In the coming months, the things that MAGA wants to do regardless of public opinion will become clear. One can reasonably think that MAGA elites will try to do their best to limit news reporting and propagandize MAGA goals and policies that most Americans oppose.
Among the things that MAGA hates are transparency in government and taxes on elites and big corporations. Among the things that MAGA loves are opacity in government and huge amounts of corruption. A key target is the IRS. By gutting funding to the IRS, congressional MAGA elites enable wealthy tax cheats to commit their crimes with impunity. One source writes:
Republican lawmakers have now clawed back half the investment the Biden administration made in the IRS tax agency. Congress revoked an additional $20 billion from the Internal Revenue Service last week when lawmakers averted a government shutdown, a cut that may undo many of President Joe Biden’s efforts to improve customer service at the tax agency and train fresh scrutiny on wealthy tax cheats.
Biden and congressional Democrats gave the IRS $80 billion in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, but Congress rescinded $20 billion as part of a 2023 budget deal. Shortly afterward, Republicans vowed they’d be back for more IRS cuts. When Congress approved a stopgap funding bill, called a continuing resolution, all the existing policy from the previous fiscal year was carried forward unless new text was specifically added to the bill to change it. There was no language in the bill to undo last year’s cut, so it repeated in the new law.
Critics of the IRS were pleased.
Biden administration officials said the additional cuts would add $140 billion to the national debt over the next decade by hamstringing the agency’s ability to audit wealthy individuals and large corporations.
Prominent critics of the IRS are authoritarian, government-hating MAGA ideologues and wealthy tax cheats in the form of rich, powerful human beings and huge, powerful human legal entities called corporations. Once in power, MAGA elites plan to fire independent federal Inspector General positions and replace them with corrupt political loyalists. That opens the entire executive branch to true, full-blown kleptocracy. As it sands now, tax cheats already illegally withhold about $428 billion/year from the IRS by one estimate and according to the IRS (which in my opinion is not trustworthy on this data point). My personal estimate is that the annual festival of tax "theft" amounts to at least ~$1 trillion/year. Whatever the true number is, tax cheating is probably going to experience a "healthy" increase thanks to MAGA's kleptocratic hate of taxes, collecting taxes and enforcing tax laws.
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
Self-reliant pulling up before
boostraps were invented
After backing Trump, low-income voters
hope he doesn’t slash their benefits
NEW CASTLE, Pennsylvania — Lori Mosura goes to the grocery store on a bicycle because she can’t afford to fix her Ford F-150 truck.
The single mother and her 17-year-old son live in an apartment that is so small she sleeps in the dining room. They receive $1,200 each month in food stamps and Social Security benefits but still come up short. Mosura said she often finds herself deciding between buying milk or toilet paper.
It was all that penny-pinching that drove the part-time tax consultant to abandon the Democratic Party this fall and vote for Donald Trump.
“He is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of just the rich,” Mosura, 55, said on a recent afternoon. “I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us.” (and there's the fantasy)
Trump carried the Pennsylvania city of New Castle by about 400 votes, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to win here in nearly 70 years. More than 1 in 4 residents live in poverty, and the median income in this former steel and railroad hub ranks as one of the lowest in Pennsylvania.
New Castle’s poorest residents weren’t alone in putting their faith in Trump. Network exit polls suggest he erased the advantage Democrats had with low-income voters across the country.
Now, low-income Americans who voted for Trump say they are counting on him to keep their benefits intact even while his Cabinet picks and Republican lawmakers call on him to reduce federal spending.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — whom Trump has chosen to lead a new nongovernmental advisory panel, the “Department of Government Efficiency” — have said they want to trim $2 trillion from the government’s annual budget, a cut that some experts say could be accomplished only by slashing entitlement programs.
What can one say in the face of that kind of irrational false belief? It was well-known before the election that (i) DJT and MAGA hate most government domestic spending and they plan to seriously gut social safety net programs, and (ii) DJT's proposed tariffs would very likely significantly increase inflation. Those low-income voters are probably in for a huge, rude surprise. DJT and MAGA could not care less about them. DJT holds them in open contempt. They are probably gonna need to do a bunch of bootstrap pulling in the next couple of years.
MAGA logic
(compassionate conservatism)
