ever Save
This article was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Dave Nershi was finalizing a report he’d worked on for months when an ominous email appeared in his inbox. Nershi had worked as a general engineer for the Internal Revenue Service for about nine months. He was one of hundreds of specialists inside…
1 Like
That’s the point. It’s not about saving money…
15 Likes
…and tariffs, like sales tax, will push more of the tax burden down to the middle class. If only voters were smart enough to see this.
10 Likes
And guess which President never released his tax returns? Don’t people remember this?
From the Wiki:
During the presidential debates, Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton criticized Trump for not disclosing his tax returns, saying that only “a couple of years” of Trump’s tax returns were publicly available, “and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax.” Trump responded: “That makes me smart.” Clinton went on to suggest that Trump might not have “paid any federal income tax for a lot of years”; Trump responding by saying that the taxes he paid “would be squandered” by the government.[50]
10 Likes
This is certainly true but the knife goes deeper than that; i.e, ‘waste and fraud’ were the smoke screen but this isn’t just a big tax cut for oligarchs (and tax increase for middle class), it includes regime change.
These ideas are not original to Vance or Bannon: In the 21st century, elected leaders such as Hugo Chávez or Viktor Orbán have also used their democratic mandates for the same purpose. Chávez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil company; Orbán dismantled labor protections for the civil service. Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing.
This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose. ...
– Anne Applebaum
11 Likes
such as a certain short-fingered vulgarian
7 Likes
The whole point to all of the Trump agenda is turn America conservative, destroy the left, transfer the wealth from the needy to the greedy, benefit conservative authoritarian enemies of America that help conservatives retain control of the levers of wealth and power and cull America of non-conservatives to free up more resources for conservatives to hoard.
5 Likes
with a hat tip to Graydon Carter!
2 Likes
Of course, the second benefit of this to the fascists, other than enabling wealthy tax cheats, will be to slash social welfare programs, claiming that we just can’t afford them.
10 Likes
This can’t be repeated often enough. It’s always been about giving Musk total control over America. He’ll be blackmailing future governments for years to come.
8 Likes
to make DonOLD a dictator, or President for Life. I really think it’s that simple.
5 Likes
The damage done by this kind of sabotage of the government goes much further than the (it is to be hoped) temporary regime of the felon. For more than a century, people with a strong sense of public obligation have been taking government jobs at salaries lower than they could get in the private sector, in part because they knew that the lower pay would be compensated by the importance of the job they were doing and by the stability of their employment. The dogeboys and their enablers are doing their best to tear down all stability and all sense of public purpose, and that will deter good people from wanting to work for the government even once this disastrous administration is past.
5 Likes
I was hoping this article would have broader scope. The IRS case is sorta obvious. There are many examples of purges that will result in huge costs…like cutting the Forestry Service and the ensuing forest fires or gutting the CDC and the rapidly mushrooming medical costs of the measles epidemic. And those are the ones that I can think of. I want to read about the ones I don’t figure out for myself.
2 Likes
After all these years I still miss SPY* magazine.
*… which always characterized Henry Kissinger as “diminutive war criminal.”
4 Likes
Just another consequence of the great self-castration known as the election of 2024.
1 Like
Lets say the quiet part out loud…unprecedented monumental corruption in the same league as offshore tax shelters…this rigged game is going to end badly at some point soon…death is going to come to some unexpected victims
1 Like