An IRS tax examiner went on the record with O’Keefe Media Group and blew the whistle on the agency.
“We can’t do anywhere close to what the American people think we can,” David Nelsen, Tax Examining Technician for the IRS, told James O’Keefe. “We have very antiquated systems. They aren’t integrated. We’re basically handcuffed.”
David Nelson said there has been virtually no funding to improve anything at the agency.
“There’s been no funding for decades to try to improve anything,” Nelsen said. “When funding is provided, it’s put towards little Band-Aid issues instead of the big problem of the whole.”
“We also have very antiquated software. We use a software called Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS),” Nelsen added.
David Nelsen said the outdated software has led to a bloated workforce and delays in tax processing.
“We could probably reduce the size of the IRS substantially with changes, programs, a centralized inventory system, replacing IDRS,” he said.
Last month the IRS fired 6,000 employees as President Trump works to reduce the federal workforce.
The IRS is planning to cut up to 50% of its workforce.
“I’m not afraid of losing a career,” Nelson said. “I’ll fall on the sword if it means I can help the American people and help everyone else at the IRS who are doing their jobs.”
Oliver Stone posted on X on 3/11 his 2022’s views on the Ukraine-Russia war as well as Jeffrey Sach’s “Geopolitics of Peace” speech before the EU on 2/19. Sachs lays out the neocon foreign policy and NATO expansionism of the past 30 years that initiated no-win wars. Words of wisdom from peacemakers Stone and Sachs. My quibble with Stone, whose filmmaking especially “JFK” I hold in high esteem, is his unfortunate promotion of climate change. Hasn’t it occurred to him that the #1 reason exposing why the climate change agenda is fraudulent is that the largest emitter of carbon, the US military, is excluded from policies proposed to fix the alleged crisis.
No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.”
— Samuel Adams, 1775
So true. It was said in different ways by different founders of America. Some said that without morality, freedom was doomed. However you define morality, it includes a sense of self-responsibility and individualism whereby you respect the same in others. Morality and individualism go hand in hand, just like the Bill of Rights implies individualism, and vice-versa.
Over the last several generations especially, American culture has morphed from individualism into amorality, subjectivism, and the kind of “nonjudgmentalism” that inevitably seems to lead to heightened restrictions by government. The cultural experts start by saying: “Don’t worry about morality, anything goes,” and the government ends it all by saying, “Leave morality up to us. We’ll decide what’s right, and what’s wrong.” Because if people eschew the responsibility of objective judgment, then you better believe others will pick up the task for you.
You cannot live independently, and in freedom, without thinking. If you won’t think for yourself — well, you get the spectacle of Joe Biden and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and those shrews on The View doing your thinking for you. And having their idiocy codified into law.
Most of the people that most of us rely on today for intelligence, “expertise” and wisdom in the affairs of man have no remote grasp of what I just wrote. And they don’t wish for you to understand it, either. Because the moment you do understand the value and power of independent thinking, their whole enterprise is overthrown. But not a moment sooner.
Regarding environmentalism, a reader wrote the following on my Facebook thread, in response to my article criticizing the Biden regime for imposing electric vehicles and stoves on the population, rather than leaving it to market forces and individual judgment:
As much as we want to make fun of the government, we shouldn’t attack electric vehicles.
Would you agree that there is no natural function within capitalism to take care of the environment?
Even Ayn Rand was not an anarchist.
I am not attacking electric vehicles. I am attacking the government for gradually outlawing fossil fuels — by force. If electric vehicles were as great as the Biden regime insists — or even as great as you claim — they would not need the protection of government force to create a mass market. Rest assured, the mass market would come about naturally and drive down prices. There’s a reason why electric vehicles are not ready for market, at least on a wide scale. They are not up to the job that fossil fuels are. That’s just a fact.
I don’t agree with the argument that “capitalism cannot keep the environment safe.” This is nothing more than the Communist/fascist excuse for taking over the whole economy. “If we don’t take it over, and mandate electric vehicles, etc., then the world will end.” If we EVER have to depend on people like the Communists, fascists or American politicians to save us, then — believe me — we were not capable of being saved. I have more trust in the market — in real people, the ones who eventually correct themselves (unlike unaccountable statists and politicians) — than the elites running the World Economic Forum. Good grief. I can’t even believe we need to have this discussion on a thread like this. Collectivism over capitalism — really? Have you heard of the Soviet Union? Look at how the United States economy (and culture) have degenerated since we have developed more and more central planning, starting in earnest during the New Deal and growing (with occasional pauses, as in the Reagan years a little bit) ever since.
