Aw crud -- the tax gap again, sorry :( ---- and the news isn't close to good :(

The Washington Post writes:

Republicans have long sought to shrink the tax-collecting agency, but Biden aides believe hundreds of billions of dollars go uncollected each year. [that's a lie --they know that hundreds of billions of dollars go uncollected each year, everyone on the inside knows that] 

White House officials plan to make a massive [puny -- WaPo is full of baloney on this point] increase in enforcement at the Internal Revenue Service a central component of the tax proposal they will unveil this week alongside a $1.8 trillion spending package, according to four people briefed on the matter. 

But probably the single biggest source of new revenue in the plan comes from dramatically expanding the clout of the nation’s tax agency. It seeks to beef up the number of agents and give the IRS new tools and technology to execute collections and crack down on avoidance, the people said. White House officials have eyed raising as much as $700 billion from toughening IRS enforcement and auditing over 10 years, two of the people said, although the precise amount in the plan remained unclear. Enforcement will be focused on the wealthy, the people said.  

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private administration deliberations. Officials cautioned the plan had not been finalized. White House officials are looking at increasing the agency’s budget by $80 billion over 10 years, a figure first reported by the New York Times.

If approved, the coming White House proposal would represent a remarkable change to the IRS, which has been beset for more than a decade by problems from steep budget cuts and a growing list of responsibilities. The IRS lost roughly 18,000 full-time positions after 2010, due primarily to cuts pushed by Republicans in Congress under President Barack Obama, with the number of auditors falling to lows unseen since the 1950s.  

Those changes have hampered the IRS’s ability to collect taxes even from those who legally owe them, particularly among the rich. Former IRS commissioner Charles Rossotti joined economists Larry Summers and Natasha Sarin in a recent analysis that found the tax agency could raise as much as $1.4 trillion in additional tax revenue with better data, technology, and personnel.

Germaine's analysis

What?? Now it's $1.4 trillion???? WTF! The last time I checked (April 22, 2021), it was a mere $1 trillion/year. A 40% increase in one week? I smell rotting some fishes here.

The latest estimate I was aware of was that each additional dollar the IRS gets to enforce tax law and recovery of unpaid taxes will result in about $4 recovered. So the return on investment is 400% for the tax year that taxpayers paid for additional tax law enforcement. That is pretty good. Right?  

So, is this $80 billion over 10 years is great stuff? Right? 

No, it isn't. It sucks hard. It is an insult to honest taxpayers. 

The annual tax gap is about $1 trillion/year (or $1.4 trillion?). Averaged out, an added $80 billion over ten years (~$8 billion/year) will grab about $32 billion/year from tax cheats. $32 Billion/year out of $1 trillion/year amounts to recovering about 3.2% of the annual theft-fest (less than that if it's $1.4 trillion).

In other words, this is a pissant level investment in vindicating the rule of law and treating honest taxpayers respectfully. Actually, it is an outrageous insult to taxpayers and a slap in the face. But, it's not a surprise. 

An actual pissant -- it is a real thing

The March 24, 2021 post here on Dissident Politics about the tax gap included this prescient insight from Germaine:

Janet Yellen commented blandly that the current gap is running at $600 billion/year and she would take a look at it.

Translation: She will do nothing about it and could not care less.

Well, that prediction turned out to be true, unless one defines this pissant 3.2% act as something and caring in view of the size of annual theft festival.

Of course, one can reasonably shift most of the blame for this outrageous insult to taxpayers to the corrupt GOP in congress. Any more of an effort from Biden and democrats would trigger a crapstorm of who knows what awfility[1] from republicans who want to protect their tax cheats.

One can reasonably imagine that the added tax enforcement dollars will go to low income folks. Rich folks will not tolerate such an intrusion on their sacred feng-shui.

Questions: Who is more responsible for the annual theft-fest, congressional democrats, congressional republicans or are both about equally responsible. Does anyone care?

Footnote:

1. Awfility is not a real word, but my old room mate from Rutgers, a chemical engineer and hard partying friend of the drop trou Rutgers football team*** used the word when appropriate. It stuck in my little brain all these years.

*** The football team my old room mate partied with crashed parties and liked to drop trou before stealing the beer keg(s) and driving off to the next party to crash and steal more beer keg(s) from after dropping trou again in salute to the next party. There was much trou dropping and beer keg stealing in the Rutgers neighborhood way back in the 1970s. Of course, that was far better than what the football team at my old alma mater used to do. Those fine students used to go to a college student bar and randomly pick out some guy to drag out and beat the shit out of him for fun and then go back in and find another victim.

