Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
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PAGE 113 of 479
Excellent.
It was a good day.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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In only two months Trump convinced Americans to follow his example and not pay their income tax. Are you feeling the Winds of Change Blowing?
Tax revenue could drop by 10 percent amid turmoil at IRS
Story by Jacob Bogage | March 22, 2025
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/taxes/tax-revenue-could-drop-by-10-per
cent-amid-turmoil-at-irs/ar-AA1Bs7Yp
Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.
Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.
“The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,” said Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official.
The prediction, officials say, is directly tied to changing taxpayer behavior and President Donald Trump’s rapid demolition of parts of the IRS. Senior tax agency officials issued detailed warnings about those outcomes to the incoming Trump administration before the president took office, according to records obtained by The Washington Post.
The administration has moved to fire nearly 20,000 agency employees, specifically targeting new hires in taxpayer services and enforcement divisions. It’s already dismissed more than 11,000 workers at the agency, though some of their statuses are unclear pending fast-moving court cases.
The IRS has dropped investigations of high-value corporations and taxpayers, according to several agency employees involved in those inquiries, because it’s had to triage resources to keep internal systems operating. Two agency commissioners have resigned since Trump took office. The IRS’s head of compliance, Heather Maloy, stepped down effective Friday.
The IRS publishes weekly filing season reports that show the number of returns received and how officials are processing refunds. Those reports show the IRS has received 1.7 percent fewer returns this year compared with the same point in the 2024 filing season.
That percentage is narrower than the projected decrease in total receipts. But the agency also makes more detailed, nonpublic revenue projections based on IRS measurements of scheduled payments from already filed returns and outstanding balances relative to similarly situated taxpayers in previous years.
Those calculations take into account the number of filers who have paid their balances or are owed refunds, those who have scheduled payments by the April 15 deadline, those who have taken extensions, and measurements of annual noncompliance. That gives the agency deeper insight on the amount filers are paying.
The IRS also has separate measurements of business tax receipts. Corporations must pay first-quarter estimated tax on April 15.
“The thing that I think is really alarming is if this data ends up telling a story about how this filing season is evolving, and you’re seeing it happen in real time,” Sarin said.
The IRS has noticed an uptick in online chatter from individuals declaring their intention to not pay taxes this year or to aggressively claim credits and deductions for which they are ineligible, the three people said — wagering that auditors will not examine their accounts.
Representatives from the IRS and Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Other dynamics could explain some of the projected drop in revenue, experts say. Natural disasters, s
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Quote:IRS braces for $500bn drop in revenue as taxpayers skip filings in wake of DOGE cuts at agency
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Excellent.
It was a good day.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Individuals were ‘wagering that auditors will not examine their accounts’ amid DOGE’s plans to downsize the IRS by nearly 20 percent ahead of tax filing season
By Rhian Lubin in New York | Saturday 22 March 2025 15:03 EDT
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/irs-do
ge-cuts-tax-filing-b2719911.html
IRS auditors fired
https://www.google.com/search?q=IRS+auditors+fired
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Money money money for Trump from Amazon Prime Video.
On ‘The Apprentice,’ Donald Trump Showed Us Who He Was. If Only We Had Listened.
Rewatching the series that rebuilt Trump’s reputation is a thoroughly unpleasant experience I wouldn’t recommend.
By Karen Valby | March 19, 2025
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/rewatching-the-apprentice-o
riginal-donald-trump
The braid of Amazon and Donald Trump grows tighter. Prime Video announced last week that it would stream the first seven seasons of The Apprentice, the boardroom reality show that resurrected Trump’s cultural relevance when it premiered in 2004. (This deal is likely to directly line the pockets of Trump, who not only starred in the show but also served as an executive producer, even retaining that credit during his first year in the White House, when The New Celebrity Apprentice aired with Arnold Schwarzenegger as host.) Meanwhile, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose company contributed $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, is earning praise from the president for his recent moves at The Washington Post, such as neutering the editorial staff. Amazon has also entered into a $40 million licensing agreement for a documentary about first lady Melania’s life, which will reportedly see her earn at least $28 million. Democracy dies in backroom deals at the hands of dark billionaires.
It’s a bad trip revisiting The Apprentice today—watching Trump hawk his show from the base of the Statue of Liberty. A Gallup poll measuring Trump’s reputation before the show revealed that 98% of people surveyed knew his name, but 58% viewed him unfavorably. We the people gave the dog back his teeth. As an audience, we were seduced by his mean-spirited catchphrase and illusion of authority. Yet he seemed harmless enough as a TV star, like the charismatic uncle at family dinner who would pick up the check if the table let him tell the same old stories. His hair has forever been his business card. He loved showing contestants his hairline so that they could marvel that it was real.