It’s a false alternative to suggest: “You’re against the benefits and innovation of electric cars if you don’t support government environmental policies from the central planners.” B.S.!!!! It’s precisely because I SUPPORT innovation, progress and market forces that I want more and more capitalism (ideally, unhampered capitalism). Read not just Ayn Rand (and early Alan Greenspan), but also the brilliant Henry Hazlitt and especially Ludwig von Mises. Also, honest thinkers out there, please see George Reisman’s “Capitalism”; Reisman was a student of von Mises, I believe. The case has been made and won, both theoretically and in practice. Idiots who turn environmental causes into their own form of urban/suburban religion have nothing of substance to offer.
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I sure HOPE he has an enemies list. Any enemy of the Constitution and individual rights deserves what’s coming to them. The top offenders should be tried for treason.
The election of Donald Trump was a magnificent event. We should continue to celebrate. Election 2024 reminds us: Good will always triumph over evil, so long as the good steps out and asserts itself. But we must remember, this is still a war. The bad guys view this as a defeat of one battle, not a defeat in war. Not all the people who voted for Kamala are evil. But anyone who voted for her and actually thinks she was a good candidate must be pretty depraved. Millions of Americans are lost, or worse. So we are not out of the woods. Trump and all who seek to advance his agenda of less government, lower taxes, a strong military and actual borders — they are all in mortal danger. The Deep State is capable of anything. Media and academia are rotten to the core, more dishonest than state-run media in a dictatorship. We have much to overcome. The war continues, and the battles have only begun.
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A new analysis of former President Joe Biden’s use of autopens again raised the question: Who, exactly, was running the country?
The fact that virtually every document Joe “signed” as prez, on top of everything else we know about his mental decline, seems the final proof that the buck wasn’t stopping with him.
The Heritage Foundation dove deep on official documents from Biden’s time in office and found that nearly all bore the robot’s signature; the chief exception was the one dropping his bid for re-election.
Which raises the question: What did the president even know about what he was signing?
Fine, other presidents sometimes use the autopen, but none has shown the same symptoms of senility and dementia — issues we now know plagued Biden from his first days in the Oval Office.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has publicly named at least one Biden executive order (mandating a pause on liquid natural gas exports) that went out the door with the president having a fundamentally incorrect idea what the order actually did.
What other orders did Biden “sign” under similar misunderstandings?
Were there any orders he never saw at all?
And who was actually deciding what got signed?
Consider the flurry of left-pleasing executive orders in Biden’s final weeks in office — a blitzkrieg that supposedly originated with a man who months earlier on national TV had revealed himself to be incapable of basic argument or even recalling simple facts.
Thanks to the determined professional incuriosity of our journalist class throughout Biden’s decline, it’s likely impossible to ever be sure just who called which shots.
That White House, however decisions got made, gave America a string of disasters: an open border, Bidenflation and runaway federal debt, the Afghan bugout debacle, wars in Europe and the Middle East.
A Delaware Wave reader writes, “I hate to admit this, but I feel like my second grader’s mistakes and blunders are a reflection on me, as if I have somehow bungled his upbringing. Obviously, I’m as ashamed to feel this way as I am ashamed to admit it.” She signed her note, “anonymous.”
I responded to the reader thus: Let’s get right to the point: If you are secure within yourself, then you will view your child’s mistakes simply as mistakes, not necessarily as reflections of yourself. You’ll try to help him identify, correct and learn from his mistakes.
Apparently you are not secure with yourself. You want to instantly “make” him OK, because if you can’t, then somehow you’re not OK. You’ve obviously got your own problems, as your “signature” suggests, but the real damage here is to your boy: You’re sending him the message that his well-being is connected to your own sense of security, rather than to his happiness. The fact that this embarrasses you is at least a small step in the right direction.
The compulsion to turn out “the perfect child” is usually fueled by two factors. One is the parents’ tendency to take the child’s development — or lack of development — personally. This leads a child to focus not on what he wants to do, but more on pleasing others. As an adult, this emotional problem will manifest as trying to gratify others instead of trying to please himself. It’s neurotic and unhealthy, and it distracts him from trying to excel without the added pressure of making everybody else happy. Any success that is achieved will not be very rewarding, and will be hard to sustain. This is often the reason why many talented and gifted people, despite their already impressive accomplishments, exhibit psychological symptoms such as drug or alcohol abuse to cope with their anxiety.
