Tag: Evil Bastards

Timely Law, Catchy Title

Government Thugs, Gummint, Taxes and Theft

From the U.S. Senate comes this little bit of commonsense:

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) on Monday introduced legislation that would sell off millions of dollars of the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) firearms to pay for the national debt.

As America approaches Tax Day on Tuesday, Ernst introduced the Why Does the IRS Needs Guns Act to reform how the agency handles firearms. The Iowa senator introduced the legislation after reports from Open the Books have suggested the IRS would one of the top 50 largest police departments based on its headcount and stockpiling of firearms and ammunition.

“Since 2006, the IRS spent $35.2 million on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment (CPI adjusted). The years 2020 and 2021 were peak years at the IRS for purchasing weaponry and gear. Just since the pandemic started, the IRS has purchased $10 million in weaponry and gear,” Open the Books wrote.

Since 2020, the IRS has spent at least $10 million on firearms and ammunition for its roughly 2,100 special agents.

Here’s Joni, outside D.C.:

And Rep. Barry Moore (R-AL) introduced the House companion legislation:

“Arming these agents does not make the American public safer. My legislation, the Why Does the IRS Need Guns Act, would disarm these agents, auction off their guns to Federal Firearms License Owners, and sell their ammunition to the public.”

Moore takes the cake with this exit quote:

“The only thing IRS agents should be armed with are calculators.”

As the old (and bitter) joke goes:

“Taxes are funds taken from citizens at gunpoint.”
“No, they aren’t!”
“Really?  Try refusing to pay them.”

Bastards.  Disarm them.  All of them.  Perhaps they’d be a lot less arrogant towards us if they were unarmed.

Nazzo Fast, Guido

Taxes and Theft

I’m truly enjoying the havoc and chaos that Musk and his DOGE squad are inflicting on the Gummint.

I’m not so sure about this one, though:

Acting IRS Commissioner Melanie Krause felt slighted after Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem struck a deal for the tax agency to share data with DHS on illegal aliens. She decided to resign and take the government buyout that Trump offered.

Sources told the Washington Post that disagreements over the agency’s direction also factored into Krause’s decision to leave.

To be sure, I don’t give a rat’s ass about Krause — or pretty much any IRS apparatchik, fuck ’em all — but on reading further, her reason for quitting stuck with me:

Trump and Musk want to overturn the entire privacy regime that prevents the IRS from sharing data with other government agencies. They’re contemplating building a “cross-government data-sharing system,” reports the Post, “that would allow agencies to use personal tax information to hunt for fraud in social safety net programs.”

Nice goal, but I’m not so sure about that “cross-government data-sharing system” thing — most of all when it comes to tax-related data.

Remember the immortal words of John Cowperthwaite:  “If I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.”  And no “statistics” are more deadly in government hands than financial ones.

I’m against giving government personal data, even in that most innocuous of functions, the decennial census.  Financial data, that could be shared between government agencies (such as, for example, the FBI and ATF and not just Social Security)?

I don’t fucking think so.

The old joke was that the IRS didn’t care if you were a citizen or an illegal alien, as long as you paid taxes on your wages and earnings;  while the INS didn’t care if you paid your taxes or not, as long as you were a legal resident.  It was a joke back then, but it’s going to stop being a joke, in every way possible, if this “cross-government data-sharing system” becomes a reality.

And remember, while I may — may — trust that this Republican government is going to do The Right Thing with all this data that’s going to be shared (and that’s not a sure thing, by any means), I have no illusions about how this data is going to be used by any future government, no matter what its label may be.

It’s going to be used against us — you and me — for whatever purpose they may dream up.

The only way I might agree to this fuckery is if there’s an absolutely cast-iron guarantee that the IRS is going to disappear altogether in the (very) near future, to be replaced by a National Excise Office that would collect taxes exclusively from foreign governments (tariff fees) and merchants (end-user sales taxes) — i.e. when the godless 16th Amendment is nullified — and we all know that none of that is going to happen anytime soon.

I would stipulate that this sharing of tax data be limited strictly to root out corruption in the SocSec network — i.e. it’s a one-time, one-function application — but we all know that this stipulation would be ignored before the ink was dry on the paper, to await the arrival of a future government or government department which would use it as a tool to oppress and destroy our freedoms.

No, this data-sharing thing is a bridge too far, and I don’t care how badly it’s needed — Musk has yet to prove that to me or anyone else — or how much easier it would make DOGE’s job.

My personal data doesn’t exist in order to make anyone’s job easier or more convenient.  So leave it the fuck alone.

