***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[IATT]

 

[boxer15]

I thought the "having sex with women makes you gay" hot take would reign supreme for a while, but damn, this is a masterpiece

Reminiscent of homie that said Hugh Hefner watching gay pron to get hard for the bunnies was top tier alpha male ish.

 

[Brownstone]

Oh thank god! I thought Diamond from Crime Mob passed away

 

[Nike Jordan]

noooooo oh noooo
thoughts and prayers go out

 

[elpablo21]

#RIP #diedsuddenly

 

[Based Jesus]

Fox is actively a danger to democracy here and abroad.

 

[elpablo21]

How did Diamond and Silk get fired from Fox for spreading disinformation

Thats like Kevin Durant getting cut because he's too much of a bucket

 

[whywesteppin]

that special feeling when you're 1 in a 100

 

[frink85]

that special feeling when you're 1 in a 100

you could say she was a...

Diamond in the rough

h/t Based Jesus

 

[Nike Jordan]

you could say she was a...

Diamond in the rough

 

[IATT]

 

[cedric ceballos]

She’s upstairs with Herman Cain looking over us all. Thoughts and prayers.

 

[IATT]

dwalk31

 

[Belgium]

Today I received an anonymous WhatsApp message with the single word, “Hola”

The sender was coming from a +234 country code and their profile picture was this:

Spoiler: Yeah, sure

And I thought, “Still less grift than the modern GOP.”

Given the random messages in Russian I regularly receive on my Telegram, maybe I should start playing along and replying to them.
I’m curious what kind of rabbitholes that could lead to.

Some of the Russian messages are just asking to buy my Telegram username “Notorious” but a lot of the Russian messages are more along the lines of asking if I’m (person) or mistakenly addressing me as a particular person.

 

[Based Jesus]

She’s downstairs with Herman Cain looking up at us all. Thoughts and prayers.

Fixed

They're in a better place now

 

[Zainjal26]

 

[Zainjal26]

 

[Nike Jordan]

"I'm voting to eliminate jobs" isn't the flex you think it is.

 

[Methodical Management]

American myths are made of white grievance—and Trump's Big Lie is just the latest

Let's not lose sight of the real motivations behind the Jan. 6 insurrection.

www.motherjones.com

Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, has been gathering information on rioters who faced prosecution for their involvement on January 6. He and his “little army of researchers” have analyzed 890 insurrectionists and the 439 counties in 47 states from which they came. The rioters were 92 percent white and 86 percent male. Only 14 percent had extremist ties. They were far less likely to be unemployed or have a criminal record than right-wing protesters arrested earlier in the Trump era. They were also older, mostly in their 40s and 50s. But what especially jumped out to Pape and his colleagues was that more than half were from counties that Joe Biden won. The more rural a county was, and the more its voters favored Trump over Biden, the less likely it was to produce an insurrectionist.

There was another striking common denominator: The more a county’s white population declined, percentage wise, the more likely it was to send a would-be rioter to the Capitol. “Race is the primary factor,” Pape says, accounting for “as much as 75 percent of the energy underneath the insurrectionist movement.” It’s not that the rioters were duped by Trump, but that his lies found fertile ground amid their fears. “The word ‘disinformation’ is off,” Pape says. “It’s about demographic change and whether you’re afraid of it or not.”

a take hotter than the surface of the sun.

The 288 character limit must have prevented him from adding,

3. Geothermal energy destroyed Pompeii.
4. Hydro power broke New Orleans' levees.
5. Solar power started the Australian wildfires.
6. Why are we doing all of this just to save a bunch of icebergs when they sank the Titanic?

I have zero faith in enough republicans (5) doing the right thing.

Yellen and Biden just need to say **** it and mint that trillion-dollar coin

If there as to be a global economic collapse, let the Supreme Court own it at least.

It's interesting how investigating financial crimes is "government working against the people," and should be de-funded, but this is apparently government working "for the people" and must be "backed:"

Bad apples…

"Law and order" for whom?

 

[IATT]

 

[IATT]

 

[trynafeelmink]

****** is in here celebrating the death of someone they don't know because they are Trump affiliated , but then want to claim moral superiority over the same right wing dickheads who do the same.

 

[RustyShackleford]

What McCarthy is actually saying:

We voted to destroy middle class jobs, and increase the deficit, just to make it easier for our donors to evade taxes

And tons of people will be too stupid to realize that.

