You Can't Fix Him (the IRS)

Liz Wolfe10.27.2023 9:30 AM

We told you to work on this: Just this week, the Government Accountability Office released a report studying whether the nation's tax collectors are set up to use their cool $80 billion infusion of cash, doled out over the next decade, properly.

The report roughly boils down to: We told you to fix these things, so why haven't you yet?

It's actually incredible the number of problems that government auditors have been flagging for the IRS for years on end, to no avail.

For example: "IRS's policy is to generally respond to correspondence within 30 days of receipt. Responses that take longer than 45 days are considered late, or what IRS calls overage. As of the end of the 2022 filing season, about 55 percent of IRS's correspondence inventory was overage."

And: "As we reported in December 2022, IRS customer service representatives answered less than one out of five taxpayer calls seeking live assistance during the 2022 filing season." Last year, the Treasury Secretary "announced that Treasury was committing IRS to an 85 percent level of service [percentage of calls answered] for the 2023 filing season, the highest in the last decade." (Going from roughly 20 percent to 85 percent will be a mighty big jump for these beleaguered employees.)

Also: "Between the start of fiscal year 2010 and March 2023, we issued 451 recommendations to IRS related to protecting taxpayer information. As of October 2023, IRS had taken steps to address the gaps in safeguards we identified and implemented 85 percent of our recommendations." Phrased differently, over the course of 13 years, the IRS still didn't implement 15 percent of recommendations.

This is all unsettlingly par for the course. After all, it was only in July 2022 that the IRS finally worked "to prevent employees from saving data to external devices, making it harder for taxpayer information to be removed from IRS's network." Given that an IRS contractor leaked confidential taxpayer information about some of the wealthiest Americans to major news organizations in 2021, it's fairly shocking that the agency seems to want plaudits for having taken 11 months to secure a major vulnerability.

As you might expect, retention is in trouble—"the agency loses about 23 percent of new recruits within 2 or 3 years"—and the IRS hasmostly failed to work on improving its security systems. This is all after the agency blew past the initial deadline for releasing its report on how to use the Inflation Reduction Act funds. Deadlines for thee, but not for me.

One might be left wondering what the $3.2 billion in taxpayer services was for, if reps still can't pick up the phone,or the $25.3 billion in improving IT systems, if taxpayer data still isn't secured.

(This illegal agency should have never been created, at this point its a willing accomplice to corrupt politicians that want to target specific citizens they harass, usually middle and lower class that do not share the ideological mindset of leaders with a one world order dictatorship)

https://reason.com/2023/10/27/you-cant-fix-him-the-irs/

New Audit Finds San Francisco Takes 3 Years To Approve New Housing

The state housing officials who performed the audit describe San Francisco's approval process as a "notoriously complex and cumbersome" mess.

Christian Britschgi10.26.2023

San Francisco takes three years on average to approve and permit a new housing development, the longest timeline of any jurisdiction in California, and the city is out of compliance with numerous state laws requiring expedited housing approvals. That's the damning, not necessarily surprising, findings of a new state audit released yesterday that found thecity's housing policies and practices added up to a "notoriously complex and cumbersome" messthat will ensure San Francisco falls well short of its state-set goal of building 82,000 units by 2031.

Currently, the city is producing only about 4,000 homes per year, orless than half of what it needsto hit that 82,000-unit goal. The state audit also found that the city takes 523 days on average to issue planning approval for housing projects and another 605 days to issue building permits to already approved projects.

"This audit puts cities across California on notice:there will be no more leniency for illegally obstructing housing construction," said state Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco). "San Francisco has added layer upon layer of unnecessary discretion and bureaucracy for decades."

This first-of-its-kind audit was launched by the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) in August 2022. It came in response to a series of increasingly fiendish decisions by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to route around state laws requiring them to approve new housing.

One notorious episode came in late 2021 when the board voted to require the sponsor of a planned 495-unit residential tower slated to replace a Nordstrom's parking lot to perform an additional environmental analysis of their project.

That wasdespite the fact that the project sponsor had already produced a 1,000-page environmental report.. individual supervisors told the SF Chronicle their vote was motivated by affordability concerns, not its environmental impact.

California law requires cities to approve projects that comply with the zoning code. If a city rejects a zoning-compliant project, state law entitles the project sponsor to sue in order to get their permits; the city was keeping the project in a legal twilight zone where it was neither approved nor denied; followed up by an even more clever scheme by a majority of the Board of Supervisors to thwart a state law, S.B. 9, that legalized duplexes on single-family lots and required localities to approve these duplexes "ministerially."