The other reason for this “perfect child” syndrome is the unspoken philosophy behind most education. Public and private schooling in our society is generally based on a classroom model in which “socializing” the child to the “group” is deemed more important than training the individual to use his or her mind confidently. Some home-schooling and Montessori educational approaches focus less on “socializing,” and have been proven to turn out kids who score better on standardized tests and generally develop greater intellectual self-confidence, faring better than those who are taught to fit in as “good little citizens.”
If three-year-old Johnny isn’t interacting with other children the way his three-year-old neighbor is, a rational parent will NOT see this as an indication that he must be shoved into a “special” social group where, more often than not, nothing more than bad manners and germs abound. The rational parent will encourage the child to reason and observe both himself and the social and natural world around him. Socializing should be a consequence of good intellectual development, not a cause. A healthy child will eventually want to socialize, and not with just anyone. He or she will choose friends for mindful, objectively sound reasons.
Parents are advised to do two things. First, check their assumptions about educational philosophies and what really motivates them to have their kids attend certain schools. Second, remember that kids are autonomous, independent beings with minds of their own. Of course they must be guided and sometimes even told what to do, but at the same time, this guidance must be geared toward what’s best for the child; not for the parents’ egos. Even young children make choices, and in most cases their errors are not personal attacks on their parents. The parenting process should be beneficial for both parent and child, but in any conflict between what’s best for the child and what’s best (or feels best) for the parent, the child must prevail.
Dear anonymous reader, you need to set aside your fragile ego. Foster in your boy a well-trained, self-respecting mind, along with the attitude that the world is a potentially knowable and happy place. This training and respect must be for HIS benefit and development, not yours. This is the greatest and only truly long-term contribution any parent can make.
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The literal meaning of “normal” is nothing less than – and regrettably nothing more than – average. When people tell me they want to be normal, I cringe. After all, why do they aspire to just average? I can understand how being average is better than being below average. But if you happen to be below average, wouldn’t you simply want to become better? And if you’re above average, why on earth would you want to diminish yourself to the average?
I once spoke with a woman about this and she replied by saying, “You know how it is, Dr. Hurd. We all want to be part of the pack.” I don’t know if this is true of everyone, but we all want and need to belong. But those who belong simply for the sake of belonging are sidestepping the need to develop themselves. A perfect example of this is young people who join gangs, abuse drugs or do other foolish things in groups. This need for approval is often a consequence of their inability to figure out who they really are and what’s really important to them.
In my work, I sometimes encounter young people who deliberately fail in school. You guessed it: They don’t want to be embarrassed by rising above the pack. Aside from squandering their education, they’re making the long-term decision to systematically undermine their potential for success and happiness in favor of nothing more than to be… well, average. And there they will remain, long after the pack has fizzled out and moved on.
If one is going to enjoy the self-esteem that a well-lived life can bring, then he or she must use good judgment to develop his or her talents. If that results in being below average, then so be it. But if there’s any hope of rising above the crowd, then one has to be willing to move out ahead.
People sometimes seek therapy in order to become normal — or, more likely, to “see if they’re normal.” I ask them why that matters. It seems to me that the important thing in life is to be happy, adaptive, rational and effective. Sadly, if you look around today’s world, these qualities have become more suited to the minority than the majority.
Some people struggle between being normal and being a “free spirit.” But you don’t have to choose between one or the other. The alternative to being normal is simply to be yourself! If in some respects that happens to be average or below average, who cares? We all have some potential; hidden or otherwise. Develop it by being productive and innovative in your approach to problems. Be a free spirit in the sense that you enjoy life by keeping your feet firmly grounded in reality.
The next time you find yourself wondering if you’re normal, remind yourself that “normal” is nothing more than a statistical average. It’s not necessarily good or bad. The only thing that matters is that you’re happy and in touch with reality. I dream of the day when earned self-esteem – note the use of the word “earned” – and true contentment finally become the statistical norm. I’m not holding my breath, but I don’t think it’s impossible, either.
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The next time you hear someone complaining that DOGE is “slashing” federal spending or “dismantling” the government, pay close attention. There will almost certainly be an important fact left out: The gargantuan federal deficit.
Every day brings a new sob story about how someone is being hurt by Elon Musk’s chainsaw because some federal program is being shut down, or because a precious federal job has been axed.
