Presidential Debates

The presidential debates have been (mostly) set for 2024. The Donald debates The Frontrunner on June 27 and our Vice-President, Triple A, debates The Donald’s pick in an unspecified July date. Then there is another presidential debate on September 10.

The dates are perfect for our fantasy where Triple A and her Democrat supporters oust The Frontrunner at the Democrat convention starting August 19. Of course, it is extraordinarily unlikely because it depends on good fortune and Triple A exhibiting the ruthlessness that we have seen from her and the competency that we have not seen from her. She will also be battling people in and around the current administration that are enjoying presidential authority without presidential scrutiny. We’re looking at you Dr. Jill and Secretary Deb.

It is all off if The Frontrunner is commanding on June 27 but the chances of that approach zero. He could be awful but the likely probability is that his performance will be a spin battle. Triple A and her allies are going to need to be prepared to be reasonably subtle but effective: “We need to thank The Frontrunner but relieve him of his burden.” Surely the GOP will be a big help in keeping any of The Frontrunner’s foibles in front of the public.

The really important event will be that unspecified date in July when Triple A debates the GOP VP candidate. Hopefully, (for Triple A, not The Donald) it won’t be Dakota Doug.

Sidebar: A really tough question for us is: Do we prefer a White House with Triple A and some governor not named Gavin over The Donald and Dakota Doug? End Sidebar.

Triple A needs a competent debate where she looks like the best choice to replace the aging candidates that are currently the nominees for president. At a minimum, she needs to look better than The Frontrunner and at least as good as The Donald. We think that a really positive debate performance by Triple A is the unlikely part of the puzzle to fall in place.

A good debate for her and a bad debate for him will give Triple A the chance to start building momentum for a truly interesting Democrat convention. We hope the unlikely happens. It might be good for the country and the catfight would surely be entertaining.

Javier Milei, Davos, And Davros

Speaking the truth to power. It is a misused phrase that is often, although unintentionally, ironic. An unintentionally ironic example was a British soccer player from Manchester United whose name escapes us that criticized the Conservative or Tory government in the UK much to the delight of everyone in the media. He wasn’t speaking to power but from power. On the other hand Mesut Ozil, a former Arsenal player, criticized the Chinese communists for their treatment of his fellow Muslims and he lost his job. That was speaking the truth to power.

We’ve been trying to think of an analogy for Javier Milei, the new president of Argentina, and his recent epic speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos where the rich, famous, and powerful gather. The WSJ (paywall alert) has a longer excerpt. Here is the conclusion:

Therefore, in concluding, I would like to leave a message for all businesspeople here and for those who are not here in person but are following from around the world. Do not be intimidated, either by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state. Do not surrender to a political class that only wants to stay in power and retain its privileges. You are social benefactors. You’re heroes. You’re the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen. Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being. Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself. You are the true protagonists of this story, and rest assured that as from today, Argentina is your staunch unconditional ally. Thank you very much and long live freedom, damn it. [Emphasis added]

Wow. Wow. Parasites. OMG wow! Is he the love child of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher? Another analogy to Javier’s courage would be when President Warren Harding went to the celebration of the founding of Birmingham Alabama in 1921 and, amongst other things said:

 I would say let the black man vote when he is fit to vote: prohibit the white man voting when he unfit to vote. Especially would I appeal to the self-respect of the colored race. I would inculcate in it the wish to improve itself: distinct race, with a heredity, a set of traditions, an array of aspirations all its own.

If you think of Warren as a minor president who died in office you ought to read the whole speech at the link above. In Birmingham, Alabama in 1921 he was surely speaking the truth to power.

But a more recent analogy to Javier is the fourth doctor in the Doctor Who series played by Tom Baker. Check out the pictures of Tom and Javier. People have tried to compare Javier and The Donald because of their hair but Tom, as The Doctor, and Javier are a much better match on both hair and personality. Check out the pictures at the link for the hair comparison. Both are here to save humanity. Javier is starting with Argentina and trying to save us from the advance of the state and state like actors as in those who meet at Davos. The Doctor was usually saving humanity from aliens although sometimes he is saving the whole universe too. The Doctor’s deadliest enemies were Daleks. And the Daleks were created by, wait for it, … Davros. And, of course, there is a great scene where The Doctor confronts Davros just like Javier’s speech at Davos. 