But rather than bow to the state requirements inS.B. 9, the board voted to eliminate single-family zoning altogether. Because S.B. 9 only applies to single-family-zoned properties, that decision effectively nullified the law. Duplexes were legal on paper, but the San Francisco Board of Supervisors retained the ability to reject any one individual duplex project.

These are not isolated examples either, as the HCD audit makes clear."San Francisco has perfected the art of avoiding obligations under state housing laws by maneuvering around them through local rules that exploit loopholes and frustrate the intent of state housing laws," reads the audit.

To remedy the situation, HCD issued 18 required actions, to come into compliance with state housing law.

•That includes the elimination of "discretionary review"—a process by which third parties can file an appeal of an otherwise code-compliant project and the Board of Supervisors can ultimately decide whether it gets permits or not.

• The state is also calling on San Francisco to reform its environmental review practices. Right now, the city requires developers to study a host of environmental impacts, including shadow and wind impacts, that go beyond what (already cumbersome) state environmental law requires.

• Some might remember the case of Robert Tillman, whose plans to convert a laundromat he owned in the city's Mission District into an apartment building were frustrated by the city's requirements that he do not one, not two, butthree separate shadow studies.

HCD's audit makes clear that San Francisco's average three-year timeline for permitting new housing is a problem the city government has created for itself with endless, meaningless process, red tape, and delay. Neighboring Oakland approves comparable housing projects three years faster, the report notes. San Francisco needs to do to get its housing house in order require the Board of Supervisors to act and pass proactive, pro-supply policies. As yesterday's audit makes clear, if there's any elected body less inclined to do that, it's the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

https://reason.com/2023/10/26/damning-new-audit-finds-san-francisco-takes-3-years-to-approve-new-housing/

>>19830210 Note the date of article,, its much higher 18 mos later

Millennials, Gen Z among largest share of residents leaving San Francisco: data

David Propper June 22, 2023, 6:52 p.m. ET

Millennials and Generation Z were among the biggest share of people to flee San Francisco as the embattled city continues to see a population decrease since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

The number of San Francisco residents ages 25-29 plummeted 21% between April 2020 and June 2022, according to US Census data reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle.About 94,000 people in that age group lived in the California city in April 2020 before shrinking down to 74,000 in June 2022 — the largest drop amongst age groups.

City dwellers ages 30 to 34 decreased from 105,000 in 2020 to about 88,000 in 2022, the newspaper reported – enough for a 16% drop.

And residents ages 20-24 and 35-39 also fell by about 10% each, according to the Census data compiled by the Chronicle.

San Franciscans ages 20-24 were more than 44,000 in 2020 before dropping to about 40,000 in 2022. And people ages 35-39 reached 81,000 in 2020 before decreasing to a bit under 73,000 in 2022, the data indicates.

Other notable decreases were ages 0-4 and 45-49, with an 11.7% drop and 9.6% decline, respectively, according to the Chronicle.

Meanwhile, the fastest growing population by five-year age bracket were senior citizens ages 75-79, notching a 15% increase, the Chronicle reported.

Overall, San Francisco’spopulation dropped from 873,000 to about 808,500 in the two years leading up to June 2022, the data shows. Other major cities in the country have also faced population declines.

The city has grappled withsky-high crime, rampant homelessness and exorbitant home prices in recent years.

Remote work has also contributed to the exodus. At the start of 2023, about 30% of job postings based in the city allowed for either hybrid or fully remote work, the Chronicle reported. In 2019, only 5% of job openings offered that.

A large number of businesses have also closed up shop in the city. At least 22 big-name stores have closed or announced plans to leave the area around the city’s Union Square since January 2022.

Since 2019, 47% of businesses in the area have shut their doors, the San Francisco Standard previously reported. The Census data dump also revealed San Francisco wasinching closer to becoming a minority-majority city, the San Francisco Standard reported Thursday.

About 51% of the city’s population was white at the start of July 2022, according to the data. There were 411,000 white people, 310,000 Asian people, 46,000 black people, 40,000 multiracial people, 6,000 Native American people and 3,700 Pacific Islanders, the news outlet reported.

https://nypost.com/2023/06/22/millennials-and-gen-z-largest-share-of-population-to-flee-san-francisco/

>>19830304

The Wealthy Residents Who’ve Left San Francisco Have Taken Billions in Income With Them

May 5, 2023

There’s an exodus going on in the Bay Area, and it’s not just Twitter employees fleeing the company.

An analysis of tax return data suggests that wealthy San Francisco residents moved out of the city during the early years of the pandemic, taking billions in income with them, according to according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

In 2020, 32,000 more people left San Francisco than moved into the city, and the income of those who cut out was nearly $8 billion more than those who came. That only compounded a problem the city was already experiencing. The year prior, San Francisco saw 39,000 more people depart than arrive, representing a net loss of $6.9 billion in salary. That means the city saw $15 billion dollars of income leave in a two year span.