Never in any of these is any context provided. And in this case, context is everything.
By the time President Donald Trump took office – four months into the new fiscal year (which started last October), the federal government was already $840 billion in the red. That’s a 58% increase from the prior year.
If all goes well, the deficit for this year will total $1.9 trillion, according to the Treasury Department, which would be the third annual increase.
The result is that the national debt is now $37 trillion – more than double what it was a decade ago. Interest on the debt took off like a rocket under Joe Biden.
None of this is sustainable.
And if anyone suggests to you that Trump’s 2017 tax cuts are to blame, they aren’t.
This year, revenues will equal 18.7% of the nation’s GDP. That’s well above the postwar average of 17.2% – and it is a level that has been topped only seven times in the past 80 years.
Too much spending, not too little taxation, is the problem.
This year, federal spending is on course to equal 25% of GDP, which is significantly higher than the 20% postwar average, and a level topped only twice since World War II – (both times because of massive COVID spending).
Not all of this is Joe Biden’s fault. The federal government has not run a balanced budget since 2001. Ten of the past 20 years have seen annual deficits above $1 trillion. Runaway entitlements are making it nearly impossible to balance the budget. And Republicans have often proved just as eager as Democrats to spend money we don’t have.
But Biden made everything much, much worse.
Why is this context always missing from all those “slashing” stories?
Because Democrats and the press don’t want the public to know just how dire the nation’s fiscal situation is. The public is already generally supportive of DOGE’s efforts to eliminate waste. But if it knew just how bad things were, support for deep spending cuts would only increase.
The same is true for Medicaid. Democrats are howling about proposals to cut Medicaid spending by $800 billion – over 10 years.
What’s never mentioned is the fact that Medicaid spending shot up 68% over the past decade. If the government simply returned to what Medicaid spent the year Biden took office, it would save almost $700 billion over the next decade.
Trump has promised to drain the swamp. He’s off to a fast start. But it will take much more than a few months of high-profile cancellations of grants and firings to get the budget under control. The Golden Age might be upon us, but it will be smothered in its crib if Democrats, weak-kneed Republicans, and a corrupt media keep playing the same games that got us into this mess in the first place.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE Keeper of the Flame of the Enlightenment
Welcome to The Artful Dilettante–a sanctuary of reason and virtue, where reality is your best friend and facts always trump wishful thinking. It is the Lamp of Hope in a dark and musty corner of a crumbling civilization. It is the seedbed of the Republic of Letters and Virtue coming soon to a world near you. It is a place of free minds, free wills, and free markets–without chains, yokes, or harnesses.
The Artful Dilettante is on the front lines of the Liberty Movement. It is intended for people who think rationally as a way of life. There is no place here for the false dichotomies of left and right, haves and have-nots, liberals and conservatives, weak-kneed republicans and self-righteous democrats. History is, and has always been, about the struggle between liberty and power. The stale bromides and recycled political pablum advanced as solutions by our benighted leadership will find no support here. Great moral problems can not be solved by sleights-of-hand. The true sign of a good idea is the wailing and gnashing of teeth by the ruling class, the Deep State.
We are ever on the lookout for bold and sweeping ideas, firmly grounded in liberty, which will send the political class into fits of rage.
We always have our finger on the pulse at The Artful Dilettante. We are passionate, keenly perceptive, and yes, somewhat cynical observers of human events and behavior. We are at once above the din and in the fray. We have a nuanced understanding of our political system and the criminals and reprobates who run it. We never accept anything at face value, especially the pronouncements of those in power and the echoes of their dutiful, fawning bottom-dwellers in the media and university faculty lounges. We know that people often aren’t who they say they are and that things aren’t always as they appear to be. We fully agree with the notion that there are no accidents in politics. We reflexively assume that nearly every politician is either lying or stupid and that the vast majority of the American people can be trusted with a deadly weapon but not the right to vote. We fully agree with the words of Jefferson: “The Tree of Liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots.” Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are yours by birthright, not permission. They can be taken away but never granted.
We promise never to be fair and balanced but to tell the unvarnished truth. Fair and balanced just means you’re telling the truth half the time. Remember, all you get when you straddle a fence is a sore ass. We promise to challenge the prevailing wisdom while honoring the universal, timeless truths of our forebears. Lastly, we promise to aggressively promote our vision of a just and peaceful society based on the application of reason to the challenges of life on earth.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 