So it is settled. Javier is just like Tom Baker’s portrayal of The Doctor. Tom Baker was the longest running version of The Doctor. We hope the same for Javier but actually speaking the truth to power is a much more dangerous occupation in real life than on TV.

Lots of folks are upset about the potential presidential rematch between The Donald and The Frontrunner. The Morning Dispatch asked:

What presidential election of your lifetime do you think featured the “best” two major-party candidates? Where would a hypothetical Trump-Biden rematch in 2024 rank for you?

We think Carter-Reagan was the best. For elections in our lifetime Carter was the best Democrat elected and Reagan was the best from the GOP so it was far and away the best matchup although we are very happy about the result. There have been many more bad matchups and the rematch of The Donald and The Frontrunner would be amongst them.

A few days ago, Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO put the problem of the rematch of The Donald versus The Frontrunner nicely:

If I believe, as I do, that it simply cannot be the case that we are going to end up next year with two presidential candidates whom the public openly loathes, I am professionally obliged to do more than simply share my thesis, wave my hands, and hit the bar. But the thing is: I can’t, because I don’t know. Instead, I must point to the same rules that govern the free market, and propose that, as matter of elementary logic, our democratic system surely cannot be that different in kind from our private system of exchange. [Emphasis added.]

We agree with Charlie that The Donald and The Frontrunner are worthy of our loathing. Where we disagree is that we think our (not quite) democratic system of nominating presidential candidates is vastly different from our private system of exchange. There are at least three ways our electoral system is not a free market.

First, there are only two significant parties, the GOP and the Democrats. The barriers to entry for a new party are huge. It is possible that No Labels might try in 2024 but it seems unlikely they will try and even less likely that they will succeed. As The Donald recognized, the way to have a chance is to take over one of the parties.

Second, as Jim Geraghty often tells us, name recognition is very close to a must now. We have read several folks comment that it would be nice for the GOP to nominate somebody able like Dakota Doug . We concur but it won’t happen because of his lack of name recognition. Thus, the Democrats actually nominated Hillary Clinton and Robert F. Kennedy, junior is taken as an almost serious candidate.

Third, there is who makes the market. In our system of exchange it is the folks with knowledge and incentives to make rational choices. Yes, consumers are often irrational but the market makers are irrational less often. The market makers in politics, and yes we are oversimplifying, are the political crazies from Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. As a comparison, look at what consumers have chosen over the past fifteen years, e.g.,streaming television, as opposed to the major party nominees over the same period. With the exception of Mitt, there is nobody you really want to be president among them. We don’t expect to do any better in 2024. We live in hope that it could happen but there is nothing in our recent history of presidential nominees that suggests the hope that Charlie professes.

GOP Picks Rookie RINO

In the time of the MLB playoffs the GOP went with a (relative) rookie for Speaker of the House. David Zimmermann at NRO tells us that Mike Johnson (who???) was voted in:

With four terms under his belt and no senior leadership roles or full committee chairmanships, [Mike] is now the least experienced speaker since Representative John Carlisle (D., Ky.) was elected in 1883. Carlisle was similarly in the midst of his fourth term before rising to the office of presiding officer.

It appears that Mike’s only notable attempt at leadership was to try and help the Chief RINO, The Donald steal the 2020 election:

In an effort to challenge President Joe Biden’s electoral victory, [Mike] collected more than 100 House Republican signatures on an amicus brief in support of a Texas lawsuit that sought to overturn the election results in four key states: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. 

We wish Mike great perspicacity in the coming year. He will need it. As we know from MLB most rookies don’t become stars. We hope a GOP star is born but we expect that Mike will be a minority backbencher after the November 2024 election. On the other hand, the other rookie from over a century ago, John, was speaker of the House for six years before being kicked upstairs to the Senate. We have slightly more hope for political sobriety than earlier today.

More On Amity And Charles

In our last post we introduced Amity Shlaes NRO post on Charles Renwick’s book All The Presidents’ Taxes. We have one more quote to discuss. We agree with Amity that Charles is on weak ground when he tries to create questions for the public in judging candidate tax returns. Charles would like to require disclosure of such returns. We want to look at the third question and part of Amity’s response:

The third is just as bad: “Are they paying their fair share?” Who determines what is fair? Federal agents, presumably, or their allies, professional accountants.