When We Do It, It’s A Game

Marxists

…but when the Left does it, it’s an action plan.

We’ve all played the “One Shot” game (“If you could pull the trigger just once, without any consequences to you, who’d be your target?”), but it’s always been a game.

With the Left, though, it’s hardly ever a game.

I myself live in dread that some day, some moron on the Right is going to try to make the One Shot game a reality and take a potshot at some Lefty.  Like that little shit in Pennsylvania tried at DJT.

History, however, sort of makes me think that as always, real political violence will come from the Left.  Let’s just hope that when it does, it fails (unlike it did with JFK and RFK Sr.).

We always allude to the shit storm that might follow open- and general violence from the Left, but the Pantifa / BLM riots — Kyle Rittenhouse wonderfully excepted — seemed to prove otherwise.

This time around, though, I think a repeat performance from these spoiled little middle-class tools might get a somewhat different response from law enforcement (or even the military, if necessary) than what they anticipated.

I hope so, anyway.

Piling On

Journalist Scum, Lies and Untruths, Two-Minute Hate

There are many times when I wonder (as do many of you) why I bother with the Daily Mail, which is a truly horrible publication.  (It’s difficult to call it a “newspaper” because so much of it is utter rubbish.)

However, I can deal with “rubbish”.  It’s when they publish outright misleading falsehoods that I get upset.  Here’s an example:

Never mind “correlation” not being related to “causation”;  the difference between “causation” and “coincidence” is even greater.

As we read this silly article, only in paragraph eleventy-hundred do we come across this embarrassing factoid:

Progressive Furniture, a division of Sauder Woodworking based in Claremont, North Carolina, announced its plans to close down and fire all 30 of its employees by the end of the year. 

The firm grew to be the seventh largest furniture manufacturing company in the world – and was a much-loved brand, selling high-quality traditional and modern homeware at Walmart, Target and Home Depot. 

Uhhhh Lauder may be large — and it is — but its tiny 30-employee subsidiary?  Much less so.  But it gets worse.  You see:

Although it is an American company, its main supplier was based in Rosarito, Mexico. That manufacturer, Baja Wood, was responsible for more than 60 percent of Progressive’s inventory.

So Progressive is really just an assembly- and shipping operation?  (That would account for its tiny workforce.)  But what about this Baja Wood?  In fact…

…the Mexican supplier’s internal dilemmas resulted in [Progressive’s] demise.  Problems began back in January, when about 60 of Baja Wood’s 320 employees rallied in front of the factory in protest of reduced hours.  Government labor investigators were called upon to evaluate the situation and production halted.  However, once the investigation was closed, Baja Wood never reopened. 

So that’s why Progressive failed:  its major supplier went tits-up.

Trump’s tariffs, despite the screaming headline, had sweet fuck-all to do with it.

In future I think I’ll just stick with the Mail’s T&A content.

Caveat lector.

No Frigging Chance

Marxists, Third World

And it was all going so well.

I was reading an article at American Greatness which shows in detail how California has screwed things up,whether by Net Zero foolishness, taxation, over-regulation and so on, e.g.

If the builder [Gov.] Pat Brown was an exemplar of “Responsible Liberalism,” California’s government today has been ranked by Wallet Hub as the least efficient in delivering services relative to the tax burden. Pat Brown’s son Jerry – who was governor from 1975-1983 and then again from 2011-2019 – and his successor, Newsom, epitomize the triumph of ideology over effectiveness. Theirs is a kind of performative progressivism that shrugs about things like roads that are now among the nation’s worst, a high-speed bullet train plagued with endless delays and massive cost overruns, and a failure to boost critical water systems in a perennially drought-threatened state.
In exchange for all this, the progressive regime has stuck ordinary Californians and businesses with some of the nation’s highest taxes and greatest regulatory burdens.

So far, so good, and the article goes on to show exactly how, why and to what extent California is doomed.  Then, in the very last paragraph, this:

Yet, for all its problems, California is far from hopeless, and its promise is not extinguished. It remains uniquely gifted in terms of climate, innovation, and entrepreneurial verve. Sitting at the juncture of Asia, Latin America, and North America, it can once again become, as Kevin Starr noted, America’s “final frontier: of geography and of expectation.”

Nope.  Unless the CalGov is purged by a mini-DOGE — or maybe even a greater DOGE, given its entrenched Marxism — as well as a 180-degree change in voting patterns, there is no way for the Golden Shower State to survive.  None.

It is a hopeless state, and the mass exodus of Californians to other states over the past ten years reflects just that.