Tag: taxes
Trump's Assault On Harvard Endangers Every American's Freedom

Trump's Assault On Harvard Endangers Every American's Freedom

The question for the last three months has been, when will it end? The question today is, will there be anything left?

Every day, this country and our freedom suffer another body blow. Tonight, news landed that after Harvard University rejected demands for federal control of its academic life, the Treasury Department is taking steps to end its tax-exempt status. This, after the Trump administration has frozen some $2 billion in grants and cancelled outright $60 million in federal contracts with the university, with threats to cancel the remainder of Harvard’s $9 billion in federal grants.

This is a partial list of Trump’s blackmail demands:

Harvard must agree to “shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name, and stop all DEI-based policies, including DEI-based disciplinary or speech control policies, under whatever name; demonstrate that it has done so to the satisfaction of the federal government.”

Harvard must submit to the government auditing “the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity” and hiring and admissions so that “every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.” It’s unintelligible gibberish, but their “viewpoint diversity” means the end of free thought at Harvard.

“The University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence,” as defined by Donald Trump.

“The University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.”

There were other demands rejected by Harvard, including that “governance” of the university be altered so that those in charge must be “committed to the changes indicated in this letter.” That means Harvard leaders must do what Trump demands or else.

A letter posted on the university’s X account put the position of Harvard this way: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle.”

Other universities such as Columbia and Northwestern have been subject to similar threats and caved into Trump’s demands. The administration is said to have a list of other universities upon which it will make similar demands.

Harvard is such an enormously wealthy institution that they recently announced that students from families making $200 thousand or less yearly would be given free tuition. Harvard is said to have an endowment in excess of $50 billion and doubtlessly has enough billionaires among its alumni to keep the place going – even thriving – for at least the next hundred years.

So why should we worry about Harvard at a time when our country is beset daily by these horrors, among many others:

American citizens as well as undocumented migrants are being snatched off the street and sent to interment camps in Louisiana and El Salvador.

There are new plans to send undocumented arrestees with no criminal records to detention in Guantanamo.

Tens of thousands of federal employees, including those serving in harms way overseas, have been summarily fired without notice on false premises.

Budgets of departments like Health and Human Services are scheduled for cuts of as much as 40 percent and entire federal departments such as USAID have been shut down without Congressional authorization.

The entire weight of the federal government is being wielded daily against organizations such as Planned Parenthood, and individuals from Trump’s first administration he doesn’t like have been threatened with criminal investigation and prosecution by the Department of Justice.

The attorney general of New York state has been referred for criminal prosecution under federal law. Threats to prosecute former President Joe Biden and his family have been made repeatedly by Trump and hang in the balance.

Multiple law firms have been threatened with loss of security clearances and access to federal buildings necessary to represent their clients.

Defiance of court orders by the Trump administration, including those of Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court, are a daily occurrence.

With all of this going on, it seems silly to worry about the wealthiest college in the country, doesn’t it?

No. Harvard is just one more brick in the wall of fascism being constructed around all of us. The demands on Harvard, now spelled out in an official document signed by a deputy commissioner of the General Services Administration, the General Counsel of the Department of Education, and the General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services – all acting on the orders of Donald Trump – are written evidence of the imposition of thought police of a an authoritarian regime.

The next step after such demands is arrest on spurious charges; after that is imprisonment; the next step in the dark stairs leading to dictatorship is arrest without charges, already being used against migrants with no criminal record, some with protected immigration status; down at the bottom of the stairs is imprisonment without trial and conviction; we know from reading history that is less than a decade older than I am what is next: torture, disappearance, death.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland flew to El Salvador today and his request to see Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran migrant renditioned to a prison known for torturing inmates, was at first denied. The Democratic senator was later permitted to briefly visit with Abrego Garcia in a San Salvador hotel.

Until Van Hollen forced the issue by showing up in El Salvador, we and his family had no way of knowing whether Garcia was alive or dead. Not even the Supreme Court has been able to compel Donald Trump to return him from imprisonment in El Salvador that the court has ruled is “illegal.”

It starts with people who are poor without proper “papers.” It starts with those who have skin that is not white or those who are not heterosexual or their gender identity is different from the one listed on their birth certificate. It starts with those from another neighborhood or another religion. It starts with them. Then it’s Harvard. Then it’s us.

We are in the terrible place history has recorded so well and that we ignore at our peril.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Can Anyone Make Sense Of Trump's Senseless Tariffs?