We don’t think paying a fair share is an interesting question. Amity asks an excellent question: Who determines fair? As we see it what is a fair share depends upon the degree of observer envy. If a fair share really means the correct amount of tax then it becomes uninteresting unless there is somebody to audit each candidate. If there is an obvious mistake then we might disparage the candidate’s accountant but little more. We suppose if the candidate is paying too much tax we might conclude that he is not to be trusted with conserving tax dollars but others might not care and there doesn’t seem like there is much there.

Our other concern in that quote is Amity describing professional accountants as the allies of federal agents. The professional accountants’ responsibility is to see that their clients pay the minimum tax given their risk preferences. Why risk preferences? Because some tax minimization schemes might lead to an audit or a court case like the upcoming Supreme Court case. Obviously, the folks in the case cited are willing to go through a tough slog to try to win on principle. Many would decide the cost of pursuing a case all the way to the Supreme Court is not worth the considerable cost.

Professional accountants are not auditing tax clients. Basically, professional accountants accept the client’s assertions unless those assertions bang up against reality. IRS agents might not accept taxpayer assertions and can compel taxpayers to produce documents and information.

Sidebar: If you have done something illegal don’t tell a professional accountant because privileged information only applies to lawyers. Let the lawyer hire the accountant if necessary. End Sidebar.

The relationship between professional accountants and the IRS is not quite the adversarial relationship of lawyers in a courtroom but it is certainly not true that the IRS agents and the professional accountants are allies. If the parties cannot agree then it can go to court for a true adversarial face-off between the lawyers at the IRS and the taxpayer’s lawyers.

Sugar Czar Needed

One of our little joys is a cube of sugar with our Darjeeling in the morning. We know, we can get the spoonful of sugar that makes Mary Poppins’ charges so happy or we can get packets, or we can even use other kinds of sweeteners. We prefer sugar cubes. Our problem is that sugar cubes have been missing from the local grocery shelves for several months. We know because we check carefully and find the price label for both brands of sugar cubes on shelves. One store even has a “sorry it is out of stock” sign which winds us up to no end after weeks of checking.

Satire Alert. Obviously there is a sugar cube market failure and we need a governmental solution to this dreadful shortage. There are full shelves of sugar bags of various sizes and various kinds including: granulated sugar (both regular and premium), light brown sugar, dark brown sugar, sugar in the raw, baker’s sugar, and confectioner’s sugar. Why can’t we have a few boxes of sugar cubes? The answer, of course, is that we can. All is we need is a government mandate for sugar cubes. The government mandates all sorts of strange things like solar panels and windmills. Why not mandate something that somebody actually wants: sugar cubes. The Sugar Czar doesn’t need to be a cabinet level post but he will need some suitably vague legislation and minions to make sure every county in America gets enough sugar cubes. And what happens when sugar cubes are fairly distributed to Americans? Well, we will always have the Sugar Czar to make sure that American sugar cube users are never, ever inconvenienced again. End Satire Alert.

If you don’t understand the satire read The Weed Agency by Jim Geraghty. Yes, we know it is fiction. And let us know if you have any sugar cubes.

Praising The Electorate

We have, rightly we think, complained about the candidates the two parties have produced recently. All of the Democrat nominees for president in a year starting in 2 have been unimpressive but they have won several time in general elections. They have won because the quality of GOP presidential nominees has waned with the Democrats. The GOP, however, has outdone the Democrats on nominating candidates for senator. Their choices include a football player, a football coach, a celebrity doctor that didn’t live in the state, and one that had to declare, “I am not a witch.”

Sidebar: Of course the statement above is unfair to all football folk. Jack Kemp was a football player of some note that became a GOP politician of some significance. End Sidebar.

At least one of them won. And then, of course, the GOP has George Santos in the House.

But today we have come to praise the electorate. Over at the NRO Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru has a short report on income inequality that connects to a longer piece at Politico. Here is what Ramesh said:

From 2017 through 2022, wages at the bottom of the labor market have been rising faster than at the top. [yea for The Donald?] The trend was especially pronounced from 2020 through 2022, when wages for high earners dropped. So concludes an analysis by Victoria Guida for Politico.

