It’s Easter Sunday for those who celebrate it. For Wrongo, it’s the final push to finish our taxes that are due on Monday. This time of year is always a painful reminder that roughly a quarter of the fruits of our labor go to Washington and Hartford. And if you need help? Well, that ship has sailed. The IRS is currently answering only 1 in 5 phone calls.
As Helene Olen says in the WaPo:
“This isn’t incompetence…It’s the result of a…decades-long and mostly successful campaign by…Republicans…to demean and defund the IRS. As a result, the…agency is severely understaffed and working with outdated technology. Which means hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes are uncollected…”
More from Olen:
“Yet many Republicans don’t want to fix it. They are pushing back against President Biden’s plan — part of his Build Back Better agenda — to give the IRS $80 billion over the next decade to improve its operations.”
Also, an interesting fact from the UK’s Financial Times about the inventiveness of the Ukrainian soldiers:
“The Russian attempt to take Kyiv was defeated by a combination of factors including geography, the attackers’ blundering, Ukrainian ingenuity, and modern arms….Moscow’s forces were thwarted, too, by pieces of foam mat — the Ukrainians call them karemats — costing as little as £1.50. The mats prevent Russian thermal imaging drones from detecting human heat “
Apparently the Ukrainian troops held the karemats over their heads, allowing them to move undetected at night, so soldiers armed with anti-tank weapons could sneak up on the Russians, fire their rockets and then slip away. Karemats are used throughout Ukraine and Russia.
An equivalent Pentagon human body heat cloaking system would cost $100k per. On to cartoons.
Is the tax game rigged? You betcha:
Ukraine also sank Russia’s Black Sea flagship, Moskva:
The NRA was joined by Marjorie Taylor Greene in spouting craziness about NYC:
Jared Kushner gets paid for services rendered, and the elephant wants you to look away:
GOP says Right to Choose isn’t limited:
Bunny is accepted while kids are not:
https://www.facebook.com/terry.mckenna.503/posts/7790590307621587
happy easter
To me it’s an enduring mystery, and a source of anger and disgust, why Congress starves the IRS. It’s budget ($11.3 B as of 2019) is just a few % of what the IRS estimates as the gap between what is owed vs. collected: $354 B as of 2007 [sic]. [I draw these stats from en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Revenue_Service.]
Doubling the IRS budget (by, say, $12 B p.a.) seems like the best & most “sure thing” ROI the gov’t can make, if that returns, say, $120 B per year (10 x as much as the IRS budget increase). In addition it reduces the gross inequity that the generally far less wealthy masses who don’t avoid & evade taxes don’t end up “subsidizing” the far wealthier who do. An outrageous reverse Robin Hood situation. To the extent that the “starve or defund the IRS” movement is due to lobbies and Congressmen out to protect and further enrich the already rich, then at least that should be made more transparent to the public. This is a no-brainer cause that I can get behind.