The IRS follows migration patterns by checking if tax filers listed different addresses on their forms than the year prior. Then, the agency can track how many people depart a region, and of course, the income of the individuals coming and going. During the two years the Chronicle analyzed, the average annual income of citizens leaving San Francisco was $153,000, while the people arriving earned $103,000 a year.

San Francisco’s chief economist Ted Egan told the Chronicle that the data may not necessarily mean wealthy people are fleeing en masse. He explained that it’s possible that a small number of extremely wealthy people are driving the average. While the paper conceded that the IRS doesn’t disclose data on individual incomes, it also noted that U.S. Census Bureau data shows that “the San Francisco metro area’s median household income fell between 2019 and 2021.”

Of course, it’s not just people leaving the City by the Bay.Nordstrom announced this week it would close its downtown store, joining retailers such as Office Depot, Whole Foods, and Anthropolgie that are all giving up locations in San Francisco.

https://news.yahoo.com/wealthy-residents-ve-left-san-002237199.html

(This is funny because PDJT has been pointing out EV shortcomings for months, esp with UAW, maybe car companies think Trump will be back and NIX the whole stupid plan)

Short-circuited: Biden’s electric car dream hits its final outage…

Did Joe Biden genuinely believe he could force all of America into becoming granola-eating electric-car users, despite an absolute lack of any infrastructure whatsoever, skyrocketing costs, and without comprehending how rural America functions? Yes. It seems he did, andas is often the case with all things Joe “thinks” about, the outcome was a complete debacle. Now, we’re watching the car industry come to a realization many of us had months ago: Americans aren’t keen on electric vehicles. Companies such asFord, Honda, and GM are now re-evaluating their visions of an “electric car utopia” that once envisioned phasing out gasoline-powered vehicles entirely.

Wall Street Journal:

General Motors is abandoning a self-imposed target to build 400,000 electric vehicles by mid-2024, the latest sign that automakers are concerned about the viability of the market for battery-powered cars.

The Detroit automaker walked back the goal while reporting a healthy third-quarter profit, despite the hit from the continuing United Auto Workers strike. The walkout, which began in mid-September, is now costing GM about $200 million a week in profit.

On Tuesday, the UAW further expanded the walkouts at GM, targeting a 5,000-worker factory in Texas that makes sport-utility vehicles and is among its most profitable assembly plants.

The move on EVs is a surprise one for a company that has bet its future on the technology, anticipating that it will eventually phase out sales of gasoline-powered vehicles next decade. It comes as rivals, including Tesla and Ford Motor, have also raised red flags about consumer demand for EVs and buyers’ willingness to pay a premium for them over traditional models.

Americans aren’t excited to spend hours a day charging their cars, only to drive for a bit and then recharge. The United States wasn’t built like Europe; traveling long distances from point A to B is often the norm. Imagine being stuck in infamous U.S. traffic, watching your battery dwindle without a charging station nearby. The majority resoundingly say, “No thanks” to that cruddy scenario.

Business Insider:

Even as electric vehicles dominate headlines and hot new models hit the market, most Americans aren’t interested in giving up gasoline. In a recent poll conducted by Yahoo Finance and Ipsos, 57% of respondents said they were not likely to choose an EV when they buy their next car.

The ultimate blow to the regime’s electric car debacle has to be this recent report that unveils the “true cost” of operating an electric vehicle. Brace yourself for this:

When you factor everything in, powering an electric car is akin to paying $17.33 per gallon at the pump.

That stings.

Here’s a closeup of the image:

Currently, the electric vehicle industry is a bridge to nowhere. The primary reason EVs haven’t found widespread success is their lack of appeal to the general population. While liberal elites might love them, they aren’t financially viable or practical for those in rural areas or for lower-income families.

Additionally, most folks with common sense realize that to power these charging stations, you need coal. In its current form, this is an unsustainable business model. Back to the drawing board, fellas…

https://revolver.news/2023/10/short-circuited-bidens-electric-car-dream-hits-its-final-outage/

30 Oct, 2023 13:28

Kremlin weighs in on call for US to reverse course on Russia

American economist Jeffrey Sachs has suggested that Washington should discuss security guarantees with Moscow

A recent article by US economist Jeffrey Sachs calling on Washington to establish a new sustainable détente with Russia is a rare sight, but evidence that debates on the issue are picking up steam, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov has said.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Peskov commented on Sachs’ piece, which was published in early October but has only recently gained media traction. The economist, who serves as the director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, wrote thatthe world is on the precipice of a “30-year US neocon debacle in Ukraine.”

