Well, Manchin and Sinema sold out and the democrats (with Vice President Harris voting to break the tie) successfully passed their hilariously-named “Inflation Reduction Bill.”
Beyond the deluge of dollars going to regulate the planet’s climate and to fund every left-wing cause, there is one other really key detail, which Raheem Kassam puts into the correct perspective. Read it, and look forward to your own next audit.
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioner Charles P. Rettig told Congress his agency wouldn’t increase audits on households earning less than $400,000 after being handed circa 87,000 more agents in the Orwellianly-monikered Inflation Reduction Act hurried through the U.S. Congress this weekend.
Which means they absolutely will be doing that, if historical promises by agency heads in front of the lawmakers they pretend to answer to are anything to go by. And they are.
In other words, they just used your taxes to increase your taxes so they could hire 87,000 IRS agents to rifle further through your taxes in case you owe more taxes.
IRS estimates (which we know are always excellent) reveal supposedly uncollected taxes of around $1trn each year. Or, as I like to call it, one-eighth of a “war on terror.”
Can you imagine how many nuclear drag queens, beagle experiments, or foreign abortions your government could (and will) buy with that cash?
Be a sport and help keep your fellow citizens informed of this scorching hot mess of a bill:
Indeed 87,000 new IRS agents is greater than the number of people living in Biden’s home town of Wilmington, Delaware (71,000, I’m reliably informed).
Even Senator Susan Collins has pointed out this move “more than [doubles] the size of the agency and [gives] the IRS more employees than the number of Pentagon, State Department, and FBI employees as well as Border Patrol agents combined.”
Democrats have been keen to pursue this strategy of spending (your) money to make (more) money (off you) for a while. …
IRS rules, like all regulations, are commonly ambiguous when applied to reality. If interpreted in your favor, hurrah! you get a tax deduction. Interpreted the other possible way, you cheated the government, you owe taxes and penalties.
The auditing process works like this. The regional office sends out the auditor. His or her job in reality consists of making the IRS money by interviewing you, going over your return with a fine tooth comb, disallowing deductions you took, and assigning interest, possibly along with penalties. The auditor is not your friend. He has a job to do, i.e. he is there to get more money out of you.
You can play it two ways. You can get indignant, stand up for your rights as a free American, argue with his decisions and pledge to fight, or you can appear confused, innocent, and dismayed. “How could I have made such a mistake?” If you are humble, cooperative, and apologetic, you’ll wind up paying the disallowed deductions plus interest. If you are hostile and belligerent, that auditor will look again and find more ways to screw you over, and you’ll get penalties on top of that interest. If you are enough of a pain in the ass, they’ll prosecute you and put you in jail.
An awful lot of Americans, not far down the road, are going to experience being audited for the first time.
Even border crossers are too scared of the crime-ridden Big Apple.
Mayor Adams tried to greet the latest bus load of migrants to get shipped in from Texas early Sunday — but was horrified to find the vast majority had already skipped, admitting it was likely through “fear” of the city.
“We were led to believe about 40 people should have been on that bus. Only 14 got off,” said Adams, whom The Post caught having heated words with an organizer during the alarming, unexpected 7 a.m. no-show at Midtown’s Port Authority Bus Terminal.
In the London Spectator, Neil Clark defies contemporary political correctness by recommending the classic hunting books of maneater-eliminator par excellence Jim Corbett.
I was reminded of Corbett and his wonderful books when reading last week that human-assaulting tigers are once again on the prowl in Nepal, with 104 attacks and 62 people killed in the past three years. Conservation efforts have seen tiger numbers rise three-fold since 2010, but with that good news comes the bad news of increased danger to humans. In March a tiger believed to have killed five people was captured in western Nepal. Meanwhile in India, a tigress apparently responsible for two deaths was captured in June.
So the man-eaters are back, though the terror from the current wave does thankfully seem less than in the days of Corbett. ‘No curfew order has ever been more strictly enforced, and more implicitly obeyed, than the curfew imposed by the man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag,’ he wrote. During the hours of daylight, life continued more or less as normal. But at night, ‘an ominous silence brooded over the whole area’. Little wonder. For eight long years, between 1918 and 1926, the 50,000 inhabitants of Garhwal in the United Provinces of northern India, and the 60,000 Hindu pilgrims who passed through the district annually on their way to the ancient shrines at Kedarnath and Badrinath, lived in fear of the ferocious big cat that claimed the lives of 125 people.
