Since my Post subscription hasn’t run out (even though I cancelled it, it was paid for a year), I still get breaking news updates, and this one is predictable:
Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.
Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024. […]
The reason, officials say, is directly tied to changing taxpayer behavior and President Donald Trump’s rapid demolition of parts of the IRS. Senior tax agency officials issued detailed warnings about those outcomes to the incoming Trump administration before the president took office, according to records obtained by The Washington Post.
That’s a real hoocoodanode, to resurrect an old blogging saying.
We all know that it won’t be W-2 employees, regular wage earners, who will be able to dodge paying taxes — the IRS can automatically catch all of them, even in its enfeebled post-DOGE state. It’s the self-employed, the small business owners, and people rich enough to hire tax attorneys or skilled accountants who will be reaping the reward of the DOGE purge. In other words, it’s mostly Republicans.
This is part of the fundamental lawlessness of everything Republicans do. Their attitude towards taxes isn’t “I pay them, but I wish they were a little lower.” They just don’t think they should pay any taxes — to them, it’s all theft — and they’re open to whatever excuse they can use to dodge them. Republicans are fundamentalist worshippers of Tax Cut Jesus, attending summer tent revivals, speaking in tongues, and devoting their lives to His teachings.
Democrats are part of the problem, because we don’t sell taxes on the basis of the value received for tax dollars money. We’re also uncomfortable with “tax the rich” rhetoric, because our rich donors don’t like it. So, a lot of the standard Democratic rhetoric implicitly accepts that tax cuts are a good thing. Democrats are the quiet Episcopalian worshippers of Tax Cut Jesus, and I wish that we’d cut it out. Instead, we should point to the quality of all of the things government brings to our lives, and push hard to make rich fuckers like Musk pay a hell of a lot more. “More bennies for everyone, more taxes for the rich” should be our new message.
While we’re on the subject of Tax Cut Jesus, let’s look once more at a big believer in the Republican Lord and Savior: Jared Polis. The other day there was a funny story about him whining that teachers were protesting on a school day. Colorado schools have taken $10 billion of cuts over the last 14 years as their tithe to God’s tax-hating son, and now teachers are saying “enough.” So, they protested on Thursday. Polis knows that underfunding schools makes his fast-growing, affluent state less attractive to the high-earning folks who have moved here. Unfortunately, his deeply held belief in a Jewish Carpenter-turned-Tax Accountant outweighs his desire to educate the children of his state.
Like a lot of other stupid beliefs, believing in a manger-born, immaculately-conceived tax-cutting deity makes otherwise intelligent people do stupid things. It’s high time we had a reformation.
