"The truth doesn't drown in water and doesn't burn in fire."
Administration delays release of IRS data showing impact of GOP tax cuts
Politico: “The Trump administration is delaying the release of detailed data showing how Republicans’ 2025 tax cuts affected millions of Americans’ taxes, even as it tries to sell voters on the law ahead of the midterm elections. The numbers document which tax breaks were claimed by people in different income brackets, as well as information like how much they paid in taxes.
The IRS typically releases the data in the wake of each filing season, and this year’s rollout is more anticipated because it’s expected to provide the first detailed look at how taxpayers are taking advantage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, including its new deductions for overtime wages and tipped income.
The data was scheduled to be released in July, and then updated again in September, as the IRS processed more people’s returns —but the agency hasn’t published either. The IRS said it is awaiting approval from the Treasury Department to publish the figures.
But the delay has already irked some who complain it is part of a pattern of the administration withholding otherwise routine releases of tax data…”
It’s time to de-privatize the US government. “The problem is not just that privatization is often inefficient because it adds a nontransparent layer of profiteering on top of government functions. The problem is that government loses basic capacity.”
Which Companies on the ATO’s List Paid No Tax This Year? | The West Report
Scammers Are Stealing Millions From Food Stamp Recipients. Congress Could Fix It — but Won’t.ProPublica
Tlaib Unveils Bill to Ban Federal Funding for Flock Cameras Amid ‘Mass Surveillance Crisis’ Common Dreams
Flock CEO defends surveillance technology amid national backlash: ‘We shouldn’t pause progress’TechCrunch
IRS Revokes 71 Pieces of Tax Guidance; Tax Pros Wrangle With Treasury Rule Authority Post-Loper Bright
Bloomberg Law, IRS Revokes 71 Pieces of Tax Guidance, Calling Them Obsolete:
The IRS revoked 71 pieces of guidance that it says are obsolete as part of President Donald Trump’s push for deregulation.
The revoked revenue rulings, revenue procedures, notices, and other documents “no longer provide useful information,” the IRS said in a notice Tuesday (Notice 2026-58). Clarifying that they are obsolete will streamline tax administration, reduce the volume of guidance that taxpayers and their advisers need to review, and increase clarity of the tax law, the agency said.
The move follows Trump executive orders to eliminate guidance that is “overbearing and burdensome” and to repeal 10 existing regulations for each new one issued.
The revoked pieces of guidance were issued as far back as 1954 and as recently as 2024.
Bloomberg Law, Tax Pros Wrangle With Treasury Rule Authority Post-Loper Bright:
Hemel: Ordinary Loss Harvesting — A Tax Shelter of Treasury’s Own Making
Daniel J. Hemel (NYU), Ordinary Loss Harvesting: A Tax Shelter of Treasury’s Own Making, 192 Tax Notes Fed. 2191 (Sept. 21, 2026):
Tax loss harvesting typically allows investors to generate capital losses that they can use to offset capital gains and up to $3,000 per year in ordinary income. A new type of tax-aware strategy — ordinary loss harvesting — offers high-net-worth investors a different, and quite extraordinary, opportunity: to generate ordinary losses that can offset potentially unlimited amounts of active business income.
Why Did DOGE Exist? Now We Know.
The New Republic- Turns out, Elon Musk’s pimply minions didn’t actually want to cut government spending. They wanted to get a piece of it for themselves.: “One of the nagging questions about the DOGE fiasco is why. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was established to cut $2 trillionfrom the $7 trillion federal budget. But in fiscal year 2026, which ended two weeks ago, the federal budget was $7.4 trillion, a 6 percent increase. The budget deficit, whose size was the reason to cut government spending, increased by 12 percent to $2 trillion. Some of that increased spending is the result of DOGE cuts.
As I explained four months after DOGE closed its doors last year, even if we were to take at face value DOGE’s claim to have saved the taxpayer $215 billion, you’d have to subtract from that the $135 billion that Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, said DOGE cost the government in lost productivity, paid leave, and the rehiring of fired workers. You’d also have to figure in the $597 billion in lost revenue that the Yale Budget Lab now projectsfor the next 10 years due to DOGE cuts at the IRS. That puts DOGE about $517 million in the hole (more than twice the estimate I reported last year). So why did about 200 people, more than two dozen of them “special employees” drawn from the tech world, flock to DOGE?
As Michael Lewis observes in his wonderful new book, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, the typical special employee “was a 25-year-old tech guy trying to breathe the same air as Elon Musk and only just now grokking the fact that the United States government had three branches.” DOGE had the feel of a startup, with Musk hosting a six-month slumber party on the fifth floor of the Office of Personnel Management, from which most OPM personnel, even very high-ranking ones, were excluded.
The Muskrats had carte blanche to show up at any federal agency and secure access to computer data that they didn’t even try to understand. Not understanding made it easier to score points with Musk. But Lewis’s answer is incomplete; it turns out there’s also a simpler and more cynical answer. Like so many self-styled crusaders against government spending—indeed, like Musk himself, whose companies, pre-DOGE, extracted somewhere north of $38 billion from the federal government—the Muskrats wanted to suck on the government teat. Read all about it in a Washington Post story published Monday:
Roughly two dozen former DOGE staffers have parlayed their government experience into relevant private-sector jobs or investments—becoming founders, securing CEO positions or senior executive roles, amassing large stakes in start-ups looking to win government contracts or approvals, or taking the skills developed at DOGE to the private sector. Though several of the businesses are only months old, with little public activity, at least six DOGE alumni have registered on Sam.gov, a governmentcontractingportal examined by The Post…”
Who shows up to the midterms?
USAFacts: “Voter turnout in the last two midterm elections has been higher compared to midterms in the past four decades.
Every four years, a pattern repeats: fewer Americans vote in the midterm election than did in the presidential race before it. That voter drop-off has persisted for decades, but in the last two election cycles midterm turnout was higher than it was for much of the past four decades. Since 1980, presidential elections have had an average reported voter turnout of 63%. Midterms averaged 48%. Generally, voter turnout drops by an average of about 15 percentage points between a presidential election and the following midterm.
But the 2018 midterms were an exception: turnout fell eight points, the smallest drop in four decades. The 2022 midterms had the standard 15-point dip. Presidential vote turnout was atypically high in 2020.
And despite the standard midterm dip, 2022’s turnout was still 52%, the second-highest midterm turnout in the available data. (2018 was the highest) The 2026 midterms are fast approaching. Before Americans head to the polls (or their mailbox) this fall, let’s look at census data from the last full election cycle to understand this uptick in midterm voting…”