One of the victims was a 14-year-old orphan employed to look after a flock of 40 goats. He slept with the goats in a small room. But even though the door was fastened by a piece of wood, the leopard got in, killed the poor boy and then carried him off to a deep, rocky ravine where he devoured him. The goats were left completely unscathed. A shocking story, and there are plenty more like it, but don’t worry – we can be sure that our hero Jim will ultimately stop the leopard’s reign of terror.
I first encountered Corbett’s three-volume Man-Eater series in childhood. We had copies of his books in my school library back in the mid-1970s and they were always among the most popular to borrow.
Goodness me, how those hardback editions with their pictures of snarling big cats on the cover captured our imaginations and broadened our horizons. Corbett was a great writer – ‘dramatic yet reflective’ to quote the OUP’s omnibus edition of his works – who brought the Indian Himalayas of the early 20th century vividly to life with his understated, descriptive prose.
For much of the post-war era his books on hunting the man-eating Bengal tigers and leopards of the Raj were hugely successful. More than four million copies of Man-Eaters of Kumaon had been sold worldwide by 1980. The BBC made a television version six years later. But one worries that in the 21st century, Corbett’s work is not read anything like so widely, particularly by children who would gain so much from his incredibly exciting tales.
Yes, the books involve hunting, which is now very un-PC – but it’s the hunting of bloodthirsty beasts which had claimed more than 1,500 lives between them. And aside from that, there is so much we can learn about life from Corbett’s writing.
Jim Corbett’s accounts of tracking down man-eating leopards and tigers have some pretty scary moments. I remember one scene in which Corbett is bending down in a gully examining the pugmarks of the tiger he is tracking and bits of dirt begin falling on his head. Corbett was not the only one hunting, it turns out, and his adversary is right above him.
The J6 political persecutions claimed another scalp when Guy Reffitt was sentenced to more than seven years in prison, even though he did not engage in any violence, nor enter the U.S. Capitol. The outrageous punishment, the longest prison term yet handed down, appears to be government retribution for Reffitt’s “hyperbolic statements” secretly recorded in his home by his teenage son. So, once again, the D.C. Despots have thrown down the gauntlet against constitutionally protected free speech.
Of all the Leviathan’s fiendish and reprehensible acts these last ten years (the IRS and DOJ’s targeting of conservatives, the Hillary-Obama-FBI Russia collusion hoax designed to take down a sitting president, the Pentagon’s forced experimental “vaccination” of servicemembers against their religious and conscientious objections, etc.), its no-holds-barred onslaught of malicious prosecutions and vengeful incarcerations against January 6 political protesters takes the cake. The government’s wildly inappropriate use of the FBI and courts to stamp out certain political speech and intimidate Americans into silence and compliance is such a blatantly un-American miscarriage of justice that it leaves me seething with anger. It can’t happen here? It has happened here. And the federal government’s vindictive and authoritarian response to January 6 only adds to the voluminously accumulating proof that Washington is filled to the brim with sadistic tyrants who would have felt right at home in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
This sort of thing happened before. The military despotism of Abraham Lincoln closed opposition newspapers, threw citizens and even elected officials into prison without charges and without trial. There were flagrant cases of unconstitutional prosecutions and detentions during WWI and WWII. But, the evil Federal Government in the former cases at least had the excuse of being at war.
The Guy Reffitt prosecution has been especially chilling. Reading about it, one wonders: where did the sick bastards come from who would use two teenage kids against their own father this way?
The Jan. 6th detentions, prosecutions, and convictions are absolutely outrageous. The only person who needed prosecuting was the Capitol Police lieutenant who murdered an unarmed middle-aged woman in cold blood.
When some Republican becomes President in January of 2025, his first order of business should be to pardon all the victims of this shameless and disgusting partisan abuse of power and the initiation of the prosecution of Lieutenant Bird and Merrick Garland and all his little Chekist friends in Joe Biden’s DOJ.
