Clowns with Flame Throwers – The Daily Cartoonist

You may recall that the Biden administration had a plan to hire IRS staff, mostly to replace retired staffers and augment customer service personnel, but with an eye towards greater enforcement of tax cheating in the upper levels of income.

This was immediately branded (i.e. “lied about”) as a plan to send jackbooted thugs after middleclass taxpayers, because, while it was hard to argue with better customer service, it was easy for the plutocrats to disagree with the plan of more rigorously going over Rich Uncle Moneybag’s tax returns.

Their preemptive propaganda made it easier then for the Musk Rats to cut positions in the IRS, such that, as Matson notes, staffing is significantly down.

This leaves two possibilities: One is that refunds will be extraordinarily slow in coming, since fewer staffers means longer processing. The other is that refunds will come back in a timely manner because nobody will really be looking at the returns. While people would be happy to have their refunds and to not have anyone look at their returns, neither possible outcome is good for the country.

But when Dear Leader has finished his reforms, we won’t have taxes anymore anyway, because the government will be funded by tariffs, like it was back in the Gilded Age, which sounds wonderful if you plan to be a Carnegie or a Rockefeller, not so wonderful if you continue to struggle along in the bottom 99%.

Though if you can get a job as governor of a state or as a member of the cabinet, you can walk around with $3,000 cash in your purse. The salary for the governor of South Dakota is $139,100 per year, and Secretary of Homeland Security pays about $200,000, so you can spend three grand to take your family to dinner, I guess. If you flew them all to Paris.

Meanwhile, Dear Leader says the price of eggs has gone down “93, 94% since we took office,” though every source I could find indicates that they’ve gone up as much as 22% since January.

But this is a man who also observed that customers at grocery stores are required to show photo ID. It’s possible he’s never been in a grocery store.

What is definitely true is that these folks aren’t from my world.

Juxtaposition of the Day

Bennett offers a general response to Trump’s claim of competence, which would cover the price of eggs and several other things, while Ariail focuses on tariffs and the impact of Dear Leader’s economic policies on the overall economy.

The Watergate Committee famously asked “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” but they would need a fine-toothed comb to find the answer to that with this president. He may honestly believe that the price of eggs has gone down.

He may even believe that exporting countries pay tariffs. He keeps saying that we’re raising revenue through his tariffs, and, while he wildly exaggerates the totals, it’s more important to point out how he implies, and sometimes plainly states, that we’re raising it from foreign countries. We’re not: We’re raising it from ourselves.

If he had increased taxes, instead of imposing tariffs, would he brag about how much he had taken from American companies and American consumers?

Dear Leader prides himself on being a great negotiator, on knowing the Art of the Deal, but his trail of bankruptcies tells a different story, as does the TV executive who promoted him as a great businessman for the Apprentice.

He and his henchmen speak of the flood of nations coming to renegotiate trade deals in light of his threatened tariffs, but those with experience in such matters scoff at the idea of one-day trade deals, while Xi Jinping indicates that he’s willing to watch our economy burn while he adds countries that were once our allies and trading partners to China’s portfolio.

Juxtaposition of the Day #2

It’s hard to figure out Trump’s plan, possibly because he hasn’t got one. His bizarre on-again-off-again tariff announcements may just be the most obvious evidence that his policy is whatever he came up with today and may be completely different tomorrow, or even this afternoon.

But Darkow is correct that starting a trade war threatens to touch off a recession, and stock prices and the value of the dollar both tumbled yesterday as a result of Trump’s tirade against Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell.

“Government by Hissy Fit” is not a sustainable policy.

Trump wanted to fire Powell, but probably can’t and so is now saying he didn’t want to anyway.

But he can fire Pete Hegseth and says he won’t, despite the plain fact that Hegseth’s breaches of security would get any military officer cashiered and possibly jailed as well.

But firing Hegseth would be admitting bad judgment in appointing him to begin with. It might also cause people to take a more critical look at the rest of the clown cabinet.

It may require some background in economics to recognize the foolishness pouring from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, but it doesn’t take much to realize that, if you have $3,000 in your purse, you shouldn’t let it out of your sight, and that smart military men don’t share battle plans with friends and family on unsecured personal phones.

It’s been said that clowns with flamethrowers may be clowns, but they have flamethrowers. Now we’re seeing how that works.

On a recent podcast, Charlie Sykes and Atlantic writer Tom Nichols discussed the value of mocking the clowns. Mockery helps reasonable people keep their sanity, but doesn’t do much to stop the damage from the clowns’ flamethrowers or break the support from their hardcore fanbase.

In other words, it may be necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

However, there’s a lot to be said for keeping spirits high, and Moudakis gets a laugh because we know that sign would never display a higher number.

But inspiring laughter is not enough. Voters must also be inspired. Turnout for the midterms will be critical because winning the House would snap the power of the Leopards Eating Faces Party.

And 80% of success is showing up. Maybe more.