The fact that Biden’s job-approval rating, and his rating on the economy in particular, is so low suggests that voters care a lot less about income inequality per se than they do about broad-based wage growth. Politico’s analysis shows that middle-income workers have been losing ground as inflation erodes their paychecks. [Emphasis Added]

Yes, we did quote Ramesh’s whole post so you don’t need to read it. We are not sure if that is improper but we really need you to see what Ramesh said so we can discuss it. Perhaps we do need an editor. We also note that The Frontrunner did not become president until January 2021 and there is sure to be a lag between becoming president and having an impact on wages so we put a “yea The Donald” in. Still, some of the reduction in income inequality comes under The Frontrunner’s aegis.

We have come to praise the electorate because they should care much, much more about broad-based wage growth (and economic growth) than they do about income inequality. Voters in the US shouldn’t care about income inequality or equality at all. The exact Gini Coefficient and debates over how to measure it shouldn’t matter at all.

At all? Well, we did say the US and we would expand it to any other country with at least, say, a Moderately Free economy according to the Heritage Index. JFK overstated it when he said a rising tide lifts all boats but economic growth lifts many, many boats and provides the resources for individuals or organizations, but not limited to the government, to attend to the boats in distress. So let us praise the electorate for recognizing that income inequality isn’t an issue of any significance. We are not as sure we will get the same answer when the demagogues gin up the envy monster but it is a step in the right direction for the electorate. Well done!

Political Failure Is Not Expert Failure

We live in a time of political failure. Contrary to what some assert we do not live in a time of expert failure. Experts are given a variety of questions that range from relatively easy to nearly impossible. The experts have provided us with predictions and degree of assurance to help the decision makers. The problem is that political decision makers have failed. One significant part of their failure is distinguishing in the degree of certainty in expert predictions.

One of the problems we have is people often confuse credentials with expertise. Many people in government have credentials with various degrees from top ranked schools. They might have some expertise but experts are experts in limited field. Pundits and politicians might know more that a layman in related fields. So, for example, from time to time we discuss tax issues. We are not an expert on taxes but we have a basic understanding of them and combined with some knowledge of economics that we can make some general recommendations but we will need experts to nail down the details. The big government folks on the left and now on the right are going to use experts to create a better world. The experts they hire can answer at least some of their questions but the problem is their questions. And, of course, the left and the new right ask very different questions.

Obviously, there have been political failures forever. We think one of our best grad school papers was the Civil War as a political failure. Both the Union and the Confederacy had estimated the cost of the war. They had ludicrously underestimated the actual actual cost of the war but there were official estimates.

Sidebar: The cost of the Civil War estimates are a nice example of experts being wrong in a predictable manner. Anyone observing a war almost anywhere will notice that the expense will almost always be more than was expected. Experts are not always right and it is the job of political leaders to ask good questions of them. End Sidebar.

We were studying the economics of slavery. Fogel and Engerman showed that there were active markets for slaves. One of the proposals to end slavery was to free slaves at birth and death. A little arithmetic adjusting for the timing of the payments showed that the cost of freeing the slaves was less than the estimated cost of the war. Cooler political heads would have come to a better solution than war.

Back to the present and Jonah Goldberg is on the case of the misgovernment of cities in Being Is Not A Substitute For Doing at The Dispatch. Yes there is a paywall and Jonah can be an acquired taste but this post is pretty good. He wanders around discussing Lori Lightfoot’s loss in the Democrat primary for the mayor of Chicago before he gets to the excuse offered by writers that big cities are ungovernable to excuse the failures of Lori and other Democrats:

But maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t that big cities are ungovernable, but that the entrenched Democratic machines dominated by fringe activists and pampered by friendly journalists are incapable of governing?

Jonah is absolutely correct to take the party of government to task for failing to govern. The GOP, however, deserves equal opprobrium. The Democrats have been screwing up most major cities for decades yet their putative opponents, the GOP, cannot find the policies or the candidates to become even plausible competition in most big cities. The party of government can’t govern and the other party can’t even find a way to compete against failed policies and candidates.

