The Ninth of the Ten Commandments is “You shall not give false witness against your neighbor.” This means two things: “Do not lie when testifying in court.” And, “Do not lie.” Period. “Thou shalt not bear false witness” forbids: “1. Speaking falsely in any matter, lying, equivocating, and any way devising and designing to deceive our neighbor.
HERE is a question for the religious right wing, where in your faith are deception and lying deemed as acceptable tactics to achieve your goals? What kind of witness, what kind of testimony for your faith do these tactics provide? I am sure Jesus Christ NEVER resorted to deception and lies, nor did he allow any of his disciples to deceive and lie. SO why is it acceptable for Christian politicians to promote a campaign based on deception and lies, the goal being the further enrichment of the extremely wealthy? And people wonder why Christianity is loosing adherents in the U.S. DEMOCRATS, especially religious, especially Christian Democrats need to consistently expose this hypocrisy as long as the religious right continues to do it. IT is time for Democrats to stop ceding the religious electorate to the gop / greed over people party. This from the Washington Post and Politico
Opinion Leaked audio of a billionaire GOP donor hands Democrats a weapon
That’s par for the course. But now, a billionaire GOP donor has reportedly been caught on a recording advising Republicans to amplify distortions exactly like this.
Politico obtained audio of a conference call that Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel held with top GOP donors, telling them their help is badly needed to win the Senate.
McDaniel advised the donors that Democrats are swamping Republicans in money, because GOP fundraising is flat with small donors. Hence big donors must step up and bail out GOP candidates by giving directly to their campaigns, McDaniel told them.
But buried in the Politico story is another revelation.
Specifically, Politico reports, during the question-and-answer session, billionaire GOP donor Steve Wynn asked whether there are additional ways for very well-heeled donors to give anonymously. Wynn also urged Republicans to crank up the messaging that Democratic tax policies will primarily hammer working-class people, per Politico:
The billionaire also offered up some messaging advice. Republican candidates, he said, should run aggressive TV ads casting Democrats as advocates of tax policies that would hurt lower-wage earners and small businesses.“Hard-hitting kind of spots with a man’s voice, no soft pedal,” Wynn suggested, before giving a sample script: “‘They’re coming after you if you’re a waiter, if you’re a bartender, if you’re anybody with a cash business … they’re coming after you.’”
It’s particularly perverse for a billionaire donor such as Wynn to advise Republicans to “message” in this way because the new legislation’s provisions are actually designed to target the very wealthiest Americans who benefit from business structures that require lots of IRS resources to audit. That is, people like Wynn.
To be fair, it’s not entirely clear which tax policies Wynn was referring to here. But Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow with the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, notes that Wynn’s claim is often made by opponents of beefing up IRS tax funding. They say such funding will inevitably mean increased targeting of low-level cash workers and cash businesses, because they are often tax avoiders.
It’s true that cash workers and small-to-midsize cash businesses are sometimes part of the tax avoidance problem. But the new policy — which would spend $80 billion on IRS enforcement, with the goal of raising at least $200 billion in additional tax revenue over 10 years — is specifically meant to address a problem that has been a huge boon to very rich taxpayers.
The infusion of money is necessary because the IRS has been the target of an extraordinarily successful campaign to defund it. Who benefits most from an underfunded IRS? The wealthy.
As ProPublica usefully documented, when the IRS finds itself without sufficient resources and personnel, it’s outmatched by the ultrawealthy, who can hire squadrons of accountants and lawyers to help them avoid paying taxes.
Notably, while audit rates have fallen across the board in recent years, they’ve plunged the most for the wealthy. As the Government Accountability Office documented, in 2010, 21.2 percent of tax returns reporting over $10 million in income were audited; by 2019, that fell to 3.9 percent. Among those making between $5 million and $10 million, audits fell from 13.5 percent to just 1.4 percent.
“The lack of resources prevents the IRS from ensuring that large and sprawling operations pay their full tax bill,” Rosenthal told us. “The point of increased enforcement is to pursue these businesses.”
There’s no telling whether Wynn himself will be affected by the Inflation Reduction Act’s changes. But Wynn, who presided over casinos and properties on multiple continents, oversaw the same sort of complex business structures that potentially benefited from years of starved IRS enforcement, Rosenthal says.
