…in so many ways.
Well, there’s this thought, as April 15th is also National Buy-A-Gun Day (link in pic):
…wherein all sorts of shooty goodness is on display.
And a closing thought:
Category: Gummint
Timely Law, Catchy Title
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
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.
Great Idea, Never Happen
Turning Britishland into Singapore? It’s an intriguing concept, as explained here. An excerpt:
There is nothing new in the comparison between modern Britain and circumstances in Singapore when it gained independence in 1965. Like the UK following the Brexit referendum, Singapore was involved in a rancorous divorce from a much larger geopolitical entity that left it facing an uncertain path. For one island’s withdrawal from the European Union in 2016, read another’s split from the Federation of Malaysia 55 years ago.
As many a minister has pointed out in recent years, Singapore went on to conjure an economic miracle. In the space of a generation, it has transformed itself from a country where the average citizen was two and a half times poorer than the average Briton, to a hotbed of soaring prosperity where total economic output is now 70 per cent higher than in the UK.
Here’s what the Brits would have to do, though:
In a country where the average monthly salary is about S$70,000 (£40,000), [Singapore] residents pay income tax of just 7 per cent – less than half of the 20 per cent charged in the UK – while a salary equivalent to £46,000 would attract 11.5 per cent tax.
The individual tax ceiling is 24 per cent, payable only by those earning more than 1 million Singapore dollars; the equivalent rate in the UK is 45 per cent, a bracket that comes into play for anyone with a salary of more than £125,140 (about 217,000 Singapore dollars).
The country’s more favorable tax regime extends to corporation tax, which stands at 17 per cent in Singapore compared with 25 per cent in the UK. There is no capital gains or inheritance tax.
Cut and eliminate taxes? In Britain?
Hence the title of this post.
That Tariff Thing
Ignoring any sensationalism from the Daily Mail (like ignoring rapaciousness from the IRS), I see that Britishland faces a 10% tariff hike.
Which, using Kim’s patented Law Of Ten Method, means nothing. (The corollary to said law, when applied to budgeting, says that you can always take 10% off anything without much or indeed any problem. This is true of a household or corporate budget.) Remember too that tariffs are not applied to the retail sale price — i.e. what you pay for them — but to the cost of goods in the home country. Even so, I expect that U.S. retailers will eat some of any wholesale price increases, so the retail cost of goods to the consumer will not be that onerous. Especially after we’ve just gone through Bidenflation. [25,000-word rant on that topic deleted]
I see this, with amusement:
The UK currently exports around £60billion worth of goods to the US.
Almost all of these goods will now be taxed 10% to send them to the US, making it more expensive.
Within this £60billion, British cars make up just over £6billion of the exports. Trump last night announced a 25% tariff on all imported cars, again making it more expensive, and less attractive, to buy UK-made motors.
So those Rolls Royces, Bentleys and NuJaguar Duracell cars are going to cost more (not the full 25%, as I expect that the manufacturers thereof will eat at least part if not most of the tariff). Somehow, I’m pretty sure that the Murkin buyers (plutocrat scum) of said luxury items will not be driven away by what is not a significant price increase.
Doubtless, my post-lottery Eagle E-type will cost more:
…but I’m pretty sure the lottery winnings would absorb the hit with little notice. [/snark]
As for companies like AstraZeneca (the Covid guys) with their ~5,000% profit margins, my heart bleeds custard, the chiseling scum.
The Euros (20%), on the other hand, may have a harder time of it, and the Chinese (34%) harder still. Whatever. Peruse the table below, and feel free to comment about any of the countries that you may know about.
The Balkans are not listed, but I’ll be curious to see what if anything happens to the price of, say, Prvi Partizan ammo.
Finally, just remember that the United States is the world’s largest market for just about everything made in that world, so if prices rise too high, Americans will just stop buying that imported shit. Which suits me just fine. I’d like to see a whole bunch of textile mills, for example, re-open in places like Mississippi, who could sure use the jobs that they lost to the cheaper sweatshops in Asia in not-so-long-ago times, when the Finance assholes moved their operations abroad.
Interesting times.
Oh, The Humanity
Why am I reduced to peals of helpless laughter at these tales of woe?
Thousands of federal employees who were forced to return to their offices in recent weeks have made some disgusting discoveries – including a lack of toilet paper and rodents.
Donald Trump promptly ended work from home options for federal workers upon taking office, saying anyone who does not ‘show up to the office on time and on schedule’ will be fired.
Ever since, federal employees across the country have found themselves in cramped offices where they have been forced to clean toilets and take out the trash, according to the New York Times.
One Bureau of Land Management employee even detailed to NPR how ‘we have to go to the agency head to ask if we can buy toilet paper’ because the government-issued pay cards they used to use have been capped at $1 under Trump’s spending freeze.
Together, the unidentified employees have said the Trump administration’s efforts to bring back federal workers has been marred by a lack of planning and coordination, leading to confusion and even more inefficiency.
At times, the federal workers are even forced to share office space with people from other agencies – creating chaos as they all try to video conference at different times.
Some have said they were not even fortunate enough to get a desk at the offices, with shortages of anywhere to 80 to 100 desks, according to a Federal News Network survey.
The lack of space has left some working out of conference rooms, cafeterias, hallways and even storage closets.
At the Food and Drug Administration, employees who flocked to the Maryland office on March 17 also found that parking was scarce, and a line snaked around the neighborhood as workers tried to get through security.
Once inside, they told the Times, they found the cafeteria had not stocked up enough food and there were not enough office supplies to go around.
A scientist with the agency, who was hired for a remote position, also said she now has to share office space while she works on sensitive and proprietary projects – creating ethical and practical concerns.
Meanwhile, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, employees were told to brace for limited parking at the two campuses.
One employee there said it can now take up to an hour and a half just to leave the campus because the parking lot is so full and there are choke points at every turn.
Read the whole thing, because there are so many more tales of woe.
Listen, you motherfucking taxpayer-supported slackers: change is always uncomfortable, and sometimes it takes a little time for things to get worked out properly. In the meantime: deal with it because after all, if the conditions are that problematic, quit. (You know, the way people in the private sector have to deal in the midst of corporate downsizings and the like.) The fact that these pampered little Gummint apparatchiks now have to live in the real world — a world that they seem to have had no problem with forcing onto the private sector — is just one of those things.
I also note with amusement the source of this whining: the New York fucking Times and National Pussified Radio. Haven’t seen much about it in conservative media, of course, but there ya go.
I needed a good laugh, anyway.