 

[trynafeelmink]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millionaire-irs-tax-audit-rate-low-trac-report/

Yup the politicians who steal money from the people everyday are SURELY focusing on auditing & convicting the rich

The Biden administration has trumpeted its plans to crack down on rich tax evaders, funneling $46 billion to the IRS so it can ferret out money hidden by the ultra-wealthy.

For now, though, the chances of a high income earner being audited by the IRS remain vanishingly low. A new report released by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found that a millionaire's chances of coming face-to-face with an auditor fell in 2022 to just 1.1%.

Although IRS enforcement agents devote a quarter of their time to auditing millionaires, nearly 700,000 millionaires face "no scrutiny whatsoever," the group found.

The IRS was slightly more active with audits by mail — instances in which the agency asks for additional information on certain items in a person's tax return. Some 85% of all audits, and just under half of millionaire audits, were done by mail, TRAC found. Still, it called this form of enforcement a "fiction."

The number of millionaire tax returns the IRS audits every year has fallen from nearly 41,000 a decade ago to just 16,800 in 2022, with the pace of enforcement slowing as the agency lost funding and personnel.



"Severe budget cutbacks over the years meant that the IRS has examined fewer and fewer millionaire returns," TRAC said.

While the number of millionaire audits rose modestly from 2020 to 2022, the rate stayed low because the number of high-income tax returns also grew in that time.

In 2022, 703,000 tax returns were filed reporting an income of at least $1 million, IRS figures show.

"Easy marks"​

One group that hasn't benefited from the shrinking IRS are lower-income taxpayers. Those who earn less than $25,000 and qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit are audited at five times the rate of everyone else, TRAC found. In fiscal year 2022, nearly 1.3% of these tax returns were subject to an in-person or mail audit.


By comparison, the average audit rate for all tax returns was just 0.4% last year.

"[T]his group of taxpayers have historically been targeted not because they account for the most tax under-reporting, but because they are easy marks in an era when IRS increasingly relies upon correspondence audits yet doesn't have the resources to assist taxpayers or answer their questions," TRAC concluded.

"While these small differences may sound trivial, the difference represented tens of thousands of low-income families," the report said.

The Biden administration has promised to crack down on ultra-wealthy tax evaders, while vowing that audit rates remain level for anyone making under $400,000 a year. The IRS released data last year showing that it has stepped up audits of the highest earners, with a particular focus on those making $5 million or more.

Still, the recent funding boost for the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act has led some Republicans to claim the agency is raising a "new army" of tax collectors to harass middle-income workers. While these are partisan claims meant to discredit the IRS, TRAC notes that the agency's own record in this area leaves it open to criticism.

Under former Commissioner Charles Rettig, whose tenure marked the increased audits of low-income Americans, recently leaving the agency, TRAC is calling on the IRS to create "a full and detailed transparency program." Americans deserve to know "how these new funds are being applied in the selection of taxpayers for stepped up audits," the report said.

One group that hasn't benefited from the shrinking IRS are lower-income taxpayers. Those who earn less than $25,000 and qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit are audited at five times the rate of everyone else, TRAC found. In fiscal year 2022, nearly 1.3% of these tax returns were subject to an in-person or mail audit.


By comparison, the average audit rate for all tax returns was just 0.4% last year.

They coming for those evil millionaires tho

 

[biggie62]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millionaire-irs-tax-audit-rate-low-trac-report/

Yup the politicians who steal money from the people everyday are SURELY focusing on auditing & convicting the rich



One group that hasn't benefited from the shrinking IRS are lower-income taxpayers. Those who earn less than $25,000 and qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit are audited at five times the rate of everyone else, TRAC found. In fiscal year 2022, nearly 1.3% of these tax returns were subject to an in-person or mail audit.


By comparison, the average audit rate for all tax returns was just 0.4% last year.

They coming for those evil millionaires tho

Do you know why this has changed over the past 15+ years or are you going to ignore what led to low hanging fruit? It’s because when Obama was president the republicans were hitting the IRS funding during every budget. This started under GWB actually.

The IRS would constantly audit high risk returns of wealthy and large in the past but because of Republican gutting that has changed. The IRS needs to be rebuilt where people should be afraid of it again if they try to cheat.