Not to worry. The GOP is also against the US Postal Service, which treacherously delivered millions of non-legacy American ballots, cast “safely” during a pandemic, in spite of the party’s best efforts to cripple mail delivery, most conspicuously in Democratic areas. These efforts included Brett “Boof” Kavanaugh’s carefully parsed narrowly legalistic ruling to make sure states couldn’t extend vote by mail provisions during the worst of Covid. They are 100% united on these issues.

No increased budget for the Internal Revenue Service to collect the vast sums of unpaid tax every year, the money that pays for everything the government does. The IRS is underfunded to collect the vast amount of fraudulently ducked taxes, estimated at around a trillion (a thousand billion) dollars a year. Never going to happen, not the ten percent increase Biden asked for, not a zero percent increase, nada, not with the steady Joe Manchin III on the side of the fifty Republicans on this issue. Increased IRS funding for enforcement of the tax code was one of the sticking points the West Virginia senator found with Build Back Better. Another was enhanced ethics rules for federal officials, with enforcement mechanisms. Fuck that tyranny! What’s a trillion dollars a year among friends? {1]

You want to know what the GOP stands for, Joe Biden? Enforcement of the tax code only against poor people, private delivery services to replace the US Post Office, no new fussy ethics rules that could prevent a Supreme Court justice from ruling on a burning issue his right-wing activist wife lobbied for, involving an entity that paid her an undisclosed sum for her advocacy. [2]

Years ago it was fringe right-wing extremists who wanted to shrink government small enough to drown it in a bathtub, except when it comes to policing things like defending the lives of the unborn, suppressing the non-white vote and things of that nature. Today hobbling the government, the hated administrative state, is a major goal of MAGA nation and the mainstream Republican party. Get the government off our backs.

To me, the nine scariest words in the English language are “Hi, I’m Ronald Reagan and I’m your new president.” That politely racist prick (he announced his presidential run in the Mississippi town where the Ku Klux Klan killed three poll workers less than twenty years before) is now revered as a “moderate” Republican, like the bellicose defender of torture and preemptive war turned folksy painter, Born-Again George Dubya Bush. Reagan was the man who made it cool to openly express your desire to be an American fascist. My man undoubtedly had style, but the substance, sadly, was very bad.

Serious question: why fund the agency that collects the tax that makes the country run when you can defund it, quietly, simply by keeping its slashed budget as it is, and let everybody keep whatever they can steal, except for poor people, the lowest level of tax filers, who will always be made grim examples of in the name of Law and Order?

[1] from that Wall Street Journal Article:

As much as $1 trillion a year in federal taxes may be going unpaid because of errors, fraud and lack of resources to enforce collections adequately, Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rettig told lawmakers Tuesday.

During a nearly three-hour appearance before the Senate Finance Committee, Mr. Rettig said much has changed since the IRS last formally published data on the so-called tax gap—the difference between taxes owed and tax collected—using returns from tax years 2011 to 2013. That reporting, to be updated next year, showed annual losses of $441 billion.

The growth of cryptocurrencies and foreign-source income, as well as outside estimates that suggest a tax gap of $7.5 trillion over the next decade, mean past IRS research has almost certainly undercounted the losses.

[2] from the great Jane Mayer in the New Yorker article linked above

The claim that the Justices’ opinions are politically neutral is becoming increasingly hard to accept, especially from Thomas, whose wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, is a vocal right-wing activist. She has declared that America is in existential danger because of the “deep state” and the “fascist left,” which includes “transsexual fascists.” Thomas, a lawyer who runs a small political-lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting, has become a prominent member of various hard-line groups. Her political activism has caused controversy for years. For the most part, it has been dismissed as the harmless action of an independent spouse. But now the Court appears likely to secure victories for her allies in a number of highly polarizing cases—on abortion, affirmative action, and gun rights.

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