Another example of political failure, this time at the federal level, is that the budget and entitlements are, to use a technical term, all screwed up. Brian Riedl at NRO has a nice subtitle: New CBO Projections Show A Deteriorating Fiscal Situation, But No One Seems To Care, You should read it all but here is Brian’s short summary after making the point that nobody seems to care:

Yet Washington’s fiscal path demands attention. Over the next decade — even under the CBO’s rosy scenario of expiring tax cuts, no new spending expansions, and low interest rates — the national debt held by the public will leap from $25 trillion to $46 trillion. Annual budget deficits, which have never exceeded $1.5 trillion outside the recent pandemic, will approach $3 trillion within a decade.

Yes, MWG cares as numerous recent posts show but both parties seem to be playing chicken with the budget although we are not sure if they are aware of it. As far as we can see the budget policy of all the Democrats (well Bernie is a socialist and he want to increase payments by $200 a month) and most of the GOP is to ride the train to entitlement insolvency and the large entitlement cuts required by law and then … a miracle happens. Unfortunately, the miracle gets harder to create each day. We wish we had a solution to the current endemic political failure. Perhaps we will get lucky in the 2024 elections doesn’t seem like much of a plan.

Social Security Insolvency Again

Social Security insolvency (SSI) is a simple problem and yet perhaps the most serious issue our federal government faces. The unwillingness of our elected monocultural leaders to do anything about SSI is astounding given their abundant actions on Climate Change (even sillier is Climate Crisis), Equity, and gender confusion. Now The Hill informs us (without a link to the CBO report):

A report released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warned the Social Security trust fund could run out of money by 2032 — a year earlier than previously thought — if Congress doesn’t make changes to bring in more revenue or reduce benefit payouts.

That means that the president we elect in 2024 will face SSI in his second term.

Sidebar: We don’t think the Democrats are going to renominate our current president, The Frontrunner, in 2024. If they do we think he is unlikely to win unless the GOP primary voters save him so we like the second term prediction. End Sidebar.

Go here to The Reformer created by the Committee for a Responsible Federal budget and see the extent of the problem. Then you can pick your set of solutions from their menu. Before you start creating solutions check the second chart, Social Security Spending and Revenue. You can see that the 20 (+?) percent cut in 2032 (or so) will grow because baseline outlays go up sharply after that but revenues do not.

After you pick your solutions you need to be alert to the second problem, what we call the soft landing problem. We created one solution by picking our choices and then inching up the tax rate one-tenth of a percent until we had covered the entire shortfall and here is the response:

Congratulations! Under your plan Social Security will be sustainably solvent for the next 75 years and beyond.

Sounds good. But here is the other part:

112% Percent of 75-year shortfall closed; (140% of shortfall closed in 75th year)

The 140 percent is bold in the original but that is our concern that solving the problem at this late date causes a massive surplus sometime in the foreseeable future. In this case 40 percent of Social Security 75 years from now. That is a massive number even if we don’t have an exact one. Now it is possible that with a wider array of options than the Reformer you might be able to get the dotted red (revenues after policy changes) and dotted blue (outlays after policy changes) lines to converge while avoiding a benefit cut from the trust fund running out. It is unlikely but what is sure is that the task gets harder every single day.

What is more likely is that solving the Social Security problem will include either a temporary benefit cut or a temporary tax increase that is not part of Social Security to fill the gap between insolvency and solvency. Any guesses on which one we will get? We need to get SSI into the monocultures brain NOW.

Curbing The IRS

Now that’s more like it. We complained yesterday when the President’s Office of Management and Budget took issue with the GOP bill to curb the $80 earmarked for the IRS. To remind you, we have Ari from NRO:

“With their first economic legislation of the new Congress, House Republicans are making clear that their top economic priority is to allow the rich and multi-billion dollar corporations to skip out on their taxes, while making life harder for ordinary, middle-class families that pay the taxes they owe,” the federal agency asserted in a statement Monday.

We said trying to defend the indefensible is a job for a partisan rather than a government entity. Even one that reports to the president. And this morning we see that Catherine Rampell (restricted access) is up to the job. Her post is entitled, “First Order Of Business For The GOP House? Defunding The (Tax) Police.”

Sidebar: Did you know Catherine’s dad is a CPA and she has a net worth of $1 million at age 37. Well, it looks like that post hasn’t ben updated and she is 38. We wonder what her dad thinks of her current post. End Sidebar.

