Her eyes were reddened by tears, a box of tissue in the crook of her arm, a pink slip in her pocket.
There she was on the sidewalk, pictured in the Denver Post: the person who was going to help you on the phone the next time you had a tax question.
This instead:
“Elon Musk, here. If you have a tax question, you must not have a good accountant. Or you’re a libtard who doesn’t do math. Leave a message.”
The woman pictured in the paper was one of 6,000 – that’s right, 6,000 – people cut adrift this week by the IRS regional office in Denver in the middle of tax season.
That’s right. In the middle of tax season.
I hope you won’t be depending too heavily on that 2024 refund. At this rate, it might arrive in 2027.
Eviscerating the IRS has been a fun thought-game for Republican ideologues. Let’s see how that works. Let’s diminish the means of rooting out tax fraud while we also make it harder for law-abiding taxpayers to get their questions answered and get their refunds back.
People who know how these things work, unlike Musk and his Teen Titans, point out that in sum, cutting the IRS costs the Treasury significantly, and bolstering the IRS, as Joe Biden did, recovers revenue that serves the public interest.
Those like Musk and President Blob who think clear-cutting the federal workforce is “efficient” policy have no idea what they are saying or doing – a fact borne out by the indiscriminate nature of what Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is doing.
Employees dismissed by DOGE all got the same explanation: They were fired because of “poor performance.”
What a dehumanizing lie.
It’s assumed that most of the people fired were newbies – probationary employees. But that isn’t even close to the truth. Some employees who lost their jobs had considerable seniority but had just transferred to other locations or had been promoted and were in their respective probationary periods at their new positions.
“I’d understand a strategic reduction in force,” one USDA employee who lost his job told the Washington Post. “But this was butchering some of our best.”
Apologies to butchers, who as craftspeople know what they are cleaving.
The Washington Post reported that directors of the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid breathed a sign of relief when they were told that their probationary workers would not be targeted.
Come Monday, every one of them was fired.
Trust in your friend Artie — artificial intelligence — to deliver those life-essential benefits, Medicare recipients.
Overseas employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development – 95 percent of the workforce fired — were told that they had 30 days — ready, set, move – to relocate families and belongings back home if they wanted government help in doing that. A judge has put that untenable burden on hold.
Speaking of all the savings we can expect from this all else the MAGA robots have in mind:
Gutting the IRS is much like the witch-doctoring of trickle-down tax cuts which never – never ever – deliver the deficit- taming tonic it advertises.
All it does is deliver tax windfalls to people who don’t need them, like Elon Musk.
And as you recall the last time President Blob trumpeted the “biggest tax cut in history,” itself a lie – you barely felt it. Republicans in Congress are ready to “deliver” on that again. Excited?
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the second round of Blob’s tax cuts will add $5 trillion over 10 years to the federal deficit.
By the way, federal employees account for 6 percent of the budget. You won’t make up $5 trillion by replacing tax-return helpers with robots.
Indiscriminate and unspeakably cruel. The “E” in DOGE is not “efficiency” but “evil.”
Need help from President Blob’s government? Talk to the machine.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
