American Kleptocracy.

"Nations do not escape from their past merely by making a revolution."

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioner Charles P. Rettig told Congress his agency wouldn’t increase audits on households earning less than $400,000 after being handed circa 87,000 more agents in the Orwellianly-monikered Inflation Reduction Act hurried through the U.S. Congress this weekend.

Which means they absolutely will be doing that, if historical promises by agency heads in front of the lawmakers they pretend to answer to are anything to go by. And they are.

In other words, they just used your taxes to increase your taxes so they could hire 87,000 IRS agents to rifle further through your taxes in case you owe more taxes.

Welcome to American kleptocracy.

Raheem J. Kassam @RaheemKassam

Lmao they just used your taxes to increase your taxes so they could hire 87,000 IRS agents to rifle further through your taxes in case you owe more taxes. It’s a kleptocracy.

IRS estimates (which we know are always excellent) reveal supposedly uncollected taxes of around $1trn each year. Or, as I like to call it, one-eighth of a “war on terror.”

Can you imagine how many nuclear drag queens, beagle experiments, or foreign abortions your government could (and will) buy with that cash?

Indeed 87,000 new IRS agents is greater than the number of people living in Biden’s home town of Wilmington, Delaware (71,000, I’m reliably informed).

Even Senator Susan Collins has pointed out this move “more than [doubles] the size of the agency and [gives] the IRS more employees than the number of Pentagon, State Department, and FBI employees as well as Border Patrol agents combined.”

Democrats have been keen to pursue this strategy of spending (your) money to make (more) money (off you) for a while, and it reminded me of the last point the aforementioned Orwell makes in favor of establishing a harsh, socialist system in England in his 1941 essay The Lion and the Unicorn. Yes, Orwell was in fact a relatively authoritarian socialist, at least at one point.

He concluded:

Nations do not escape from their past merely by making a revolution. An English Socialist government will transform the nation from top to bottom… It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logical… Most of its directing brains will come from the new indeterminate class of skilled workers, technical experts, airmen, scientists, architects and journalists, the people who feel at home in the radio and ferro-concrete age… It will shoot traitors, but it will give them a solemn trial beforehand, and occasionally it will acquit them. It will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere very little with the spoken and written word. Political parties with different names will still exist, revolutionary sects will still be publishing their newspapers and making as little impression as ever. It will disestablish the Church, but will not persecute religion. It will retain a vague reverence for the Christian moral code, and from time to time will refer to England as “a Christian country”. The Catholic Church will war against it, but the Nonconformist sects and the bulk of the Anglican Church will be able to come to terms with it. It will show a power of assimilating the past which will shock foreign observers and sometimes make them doubt whether any revolution has happened. But all the same it will have done the essential thing. It will have nationalized industry, scaled down incomes, set up a classless educational system.

Besides the “very little” interference “with the spoken and written word,” this is an almost like-for-like version of the socialism being implemented in America, often under the cover of darkness, or the haze of a hot summer weekend.

Welcome to your American kleptocracy. Have a great week.