Ahh, college days. What fun, as long as one avoided the fun-filled football teams. I avoided my football team with a vengeance. They were a bit too feisty for my taste and I was a bit too puny to defend myself. Well, OK, way too puny.

Hm. Moral question: What's the worst? (i) The GOP protecting tax cheats in stealing about $1 trillion/year from the US treasury and honest taxpayers, (ii) some high spirited football team members crashing parties, dropping trou in salute and then stealing beer kegs, or (iii) high spirited football team members beating the shit out of people they randomly pick out of a bar? Jeez, who would have known how complicated morality could be.

Democracy is under vicious attack in Arizona

Rot flourishes in the dark, sunlight kills rot

Only the courts and the law, not morals or fairness, can shine the sun on the rot

Context

The next step I've been expecting the GOP to take in its assault on democracy, including elections, is fabrication of evidence to support their crackpot conspiracy theories. Short of engaging in widespread violence, faking evidence seems to be the only reasonable step the GOP has available to it in view of its poor situation in making its run at establishing some form of a corrupt autocracy-dictatorship. From what I can tell, the GOP did not cross the line in the last president's administration or in the ~64 lawsuits they filed to challenge the 2020 election results. But now that they have no choice, it appears that the GOP legislature in Arizona is desperate enough to take the big step to fake evidence to show that the 2020 election in that state was fraudulent. 

The next step in attacking democracy

MSNBC reported last night that Arizona republican legislators have hired a company called Cyber Ninjas to recount Maricopa county votes from the 2020 election. The attack on democracy lies in the company's lawsuit to do the recount in secret because company trade secrets are involved. The argument for secrecy due to trade secrets is a transparent republican lie. 

There is no trade secret about counting ballots. Most everyone on planet Earth realizes that counting ballots means looking at ballots using eyeballs and/or scanning machines to verify ballot and signature authenticity, count votes and decide what to do about questionable ballot markings. There is no basis for a trade secret(s) in any of that. But, what recounting ballots in secrecy does do is permit ballots to be remarked and rejected, thereby faking evidence that the ex-president won Maricopa county, when he in fact lost.

The rancid stench of republican desperation and duplicity in this is overpowering. Only Maricopa county is being recounted, not the rest of the state where the ex-president won. The court has ordered the company to describe how it is going to do the recount. The company refuses and is fighting against disclosure while continuing to do its "recount" or "audit." During the 2020 election, republicans demanded and received full access to both voting and vote counting in the name of transparency and election integrity. Now republicans demands taxpayers pay (~$150,000) for vote counting in secrecy in the name of pure partisan political bullshit, not election integrity.

Cyber Ninja's sympathies are clear. The company believes the 2020 vote was stolen and it supports QAnon conspiracy crackpottery and lies. It is being or has been hired by some other republican state legislatures for possible vote "recounts" or "audits" in those states. On top of all that anti-democratic partisan sleaze, private donors who demand their names be kept secret are giving Cyber Ninjas money for God only knows what. The company refuses to disclose anything related to that sleaze.

Part of the sleaze in this attack on democracy includes the fact that "reporters" working for OAN news are part of the machinery that is pumping money into Cyber Ninjas. Apparently in return for the cash, the radical right OAN propaganda and lies business will be the only "news" source allowed to report on the vote audit. 

This clearly looks like the time the republican party will officially embrace actual fabrication of evidence to support lies in furtherance of its relentless attacks on democracy. The GOP is on the verge of crossing the line to advance its corrupt, dictatorial political agenda. Moral constraints are not relevant in current republican politics. Maybe the only thing that can stop this attempt at massive vote fraud in Arizona is the courts. 

One can reasonably wonder what rank and file republicans in Arizona and all other states think of this new tactic. Do most who are aware of this approve? If so, what does that make the republican party, mostly democratic and rule of law-based or mostly demagogic, corrupt and tyrannical? Inquiring minds want to know.

Why The Republican Party Isn’t Rebranding After 2020

 

Typically, after losing a presidential election, a political party will undertake an intense intra-party debate over why it didn’t win and how the party needs to change to take back the White House. Democrats did so after losing in 1988, 2000, 2004 and 2016. In fact, even after winning in 2020 — taking control of the White House and U.S. Senate and maintaining control in the U.S. House — Democrats are having an intra-party debate, trying to figure out why they didn’t win more House seats and struggled with Latino voters. Republicans, too, have had such debates, after losses in 1996, 2008 and 2012. 

But not this time.