There’s always been an undertone of menace around Trump. But on The Apprentice, his shifting moods and leering once-overs of female contestants were softened by the fun he was clearly having. His only role on the show was to preen and slice people off at the knees. Firing people gave Trump such pleasure. He loved pitting members of the losing team against one another in final deliberations, goading them to go after one another. His side of the boardroom table was like the emperor’s balcony; the other, the gladiator ring. “She’s killing you,” Trump would say. “You’re getting destroyed.” “Everybody’s killing you, you’re done.”
Occasionally, someone would impress Trump with a bit of clever spin. Rewatching the show, I could see him flipping positions in real time, like how a toddler can change their mood if they’re served dinner with the wrong spoon. Being impressed by people seemed to annoy him; he would sucks in his cheeks and give a begrudging nod. Any expression of vulnerability or ambivalence or pushback incurred his wrath. “How stupid can you be?” he’d ask in what seemed like nearly every episode. Adulation of self and disdain for others were his two home bases.
During my nauseating rewatch, it was interesting to note how morally offended Trump got in season six after a contestant self-deprecatingly referred to himself as “white trash.” Derek Arteta, an entertainment lawyer, was on the chopping block after his team lost a challenge due to a misguided use of go-karts. As he defended his misunderstanding of the challenge’s target audience, he joked, “I’m white trash. I only eat at restaurants with deep-fried appetizers…”
Trump was appalled by the term. “What do you mean, you’re white trash? What does that mean? You don’t joke about that. What does that mean, you’re white trash?” he said. “You know, I grew up in a small town and I’m not sophisticated,” Arteta responded, still smiling. Trump was livid at this point. “I don’t like it as
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Vanity Fair writing about white trash.
You Dems just keep right on becoming the party of the Elite and see where it gets you.
Under 30% approval in all Lefty media polls and dropping so far. 
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:IRS braces for $500bn drop in revenue as taxpayers skip filings in wake of DOGE cuts at agency
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Excellent.
It was a good day.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Individuals were ‘wagering that auditors will not examine their accounts’ amid DOGE’s plans to downsize the IRS by nearly 20 percent ahead of tax filing season
By Rhian Lubin in New York | Saturday 22 March 2025 15:03 EDT
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/irs-do
ge-cuts-tax-filing-b2719911.html
IRS auditors fired
https://www.google.com/search?q=IRS+auditors+fired
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Yeah. I've seen all the tiktoks of stupid Lefty retards telling the world they aren't paying their taxes and fuck Elon.
Thank you for uploading the videos that will be used to identify you and used against you in court.
Good luck. You'll need it.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:You know that IRS will NOT prosecute these people because the IRS doesn't have the auditors. Why not? Trump fired the auditors. You also know from court cases involving Trump that the courts can't swiftly handle tax cheating. Trump's winds of change will blow in an increase in tax cheating.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yeah. I've seen all the tiktoks of stupid Lefty retards telling the world they aren't paying their taxes and fuck Elon.
Thank you for uploading the videos that will be used to identify you and used against you in court.
Good luck. You'll need it.
Tax Cheats Could Prosper Under Trump, IRS Experts Say
The Internal Revenue Service could lose 10 percent of its revenue — $500 billion — because taxpayers and businesses think the Trump administration won't go after them for not paying taxes
By Peter Wade | March 23, 2025
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/tax-cheats-trump-i
rs-1235301645/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Even I disapprove of the Democrats. Why? Because they (Biden is a particularly relevant example, but Chuck Schumer is another ) are acting like James Buchanan, the President just before the Civil War, the President who could have had the entire leadership of the Confederacy rounded up in Washington DC (where they were serving in Congress and talking openly of destroying America) and executed. But Buchanan wouldn't do a goddamn thing to stop those talkative traitors before they went on a rampage. The necessary job of burning slave owners' plantations and killing those traitors was left to Lincoln's Generals Grant and Sherman. Grant went on to be President and Sherman "If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve" became the General of the Army rather than President.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Vanity Fair writing about white trash.
You Dems just keep right on becoming the party of the Elite and see where it gets you.
Under 30% approval in all Lefty media polls and dropping so far.
In 1888, Sherman called upon the South to "let the negro vote, and count his vote honestly", adding that "otherwise, so sure as there is a God in Heaven, you will have another war, more cruel than the last, when the torch and dagger will take the place of the muskets of well-ordered battalions".
Sherman's purpose in 1864: My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman#General_of_the_
Army
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Canada, May I Introduce You to Ukraine?
By David French | March 23, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/opinion/trump-canada-ukraine.html
I had a conversation last week with a Canadian journalist about the culture war on American campuses. After we finished talking about that, she had one final question for me.
“What the hell is Trump thinking about Canada?”
She wasn’t just asking about President Trump’s tariff threats. She was also asking about Trump’s obsession with referring to Canada as the 51st state. The tariffs were somewhat understandable, even if terribly misguided. They are, after all, one of Trump’s few consistent policy obsessions. He likes tariffs perhaps even more than he likes walls.
But if anyone thinks that Trump is merely trolling or joking with his constant references to Canada as the 51st state, I refer you to my newsroom colleague Matina Stevis-Gridneff’s report that Trump told the former prime minister of Canada Justin Trudeau “that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary.”