We cannot find the post electronically. It is in the print version of our newspaper but it is not on their website and we cannot find it without restrictions. That means that we will be typing in quotes from Catherine’s post. We apologize in advance for any errors in our typing. End Sidebar.

Since we can’t find her previous posts we don’t know if she supports defunding the (real) police or not. We will start with the good part of Catherine’s post. About three-quarters of the way through she accepts that the GOP and almost everyone else has a point when “they say the administration has not adequately explained how it will ensure enforcement targets the well-heeled, rather than the working class.” She pleads guilty to having read the post we cited yesterday that the IRS is using the new funding to audit the Earned Income Credit that applies to low income folks. She argues that a miracle will happen and the IRS will concentrate on what Catherine thinks are high value targets like, as she specifically mentions, The Donald. She provides no evidence to suggest that “rich tax cheats” are a higher value target than numerous taxpayers in other classifications. The IRS is either foolish, a not unlikely possibility, or has come to a different conclusion based on the evidence. The reduction of the 1099 limit from $20,000 to $600 suggests that IRS wants lots of targets. We are always skeptical of miracles and even more so when they involve government agencies. We appreciate that Catherine has recognized the problem with ensuring IRS enforcement falls on the groups she wants to bully but she hasn’t come anywhere near solving it.

The real problem with Catherine’s attack on the GOP comes here:

Surely you’ve heard about the “army” 87,000 supposedly gun-toting IRS agents coming to terrorize you and your innocent working-class neighbors. [Delete paragraph break] None of that is true, not even the 87,000 figure (which refers to broader IRS hiring, not just the hiring of auditors and doesn’t subtract the many expected to retire over the next few years). But more to the point, the IRS desperately needs to increase enforcement, particularly against wealthy scofflaws. [Later she switches to rich tax cheats to describe the folks she wants the IRS to target.]

Let’s unpack what Catherine has said. We agree that 87,000 does not make an army. An army is much bigger. The “army” won’t all be gun-toting. IRS agents are divided into revenue and criminal investigation (CID). CID is much smaller and only those folks are gun-toting. Did anyone think that all 87,000 would be agents? Now we are perhaps the only one that has doubted in print that the IRS will be able to hire all the folks they want at the prices they expect to pay but there will be tens of thousands of new agents and, as Catherine later admits, some them will be terrorizing people like you and your neighbors. The retirement parenthetical is completely wrong. The positions and the dollars for the folks that retire are still in the budget. We expect that the IRS will reap the same windfall from retirements that the university did. Senior folks with high salaries retire and are replaced by junior folks with lower salaries. The difference is called salary savings and used to fund all manner of things.

Then there are the targets that Catherine wants to emphasize. A scofflaw or cheat is somebody that intentionally (or deliberately) doesn’t comply with the law. That is tax evasion:

Tax evasion is an illegal activity in which a person or entity deliberately avoids paying a true tax liability. Those caught evading taxes are generally subject to criminal charges and substantial penalties. To willfully fail to pay taxes is a federal offense under the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax code. [Error in the cite: that should be Internal Revenue Code.]

We hate to be the one to tell Catherine but she is going to need those gun-toters at CID to prosecute tax evasion. Revenue agents can’t do that. Tax evasion must be turned over to CID. Now perhaps Catherine is not being careful and just trying to generate clicks by playing the envy card but the differences among tax avoidance, tax disputes, and tax evasion are serious matters that can mean the difference between prison and not.

Other than the seemingly obvious points that not all of the 87,000 will be agents and only a few will be gun-toting Catherine is agreeing to all of the GOP’s complaints. She tried but it really doesn’t work.

Now the GOP House is supporting the fair tax law to eliminate the income tax and all of the enforcement problems.

Sidebar Two: We are not sure we would vote to replace the Internal Revenue Code with the fair tax law. When presented with a binary choice we might go fair tax law but we would prefer to debate it and come up with a better solution. End Sidebar Two.

Perhaps, contra to Catherine’s conclusion, the GOP does care about law and order. And we know the bills passed by the GOP House won’t become law because the Senate Democrats won’t vote for it and if they did the president wouldn’t sign it. Unless you work or want to work for the IRS, it seems like an easy choice on which side to support.