“Wynn is trying to push Republicans to scare the little fish into thinking the IRS is targeting them," Rosenthal told us, “when in fact the IRS has pledged to target the big fish.”
In short, the new policies will target members of Wynn’s class. It’s pretty revealing for Wynn to be urging Republicans to attack those policies by arguing that their real victims will be waiters and bartenders. Democrats should jump on this.
RNC chief on tape to donors: We need help to win the Senate
So many lies, so little time.
It is impossible to keep up with the volume of disinformation churned out by the MAGA-occupied Republican Party. But sometimes it’s worth pausing to examine the anatomy of a particularly egregious fabrication, to understand the broader “alternative fact” ecosystem that misinforms tens of millions of Americans.
Let’s consider the lie, endlessly repeated by Republicans and the Fox News-led echo chamber, that new legislation enacted by Democrats funds the hiring of “87,000 armed IRS agents.” Like the “death panel” fabrication during the Obamacare debate, this is a whole-cloth invention designed to stoke paranoia.
Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.), head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, sent an open letter last week warning Americans not to work for the IRS. He falsely claimed that the Democrats’ climate, energy and tax bill would add “roughly 87,000 agents” at the IRS, creating “an IRS super-police force”:
“The IRS made it very clear that one of the ‘major duties’ of these new positions is to ‘be willing to use deadly force.’ … The IRS is making it very clear that you not only need to be ready to audit and investigate your fellow hardworking Americans, your neighbors and friends, you need to be ready and, to use the IRS’s words, willing, to kill them.”
Where to begin?
The IRS certainly isn’t adding 87,000 armed agents. It isn’t even adding 87,000 agents. In fact, it’s not even adding 87,000 employees.
When you figure in attrition (current funding doesn’t let the IRS fill all vacancies), Treasury officials tell me, the expected increase in personnel would be more like 40,000, over the course of a decade — which would merely restore IRS staffing to around the 117,000 it had in 1990.
Only about 6,500 of the new hires would be “agents.” The rest would be customer-service representatives, data specialists and the like.
And fewer than 1 percent of the new hires would be armed. (The IRS job posting Scott cited, which predated the new law, was specifically for such law-enforcement personnel.) Such officers, who go after drug rings and Russian oligarchs, have been part of the IRS for more than a century.
As for the IRS coming after “hardworking Americans,” Treasury says the new law will result in a “lower likelihood of audit” for ordinary taxpayers, because technology upgrades will enable the IRS to target the actual tax cheats — the super-rich — for more audits. The wealthiest 1 percent defraud the government, and fellow taxpayers, of more than $160 billion a year.
So here we have a Republican Party leadership figure generating false hysteria about armed government agents, hysteria that has increased threats against the people who collect the funds for the U.S. military, among everything else. And he’s dishonestly fomenting antigovernment fury in the service of protecting filthy-rich tax cheats. (Scott’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
It isn’t just Scott.
Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), fantasizing about an “army of 87,000 IRS agents,” proclaimed that “we WILL NOT FUND these 87k armed new IRS agents who will target the American people.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) mused on Fox News about “a strike force that goes in with AK-15s [sic] already loaded ready to shoot some small-business person.”
House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) warned that “Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you.”
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel saw an “IRS ‘SWAT team’ ” invading “your kids’ lemonade stand.”
Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade imagined that IRS agents would “hunt down and kill middle class taxpayers that don’t pay enough.”
Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.) envisioned “87,000 new agents, AR-15s and 5 million rounds of ammunition.”
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) claimed “87,000 new IRS agents.” Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia alleged “87,000 armed IRS agents.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called it a “middle finger to the American public.”
The media startup Grid found that Republican members of Congress tweeted the “87,000 agents” falsehood hundreds of times, while Fox News has repeated it more than 90 times this month, according to the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer — all unmoved by fact checks repeatedly debunking the nonsense.
Grid traced the 87,000-agents lie to Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, which in May 2021 took a Treasury Department proposal to add 86,852 positions at the IRS by 2031 (again, a gross figure that didn’t account for attrition) and wrongly concluded: “Biden Plans to Hire 87,000 New IRS Agents.” Sen. Joni Ernst (Iowa) repeated the misrepresentation, and Republicans were off to the races.
Instead, they could have told the truth: that the administration plans to add a few thousand IRS agents over 10 years, and a few hundred armed officers, to go after super-rich tax cheats. But the lie is so much scarier.