Trudeau told Canadians that Trump wanted “to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.” The president’s statement is not one a world leader lightly makes, even if that world leader is named Donald Trump.
And why wouldn’t Canadians be alarmed? Trump has been quite clear with his intentions and his reasoning.
Let me quote Trump’s recent conversation with Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host.
“Here’s my problem with Canada,” Trump told Ingraham. “Canada was meant to be the 51st state, because we subsidized Canada by $200 billion a year.”
When a baffled Ingraham pressed him, saying, “You’re tougher with Canada than you are with some of our biggest adversaries,” Trump responded with the same talking point: “Only because it’s meant to be our 51st state.” Later, he said, “One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada.”
So, how did I answer my new Canadian friend? “Canada is Donald Trump’s Ukraine.”
Apparently, Trump agrees. On Friday, he made the comparison explicit. While talking to the press in the Oval Office, he once again called for Canada to become the 51st state and then compared Canada’s bargaining position to Ukraine’s. “The expression I use is some people don’t have the cards,” he said. “I used the expression about a week and a half ago” — referring to his infamous exchange with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, when he told Zelensky: “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now.”
I did not mean that Trump is preparing to invade or use force against Canada. But he does intend to dominate Canada, to render it little more than a vassal of the United States, making it only nominally independent. In fact, you can’t fully understand Trump’s approach to Ukraine without understanding his view of Canada (or Mexico or Greenland or Panama) — and vice versa.
By word and deed, Trump treats Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping as his only real peers. Our allies, by contrast, are our subordinates. It’s as if Putin, Xi and Trump are feudal lords, and each is entitled to his own feudal domain.
It’s easy to forget that Trump’s open hostility to Ukraine isn’t the full story of his response to the Russian invasion. The day after Putin signaled his intent to attack and as the Russian Army massed on Ukraine’s border, Trump told a pair of conservative radio hosts, “This is genius.”
In the same interview, he even declared his admiration for Putin’s ruse of declaring the independence of Ukraine’s eastern regions. “But here’s a guy that says, you know, ‘I’m going to declare a big portion of Ukraine independent,’” Trump said. “He used the word ‘independent,’ and ‘we’re going to go out and we’re going to go in and we’re going to help keep peace.’ You got to say that’s pretty savvy.”
It’s a mistake to think of Trump as a student of history, but he does learn, and he does carefully observe the men he thinks of as his peers (and th
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Social Security: A Time for Outrage
Trump’s policies attack his own base — but who will tell them?
By Paul Krugman | Mar 24, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/social-security-a-time-for-outrage
Donald Trump is often described as a “populist.” Yet his administration is stuffed with wealthy men who are clueless about how the other 99.99 percent lives, while his policies involve undermining the working class while enabling wealthy tax cheats.
What is true is that many working-class voters supported Trump last year because they believed that he was on their side. And that disconnect between perceptions and reality ought to be at the heart of any discussion of what Democrats should do now.
Right now the central front in the assault on the working class is Social Security, which Elon Musk, unable to admit error, keeps insisting is riddled with fraud. The DOGE-bullied Social Security Administration has already announced that those applying for benefits or trying to change where their benefits are deposited will need to verify their identity either online or in person — a huge, sometimes impossible burden on the elderly, often disabled Americans who need those benefits most. And with staff cuts and massive DOGE disruption, it seems increasingly likely that some benefits just won’t arrive as scheduled.
Oh, and Leland Dudek, the acting Social Security administrator, threatened to shut the whole thing down unless DOGE was given access to personal data.
Not to worry, says Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce secretary. Only “fraudsters” would complain about missing a Social Security check:
Let's say social security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.
There’s so much wrong with that statement that it’s hard to know where to start. But it’s clear that Lutnick — like many affluent people — has no idea how important Social Security is to the finances of most older Americans. According to a Social Security Administration study, half of Americans over 65 get a majority of their income from Social Security; a quarter depend almost entirely on Social Security, which supplies more than 90 percent of their income. I doubt that these people would shrug off a missed check.
Reliance on Social Security isn’t evenly distributed across the population; it’s strongly correlated with socioeconomic status. In particular, it very much depends on education, with less-educated Americans much more reliant on the program than those with more education:
Source: Social Security Administration
But here’s the thing — less educated voters strongly favored Trump in November:
And by putting him over the top they set the stage for demolition of a government program that is the only thing standing between them and dire poverty in their later years.
Now, it’s true that during the campaign Trump claimed that he wouldn’t cut Social Security or Medicare. If you were paying attention, however, you knew that Trump was highly likely to break that promise, that a second Trump administration would be pursuing the Project 2025 agenda and would do all it could to dismantle the social safety net. And let’s not forget (although many voters did) that during his first term Trump came within a whisker of destroying the Affordable Care Act, thereby denying health insurance to millions of Americans. Certainly any pundit who’s surprised by what’s happening now should find another profession.
Oh, and on t
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