Tag: dog

Categories
national politics & policies tax policy

DOGE Does the IRS

DOGE, dog, meme, watch dog, who watches the watchers?

A note of caution going into today’s subject: let us try to bite our tongues; no expressions of schadenfreude; no sarcastic “Boo-​hoos” or the like.

The IRS has been grossly inefficient for a very long time, as now uncovered in a Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] investigation.

Courtesy of Laura Ingraham, we learn that the Internal Revenue Service is “35 years behind” in its scheduled upgrades, and “already $15 billion over budget.”

“You’ve heard the sob stories,” says Ms. Ingraham. “And they are quite entertaining at times. But the [presumably non-​Fox legacy news] media — they continue to spread this story: ‘DOGE is some dark and mysterious organization; you know, embedding itself into departments like some jack-​booted thugs, just intimidating staff, threatening those that don’t comply.’ OK. We’re asking, what is the truth?” 

So she interviewed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant and Treasury’s DOGE adviser, Sam Corcos.

“We,” Corcos said, including himself in the IRS’s very “they” themness, “process about the same amount of data as a midsize bank. A midsize bank has 100 to 200 people in IT and a $20 million budget. The IRS? It has 8,000 IT employees and a $3.5 billion operations and maintenance budget. I don’t really know why yet.” But he does notice that 80 percent of that budget goes to “contractors and software licenses.”

“DOGE advisers have found billions in waste just by asking questions,” explains Ingraham’s report. Secretary Bessant blames the power of special “entrenched interests” that “keep constricting themselves around the power, the money, and the systems. Nobody cares.”

“Inertia” is also a word often heard on this subject.

Democrats have been complaining about the president’s cutting of the IRS budget, and number of employees. But if most of the force is just spinning gears, the cuts could hardly be said to hurt the “service.”

And you’d think that the most pro-​government party in our political system would want this key function of government — everything rests on taxes, they admit — to be efficient, do the assigned jobs well.

But for some reason that does not seem to be the case.

Shocking, I know.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly and ChatGPT

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom

Common-​Sense Canine

If at first you don’t succeed …

Persistence. That’s the lesson of an animal rescue shown in a video of unknown provenance, most likely recorded in Southeast Asia, that appeared on the Internet toward the end of 2014.

As the video opens, we see that a small tawny-​haired, yelping dog had somehow fallen into a well. Rescuers are lowering a rope into the water. The pooch has only one way to escape — by grabbing the rope with her teeth. Which she does.

Nine out of ten times, though, she can’t hold on long enough for a rescuer to grab her and pull her out. She keeps dropping back into the water.

Discouraging.

But the tenth time proves the charm. Some combination of dog-​learning and human-​learning results at last in a successful retrieval. The dog has done the only thing it could do to save itself, and kept doing it until it worked.

The advice to “keep trying” is regularly balanced with the advice to know when to “cut your losses.” But, often, it’s neither possible nor advisable to cut our losses no matter how tough things get. Switch strategies, maybe. But not give up.

We can’t conclude, for example, that “this U.S. government thing is not working out, let’s cut our losses.” We just have to keep working to reform its institutions and policies no matter how often we get flung back into the well. It’s the only way we win.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.