Tax Day Reflections: It’s Time For Perp Walks For Federal Crime Racketeers
“If a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, the officers would be arrested.” — Elon Musk in an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier
It’s Tax Day, and your correspondent is one unhappy camper.
His household will submit an extortion-level payment to the Infernal Revenue Service for a reason this commentator has highlighted for years: Uncle Sam’s collection agency operates like a collection racket.
What if a “commercial company,” to use Musk’s term:
- Deliberately overcharged millions of households an average of nearly $3,300 a year on a bill for opaque services
- Demanded that customers estimate their actual bill with no support
- Discriminated in pricing based on how, when, and where customers earned income, location, family size, or a myriad of other factors
- Required consumers to keep exacting records and submit pages of forms to request a refund
- Then penalized them and charged interest if they underestimated their bill?
Fifty-one state attorneys general, not to mention federal authorities, would be pouncing. And executives would be doing Bernie-style (Ebbers and Madoff) perp walks.
It’s reaching back a couple of weeks, but Bret Baier’s Pulitzer-worthy interview with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency senior team demonstrates beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt that, on the spending side as well, your sainted federal government is a purely criminal enterprise.
Any taxpayer who questions this truth for a fragment of a fraction of a micro-millisecond should be lashed to a chair to watch it.
Soak in the gobsmacking and utterly infuriating findings shared by the billionaire entrepreneurs, high-ranking technology and financial executives and a literal rocket scientist who have left houses and wives and children and businesses and lands for the sake of government fiscal integrity:
- $830 million for a 10-question survey on national parks
- 22,000 filing cabinets stacked 10 high in a cave to house 400 million pieces of federal employment retirement paper files
- A government IT budget of some $100 billion funding half-century-old systems that don’t talk to each other, opening opportunities for fraudsters
- 40% of all calls to Social Security involving cons to illegally divert direct deposits
- More than 15 million people over the age of 120 marked as alive in the Social Security system (America’s oldest citizen is 114)
- $300 million in Small Business Administration loans going to applicants under 11 (including a “precocious” 9-month-old) and another $300 million to recipients over 120
- 700 distinct IT systems at the National Institutes for Health with 27 chief information officers
- 1,400 IRS personnel solely provisioning laptops and cell phones, who could serve the entire IRS in a month at two employees a day
- More than 1.5 federal-government credit cards for every employee
- A single $800 billion Treasury bank account disbursing all federal monies and so lacking in controls that if managed by a public company CFO, he or she “would effectively be removed … couldn’t file financial statements … couldn’t issue securities.”
Just as bad: how this criminal waste, fraud, overemployment and dereliction of duty has been tolerated, and now is being vociferously and even violently defended.
By far-left blue state attorneys general and activist non-governmental organizations teeing up rogue district court jurists to unconstitutionally interfere in Article II functions with historically unprecedented nationwide restraining orders.
By Democratic politicians and a compliant media purposely creating alarm among the electorate by deliberately and demagogically misrepresenting Musk’s and DOGE’s actions.
Worst of all, by radical militants violently protesting and committing domestic terrorism against Tesla dealerships and innocent, and liberal, car owners, incited by the self-same leftist pols and funded by extremist plutocrats.
Why are radical progressives going to such lengths to stop DOGE in its tracks? The same reason the Tattaglias and Barzini sent the Corleone family two dead fish wrapped in Luca Brasi’s vest: intimidation.
As Doyle Lonnegan made clear, crime bosses dare not show weakness or cede an inch of territory for fear of being “muscled in” on. A dollar conceded, even of inefficiency or outright fraud, is power surrendered and invites more challenges.
Allowing inquiries and a cleanup of wasteful expenditures could potentially open every aspect of every program to be questioned as to its value and return for taxpayers. It didn’t take long for practically the entire budget of USAID, for example, to be identified as a slush fund to export progressive radicalism, sexual aberration, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism and line the pockets of non-governmental organization executives related to legislators and judges.
Which underscores the applicability of political commentator Michael Kinsley’s famed Law of Scandal: “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal.” Leftists are pooh-poohing Musk’s efforts over all of three months poring through a complex $7 trillion operation “only” turning up $150 billion in savings so far.
But the USAID revelations demonstrate that the true, massive, systematic fraud perpetrated on the American people is the literally trillions of dollars of spending in 1,000-plus-page black-box appropriation bills that they not only don’t benefit from, but is diametrically opposed to their stated preferences as government “customers.”
That “legal” fraud is nigh impossible to combat because the current scorched-earth resistance racket is aided by three hard realities previously described on these pages: oversight-free “continuing” resolutions, Uniparty spending champions, and the immutable Iron Triangle of said legislators, advocacy organizations and back-home special interests.
And further compounding the challenge: DOGE opponents’ outrageous reign of terror cum error appears to be intimidating not just policymakers, but also voters. Recent polls show approval for DOGE falling, and the favorability rating of a true hero who saved free speech and astronauts from outer space, and is attempting to rescue future generations from bankruptcy, plunging 14 points underwater.
Unfortunately, few Americans will see Baier’s interview. But let’s revisit concept mooted earlier.
A few derelict public officials crossing their TV screens in cuffs (even if it doesn’t include the collection crooks from the IRS) might be even more convincing than the Baier interview in demonstrating that DOGE is a serious effort to bring a fraudulent, taxpayer-robbing criminal syndicate to heel.
Bob Maistros, a regular contributor to Issues & Insights, is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist, and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.
Views expressed by guest contributors to Issues & Insights are their own and don’t necessarily reflect the views of the I&I Editorial Board.
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