News bits: The high cost of cost cuts; MAGA’s authoritarianism on display; MAGA poisons inconvenient history

CBS News reports: “DOGE says it has saved $160 billion. Those cuts have cost taxpayers $135 billion, one analysis says. -- The analysis seeks to tally the costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers and lost productivity, according to the Partnership for Public Service (PSP), a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on the federal workforce. PSP's estimate is based on the $270 billion in annual compensation costs for the federal workforce, calculating the impact of DOGE's actions, from paid leave to productivity hits.”

The article points out that the PSP estimate does not include expenses for defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE's actions, or the impact of estimated lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS. Also important, the IRS is planning on cutting roughly 40% of its workforce. That would cost the treasury about $323 billion in tax revenue over the next decade (~$32.3 billion/year) due to lower tax compliance and a decline in audits. That data is according to an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab.

My guess is that in the short and long term, DOGE’s alleged cuts are going to cost more than they save. The whole MAGA waste, fraud and abuse narrative is a cynical lie. The effort disguises MAGA’s real intent, i.e., take wealth, power and protections from the people and public interest and give all of that power and wealth to unrestrained (de-regulated and untaxed) MAGA elites and all kinds of tax cheats, elite and otherwise. The annual tax gap is running at about $700 billion/year according to official estimates, about $1.1 trillion by my estimate. For 2025, the top 40% of income earners are estimated to underpay about $660 billion in taxes according to Yale’s analysis.   

Tax cheating by income level

High income earners are the biggest tax cheaters by far

P0-10 - bottom 10% of income earners

P10-20 - 10-20% of income earners

P99.5-100 - top 0.5% of income earners

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Talking Points Memo reports about a lawsuit that MAGA elites have filed in an effort to gain a lot more power over federal courts: “Close allies of President Trump are asking a judge to give the White House control over much of the federal court system. In a little-noticed lawsuit filed last week, the America First Legal Foundation sued Chief Justice John Roberts and the head of the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts. The case ostensibly proceeds as a FOIA lawsuit, with the Trump-aligned group seeking access to judiciary records. But, in doing so, it asks the courts to cede massive power to the White House: the bodies that make court policy and manage the judiciary’s day-to-day operations should be considered independent agencies of the executive branch, the suit argues, giving the President, under the conservative legal movement’s theories, the power to appoint and dismiss people in key roles.” 

The 1st paragraph of the MAGA lawsuit:

For several years, the media and enterprising lawmakers have launched an onslaught to destroy the impartiality and political neutrality of Article III courts and, particularly, the Supreme Court. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh have all faced political and physical threats because of the politicization and weaponization of the law. This lawfare has been led by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Hank Johnson, relying upon an ideologically favorable legacy media, to falsely accuse Justices Thomas and Alito of ethical improprieties. Their aim was simple: to chill the judicial independence of these Supreme Court Justices. 

Every sentence in that cynical screed is an insulting, outrageous lie. Whitehouse and Johnson aimed to reduce corruption of the USSC, not to chill the judicial independence of any judge. MAGA judges on the USSC just cannot tolerate ethics rules, which usually have nothing to do with judge independence. Threats against USSC judges have nothing to do with anything that Whitehouse or Johnson said or did. Public backlash against some MAGA judges is because some of the public is pissed off about decisions like Dobbs, which took away abortion rights. MSM reporting has been investigative journalism based on evidence, not allegedly partisan attacks for no reason. The evidence the MSM reported included improperly undisclosed gifts, flight records, tax documents, and insider accounts of USSC judge sleaze and corruption.

FWIW, if anything, the TPM article says that MAGA’s effort to corrupt the federal courts is very likely going to fail. Regardless of how it turns out, this is just more solid evidence of the staunchly authoritarian and completely kleptocratic intent of MAGA’s wealth and power agenda, which is deeply anti-democracy, anti-rule of law and anti-civil liberties.  

I will file a complaint with the D.C. bar asking disbarment of the two attorneys who filed this deepl unethical lawsuit, William Scolinos (DC Bar No. 90023488) and Daniel Epstein (DC Bar No. 1009132). D.C. bar will probably ignore me, but so what? 

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The Independent newspaper reports more evidence that MAGA elites intend to rewrite history to fit the mountain of lies that its extremist authoritarian ideology is based on: “Oklahoma wants to teach kids Trump’s false version of the 2020 election where he was cheated out of victory -- The Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters, announced a new education policy for the state on Thursday, which includes the allegation that there were “discrepancies” in the 2020 election, which President Donald Trump baselessly claims was stolen from him. The new academic standards for social studies for the coming school year state that students should ‘identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellweather county’ trends.’”

This is not new. For years, djt and MAGA elites have been very clear that (i) inconvenient history is unacceptable, and (ii) they will try to replace it with MAGA lies as much as possible. That is fact, not opinion. Examples include, (1) the TPM article where MAGA elites try to institutionalize false claims of widespread election fraud in 2020 (but, djt himself did engage in large scale election fraud in Georgia, his insurrectionist 1/6 coup attempt and his failed fake electors schemes), (2) on Jan. 21, 2017, just one day after the inauguration, djt made the false claims that (i) the media had misrepresented his inauguration crowd size, and (ii) saying it “looked like a million-and-a-half people” and extended “all the way back to the Washington Monument”, (3) djt falsely said efforts to critically examine slavery and racism in American history was “toxic propaganda” and “ideological poison” without evidence, and (4) djt falsely claimed (i) the Biden administration had lost track of over 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children, and (ii) “We have 325,000 children here during Democrats - and this was done by Democrats - who are right now slaves, sex slaves or dead.” 

MAGA’s pattern of historical revisionism within the authoritarian movement shows that factual reality is subordinate to political narrative. Normalizing historical lies undermines democratic discourse, the rule of law and decision-making. That is the point and the goal.