Uh, what?

The War of the Worlds radio broadcast was at 8 PM Sunday night - what businesses closed early? What stock brokers were working at 8:00 PM? Etc...

Was there a great over-reaction to the broadcast? Absolutely, but it was broadcast at 8 PM EST.

Source: https://www.history.com/this-d...

Seriously? That's something people track? "Worst single day drop in nearly two weeks"?

You know what that means? Three weeks prior there was a worse single day drop. How do I know this, because if there wasn't the line would have read:

"triggering the S&P 500's worst single-day drop in nearly three weeks on Monday"

What a stupid non-issue.

So your argument is they are firing IT workers so they can automate return processing of returns?

WTF? How do you imagine returns are processed? Old men with green visors and sleeve protectors plowing through mountains of paper returns?

Wouldn't they need MORE it workers (not fewer) to automate return processing?

What tapes? You do know the Steele Dossier is all made up, right? The Obama FBI offered Steele a $1 Million payment if he could prove the things in his Dossier, and oddly, the former British spy couldn't prove any of it?

Trump doubled the standard deduction in his first term (part of the "tax break for millionaires and billionaires"), then when Biden got into office he left the increased standard deduction in place, but when Trump returned to office Democrats fought Trump trying to make the doubled standard deduction permanent (again, labeling it a "tax cut for millionaires and billionaires")

To be clear, you contend that MN is on the forefront of fighting waste, fraud, and abuse? Really?

Somehow the fraudsters in MN were able to bilk the federal gov't for literal billions of dollars for a number of years and only recently started prosecuting the offenders, and that somehow proves MN is on top of things?

Also, I notice you only mention one convicted fraudster, a white woman. Of the 80+ convictions secured already, wasn't there only ONE white person convicted? It's just a coincidence all the rest were largely from one ethnic community, a community that represents a large voting bloc in MN?

Wow, too bad more states can't be as great as MN!

Changes to the tax code means changing the out-dated COBOL systems that process the returns. It really isn't as trivial as you might guess.

No, you're trying too hard. You exempt staples from sales tax, more broadly and generally than under current sales tax schemes.

For example, all unprepared food items are tax exempt, period. If you buy a rotisserie chicken or a prepared entree at the grocery store, maybe there's a tax, but not on uncooked chickens, etc. clothing, toiletries, and medical items are also tax exempt. Maybe clothes, up to a per-item limit, say, $100 per item with items under that amount tax-exempt, above that limit there's a tax applied.

You can't start mailing everyone a monthly check to reimburse estimated expenditures, that just insane and a recipe for fraud.

There are states without sales taxes, and states without income taxes, but every state has one or the other.

So businesses could no longer deduct losses or investments in research? Families couldn't deduct home mortgage interest, medical expenses, stock market losses, etc?

Really? Tell me how you'll get that approved by elected politicians?

Here's a mental exercise for you:

Imagine the IRS had a mechanism that was able to root out and deny fraudulent tax returns BUT it had a 0.01% error rate, meaning one out of every 10,000 returns would be erroneously rejected. Now, imagine a return filled out by poor people, people of color, or women were statistically more likely to be in that wrongly-rejected group of returns.

Would elected officials understand that's a cost of doing this type of work, or would they publicly rail about the racist IRS?

Politicians may not intentionally design federal programs to be easily abused, but they become incensed and very defensive when anyone takes steps to prosecute people defrauding the government if they happen to be members of certain ethnic groups (Somali childcare, Autisim clinics, underprivileged child nutrition programs, for example) are implicated.

Detecting fraud is not always rewarded in the federal or state government.

We have an ancient code base for the IRS for the same reason the FBI still has an ancient IT infrastructure and the Air Traffic Controllers are relying on vacuum tube mainframes - the government SUCKS at large-scale system upgrades/rewrites.

IT workers aren't auditors, and auditors aren't IT workers, two wildly different skill sets.

And Biden hired 83,000 IRS employees to audit ONLY millionaires and billionaires, right?

We literally know nothing about any of the IT workers that left the IRS - they could have gone on to contractor positions back at the IRS, they could have been dead wood that did almost nothing, or they could have been the very bestest COBOL batch programmers ever, who can read raw EBCIDC like it was plain text...

There were/are countless thousands of federal workers that couldn't even be bothered to log into their work laptops 5x a week, isn't it possible a few hundred of them worked at the IRS?

Just to be clear, you think there IS a good reason for a person to be walking around with a loaded weapon? Or are you making fun of Reagan for once sharing your opinion?

And BTW, what does this have to do with the staffing levels at the IRS?

The welfare of the American people depends on a fully-staffed IT department at the IRS?

Half of the U.S. population pays no net income taxes, that mean after adding up all the taxes withheld from their paychecks and all their deductions they actually either pay no net taxes or actually profit off the income tax system (get more as a refund than they paid in that year)...

What's their fair share? Zero? Less than zero?

Those are all 'consumption taxes' taxes paid for something one consumes (buying something, driving on a toll road, rides public transit, or visits a park) - the rich pay exactly the same as the poor to drive on a toll road, ride a bus or other activity you mention. Are you really wishing public buses were means tested?