My residential college at Yale. A friend of mine used to remark ruefully that the rest of life constitutes a constant struggle to live as well as one did as an undergraduate at Yale.
Nick Burns agrees that our elite academic communities are out of touch and out of step with the rest of the country, and he thinks he can understand why.
I’d never been to Boulder, or visited the University of Colorado’s flagship campus there, but even from 30,000 feet, I could tell exactly where it started and ended. The red-tile roofs and quadrangles of the campus formed a little self-contained world, totally distinct from the grid of single-family homes that surrounded it.
In urban universities, the dividing line between the campus and the community can be even starker. At the University of Southern California, for example, students must check in with security officers when entering the gates of the university at night. At Yale, castle-like architecture makes the campus feel like a fortified enclave.
The elite American university today is a paradox: Even as concerns about social justice continue to preoccupy students and administrations, these universities often seem to be out of touch with the society they claim to care so much about. Many on the right and in the center believe universities have become ideological echo chambers. Some on the left see them as “sepulchers for radical thought.”
These critiques aren’t new — for generations people have thought of American universities as ivory towers, walled off from reality — but they’ve taken on new urgency as public debate over the state of higher education has intensified in recent years. Ideology and institutional culture get frequent attention, but a key factor is often ignored: geography.
The campus is a uniquely American invention. (The term originated in the late 1700s to describe Princeton.) Efforts to create separate environments for scholars came about at a time when elite American opinion was convinced that cities were hotbeds of moral corruption. Keeping students in rural areas and on self-contained campuses, it was thought, would protect their virtue.
Though such ideas have lost their appeal in recent years, to this day American universities are radically more isolated from their surrounding communities than their European counterparts are. And being situated around a strongly defined central campus, often featuring trademark Gothic-style architecture, remains a point of pride for elite American universities.
But what students and faculty gain in the enhanced sense of academic community that comes from campus life, they can lose in regular interaction with people who don’t dwell in the world of the academy. The campus, by design, restricts opportunities to encounter people from a wider range of professions, education levels and class backgrounds.
Of course, students like to spend time with other students, and scholars associate with other scholars. And that’s good for education and research. But there’s no need to enforce a geographical separation from society on top of it.
We all instinctively extrapolate insights from our own communities and day-to-day interactions, imagining they are true about the nation at large. Inevitably, that means our view of the country is a little distorted — but for those in the university, the distortions can be extreme. Stuck on campus, academics risk limiting their knowledge and toleration of a wider sweep of American society.
To put it another way, what’s most dangerous for the health of America’s intellectual elite is not that most professors have similar cultural tastes and similar liberal politics. That will probably always be the case. It’s that the campus setup makes it easy for them to forget that reasonable people often don’t share their outlook.
Student bodies and faculties have grown more diverse in recent decades, but that shouldn’t fool us into thinking elite universities have become microcosms of society: The highly educated are far more liberal than average Americans. The divide isn’t just political: Whatever their socioeconomic backgrounds, students and professors have daily routines that are very different from those of lawyers, shopkeepers or manual laborers — and that shapes their worldviews.
Life at a university with a dominant central campus can also narrow students’ views on the world, especially at colleges where most undergraduates live on campus. Letting the university take care of all of students’ needs — food, housing, health care, policing, punishing misbehavior — can be infantilizing for young adults. Worse, it warps students’ political thinking to eat food that simply materializes in front of them and live in residence halls that others keep clean.
It also takes away the chance to encounter people with different roles in society, from retail workers to landlords — interactions that would remind them they won’t be students forever and open questions about the social relevance of the ideas they encounter in the university.
I think he overlooks the consideration that Academia offers a sheltered, highly privileged and prestigious, if financially modest, life style that is particularly appealing to neurotics, inverts, and perennially malcontent cranks.
The ability to churn out large quantities of verbiage is the key requirement, and it is the colorfulness, the outrageousness, the making a splash of some kind, not the qualities of soundness or wisdom, that command the greatest attention and rewards.
That is why catastrophist charlatans like Paul Erlich and complete loonies like Peter Singer wind up occupying endowed chairs in top universities and showered with honors.
