Grace Gedye at The Washington Monthly writes—The Tax Day Outrage You Don’t Know About. Conservatives love to lament wasted taxpayer money, but cuts to federal workers are costing the U.S. billions:
If you like to leave things until the last minute, you probably know April 15 as the day to squint at a 1040 tax form or rush through TurboTax. In the past, conservatives have also used this occasion to rally against Big Government, or to write listicles chronicling “six of the more infuriating ways that [tax] money has gone to waste.”
But the lesser known fact about Tax Day is all the money that doesn’t come in. ProPublica estimates that every year, the public misses out on $18 billion in revenue thanks to a whittled down workforce of government tax auditors. Hamstrung by eight years of budget cuts, the Internal Revenue Service has shed staff dramatically. As of 2017, the organization had 9,510 auditors—a third less than it had in 2010. That means fewer bookkeepers to investigate shady claims or to go after people who don’t bother to file taxes. No wonder the department’s inspector general estimates that the amount of lost revenue has gone up by at least $3 billion each year.
It’s just one example of how politically popular calls to cut federal workers often don’t pan out to be the straight-forward, belt-tightening measures they’re pitched to be.
“It’s been two years since we’ve hired anyone,” one Department of Labor bureaucrat told Rachel Cohen, writing for Washingtonian. “We’ve lost 25 percent of our staff, and our employees know nobody is being hired—but we’re not allowed to admit it.”
That Trump’s bureaucracy is riddled with vacancies is intentional. Soon after taking office in 2017, the president announced a freeze on hiring federal workers. He reversed that decision 79 days later, but Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney (now doubling as his acting Chief of Staff) solicited recommendations on how to rebuild the executive branch “from scratch.” Mulvaney said that Trump wanted to start with “a literal blank piece of paper.”
He’s hardly the first president to push for an overhaul of the executive branch. Bill Clinton’s ‘Reinventing Government’ initiative called for eliminating hundreds of thousands of government positions, and he followed through. Regan and George W. Bush pressed for cuts too. Sometimes the rationale is belt-tightening; sometimes it’s making government more competent. Often, it’s both. But simply cutting the government work force, both in executive agencies and in Congress, often achieves neither aim. [...]
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QUOTATION
“I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting — the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun.” ~~Wendell Berry, What Are People For?: Essays, 2010
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2008—Pelosi, At Papal Mass, Demonstrates Pro-Choice Politicians Not Prohibited From Receiving Communion:
Why is there a persistent belief among many that the Roman Catholic Church denies Communion to people—especially American politicians who are pro-choice and members of the Democratic party—who don't adhere to every tenet of Church doctrine?
Because many reporters are lazy and don't bother to figure out the facts. Four years ago American Bishops voted on a proposal to deny communion to politicians, and the proposal was rejected 183-6. And why has the issue come up? Because conservative political activists who are also Catholic have tried to make it an issue. For them, Church doctrine is only relevant on issues of the crotch. The Just War doctrine, economic justice, capital punishment, none of those things matter. No, the only things that matter for them are abortion, homosexuality and human conception. And they're trying to use the Church for their partisan political goals.
And as seen by idiotic questions from reporters like this, they're at least succeeding with some dimwitted media types.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin has Notre Dame news and olds. Yemen resolution vetoed (maybe). Waiting on Barr's book report. Joan McCarter notes Gop rush to "own libs" by catching measles. Barr’s habit of disregarding law & stuff. Fake news: "the wall," Brexit video.