Despite Republicans losing the White House and Senate in 2020, and thus being totally swept out of power in Washington,¹ there’s been no official “autopsy” or widespread consideration of appointing new leaders or anything else. In the period after the 1988 presidential election, the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in all but one presidential race (2004). It has lost three of the last four presidential elections and allowed itself to be dominated by former President Donald Trump, who was twice impeached for breaking with democratic values. But it is moving forward like none of that really happened.

• Republicans on Capitol Hill and at the state level are returning to their Obama-era strategy of opposing everything the incumbent Democratic president does; 
• Republicans at the state level are adopting laws that make it harder for left-leaning people to vote, just like they did before and during the Trump presidency; 
• Republicans in Washington and at the state level are sticking with the party’s positions on issues of identity and race, which are a big part of the reason that the GOP is struggling among the growing parts of America’s electorate, namely people of color and white college graduates (this marks a change from the post-election periods in 2008 and 2012, when Republicans talked about how to better appeal to nonwhite voters); 
• State-level Republican officials, in particular, are taking other extreme actions, from casting Democratic women as “witches” to trying to bar Democratic-controlled cities from requiring residents to wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19; 
• And, perhaps most surprisingly, Republican Party officials are largely continuing to align themselves with Trump, even though the former president was both an electoral drag on the party and also a moral stain, with a string of racist comments and undemocratic actions that culminated in him encouraging his supporters to storm the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election results. 

1. The party’s core activists don’t want to shift gears. 

This is the simplest and most obvious explanation: The GOP isn’t changing directions because the people driving the car don’t want to. 

2. Trump is still a force in the party. 

After the 2012 elections, prominent Republicans sharply criticized Mitt Romney and his campaign. Democrats did the same to Hillary Clinton after 2016 — and sometimes included former President Barack Obama in their criticisms, too. For a political party to change direction, it nearly always has to distance itself from past leaders. 

Or put another way: For there to be an autopsy, there has to be a dead body.

3. Republicans almost won in 2020. 

To torture this “autopsy” metaphor even more: There’s a good argument that the party is still very much alive.

Trump would have won reelection had he done only about 1 percentage point better in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and about 3 points better in Michigan.

4. Republican voters aren’t clamoring for changes. 

5.  There aren’t real forces within the GOP leading change. 

MORE:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-republican-party-isnt-rebranding-after-2020/

American entrepreneurialism: The slander industry

Investigative reporter trolls self

This is just too good to not mention. The New York Times writes:

My colleague Kashmir Hill and I [New York Times reporter Aaron Krolik] were trying to learn who is responsible for — and profiting from — the growing ecosystem of websites whose primary purpose is destroying reputations.

So I wrote a nasty post. About myself.

Then we watched as a constellation of sites duplicated my creation.

Egad!! IT'S ALIIIIVE!!!!!

To get slander removed, many people hire a “reputation management” company. In my case, it was going to cost roughly $20,000.

We soon discovered a secret, hidden behind a smokescreen of fake companies and false identities. The people facilitating slander and the self-proclaimed good guys who help remove it are often one and the same.

Part 1:The stain

At first glance, the websites appear amateurish.

They have names like BadGirlReports.date, BustedCheaters.com and WorstHomeWrecker.com. Photos are badly cropped. Grammar and spelling are afterthoughts. They are clunky and text-heavy, as if they’re intended to be read by machines, not humans.

But do not underestimate their power. When someone attacks you on these so-called gripe sites, the results can be devastating. Earlier this year, we wrote about a woman in Toronto who poisoned the reputations of dozens of her perceived enemies by posting lies about them.

One woman in Ohio was the subject of so many negative posts that Bing declared in bold at the top of her search results that she “is a liar and a cheater” — the same way it states that Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States. For roughly 500 of the 6,000 people we searched for, Google suggested adding the phrase “cheater” to a search of their names.

The unverified claims are on obscure, ridiculous-looking sites, but search engines give them a veneer of credibility. Posts from Cheaterboard.com appear in Google results alongside Facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles — or, in my case, articles in The New York Times.

The NYT interviewed one brave smear site owner, whose credentials include a criminal with a couple of stints in jail, e.g., for making death threats on one occasion and trying to pepper spray police in the face with Sriracha Dorito dust in another. He calmly explained why he does not feel bad about slandering people online. “Teach children not to talk to strangers, then teach them not to believe what they read on the internet.” Apparently, he sees himself as a life coach just trying to help the children of America.

The article is long and heavy with details, but mind-blowing. The astonishing high level of sleaze in this fine American industry arguably rivals that of the ex-president's personal life, business operations and his administration. Once again, the moral values of unregulated markets shine through for all to see.