He explained that Washington’s long-cherished hopes for NATO expansion eastward to Russia’s borders have been dashed by Ukraine’s devastating losses on the battlefield, the threat of Moscow launching a massive offensive, and collapsing support for this course in both Europe and the US.

As Ukraine teeters on the brink, Sachs argued, the US could avert a potential catastrophe by changing course and reaching security guarantees with Moscow. A potential deal could include a pledge that NATO would not expand closer to Russia, as well as an agreement between Moscow and Kiev that predominantly ethnic Russian areas would be recognized as part of Russia, the economist said, apparently referring to Crimea and four other former Ukrainian regions that overwhelmingly voted to become part of Russia.

Commenting on the article, Peskov said Moscow has not received any proposals on the matter. While describing the piece as “an economist’s point of view, nothing more,” he noted that “such thinking is quite rare at the moment.”

“Nevertheless, some kind of a discussion is gradually gaining momentum,” Peskov added.

In the article, Sachs suggested that Russia’s demands to NATO and the US which were made shortly before the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022 should be used as a springboard for a thaw in relations.

In the proposals presented in December 2021, Moscow asked the West to formally ban Ukraine from entering NATO, while insisting that the alliance should retreat to its 1997 borders, before it expanded. The overture, however, was rebuffed by the West.

(Ukraine is getting kicked to the curb, it’s been signaled in the Western news for at least 4 months, their propaganda machine about “they are still fighting” has not succeeded, but for all intents and purposes, they are failed miserably, and No One Can Deny it! Zelensky and his leaders blaming everything on the West accomplished the alienation of their supporters)

https://www.rt.com/russia/586189-kremlin-us-reverse-course-ukraine/

>>19829631 CBS Reporter Catherine Herridge Faces Contempt Charges For Refusing to Reveal Her Confidential SourcePN

CBS Reporter Catherine Herridge Faces Contempt Charges For Refusing to Reveal Her Confidential Source

by Cristina Laila Oct. 29, 2023 3:00

CBS reporter Catherine Herridge is facing contempt charges for refusing to disclose the identity of her confidential source.

In August, US District Court for the District of Columbia, Christopher Cooper, ordered Herridge to sit down for a sworn deposition regarding a confidential source she used for a 2017 story she covered on aDepartment of Defense-funded school that was at the center of federal investigations over Chinese military ties while she was at Fox News.

The judge ordered Herridge to turn over her source(s) in response to a lawsuit that was filed by Chinese-American scientist Yanping Chen against the FBI. Chen subpoenaed Herridge in an effort to find out who her sources were.

Herridge argued she should not be forced to disclose her source because of her First Amendment rights.

Judge Cooper, an Obama appointee, disagreed and forced Herridge to unmask her source.

“The Court recognizes both the vital importance of a free press and the critical role that confidential sources play in the work of investigative journalists like Herridge,” Cooper wrote in the ruling in August. “But applying the binding case law of this Circuit, theCourt concludes that Chen’s need for the requested evidence overcomes Herridge’s qualified First Amendment privilege in this case.”(so a Chinese spy in our government has more rights the Freedom of the press? Same thing happened to Catherine Englebrecht and Gregg Phillips, this is how you know America is in decline so severe that it must be stopped now)

Herridge refused to disclose her source during the deposition and now she faces contempt charges and potential jail time, The Epoch Times reported.

“With contempt proceedings now teed up, one of two outcomes appears likely: either Herridge will be held in contempt in the near future and can immediately appeal that order, or, as sometimes occurs in these cases, the sources may release Herridge from the privilege rather than watch her undergo the consequences of contempt,” Judge Cooper wrote in an order on Friday.

Excerpt from The Epoch Times:

A reporter who was with Fox News when she reported on information provided by a confidential source is facing a contempt charge because she’s refusing to reveal the source’s identity despite a court order that she do so.

Catherine Herridge, now a reporter for CBS News, was ordered in August todisclose the identity and motive of the source, who provided information about an FBI investigation into a Chinese scientist.

But Ms. Herridge, during a deposition after the order was handed down, “refused to answer questions regarding the identity of her confidential source(s) and other aspects of her reporting process and editorial decision-making,” lawyers for Yanping Chen, the scientist, said in a recent filing.

They asked the court to hold Ms. Herridge in contempt, a criminal charge that can bring jail time.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, who gave the order, said on Oct. 27 that Ms. Herridge would likely be held in contempt unless she provided the information.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/10/cbs-reporter-catherine-herridge-faces-contempt-charges-refusing/

>>19830644

Every judge appointed under Obama should be investigation and impeached. Interestingly they did the same to James Rosen in 2014 and 2015; and at that time all media came to his defense. Probably won’t happen now, because they are all mouthpieces of Bidan