Can Anyone Make Sense Of Trump's Senseless Tariffs?

They started collecting the largest tax ever imposed on the American people while Trump was on Air Force One on his way to a golf tournament in Florida.

Having taken a two-by-four to the global economy from a podium in the soon-to-be-paved-over Rose Garden at the White House, the president of the United States met with certifiable psycho Laura Loomer in the Oval Office and fired six of his employees on the National Security Council on her recommendation because they are disloyal “neo-cons.”

Then he flew to Palm Beach, Florida, where he plans to spend the rest of the week at his resort-club-residence, Mar-a-Lago, either watching multi-millionaires play golf in a Saudi-owned LIV tournament at his Doral Golf Club or playing the game himself. By Monday, Trump will have spent 25 days playing one of his golf courses in Florida at taxpayer expense, a quarter of the time he has been in office during his second term.

All of which makes about as much sense as the wide-ranging and onerous tariffs Trump unilaterally imposed Wednesday on imports from foreign countries, most of them long-time U.S. allies. Stock markets around the world reacted predictably, posting what the Washington Post called “correction territory” losses on Thursday.

Is this just another jaw-dropping day in Trump’s America, or is it something else – specifically, something worse? Is there something to figure out here? Let’s take a stab at it.

Trump told voters last fall that he would impose “big, beautiful tariffs” on what he insisted are “other countries,” despite the fact that like the United States, other countries collect taxes and do not pay them. Tariffs Trump announced yesterday range from 25 percent on our closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico, to 10 percent across the board on the rest of the world, with increases approaching 50 percent on goods from China, Vietnam and Cambodia, and approaching 20 percent on members of the European Union. Countries with which Trump is friendly, like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Qatar and his wife’s home country Slovenia, will see increases in the vicinity of 3 percent.

Who will pay? Not the manufacturers of sneakers and t-shirts or the producers of coffee beans or cocoa or bananas or BMW’s and Toyotas or cell phones. The tariffs will be paid by the American companies that import what we want to consume. The tariffs will be paid to customs collectors at the borders when the goods pass into the U.S. The money will be passed along to the U.S. treasury, where technically, as taxes collected by the government, it will become our money as U.S. citizens.

Then it will be deducted from our bank accounts in the form of higher prices passed along by importers like Target and Kroger’s and Walmart and Macy’s and Apple and Google and Ford and General Motors and which use imported parts in automobiles and trucks made to be sold to citizens like you and me.

So, let’s see if we can get this straight. Trump and his chainsaw-wielding cutter Elon Musk insist they want to reduce the size of the United States government by firing employees and cutting outlays for things like school lunches and federal housing support and repairing bridges and conducting research on new medicines and life-saving medical procedures, all of which is supposed to save us money so they can cut taxes.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury, a department of the government, will be taking in what Trump’s sock-puppets claim will be $6 trillion in tariffs on imports, as we pay for those tariffs in the form of higher prices on foodstuffs and clothing and electrical devices we need to communicate with each other and entertain ourselves and cars we need to drive to work so we can earn more money and pay what Trump promises will be lower taxes on our earnings.

Are you seeing the same circular reasoning I’m seeing here? No, it’s not reasoning, it’s an economic system. No, it’s not even that, because a system implies logic, as in one thing leading logically to another, and I see no discernible logic here.

What I can see is money flying out of our bank accounts in the form of income taxes and then more money leaving our wallets in the form of higher prices we pay to make up for the tariffs being paid by the companies importing the stuff we buy from them, at the same time that our smaller government is collecting more money it says will be spent on less public stuff benefitting fewer people who are paying more money into the public coffers.

Trump’s rationale for his scheme of higher tariffs on more imports from more countries is to reindustrialize this country so there is more manufacturing employing more U.S. citizens to make more stuff right here in the U.S.A. At his Rose Garden signing ceremony yesterday, Trump explained that if things are manufactured here, there will be no tariffs on those goods because they will not be imported and come across a border where tariffs are collected, thus we will have a lower trade deficit, which he seems to believe is a terrible thing to have.

But who is going to pay for all the new manufacturing plants? Let’s say you import computer chips, and now you want to make them here, so you need to build a plant where you can employ people to make them. Because you’ve been paying tariffs on your imports, you’ve had to raise prices. Higher prices for your computer chips have led to lower sales, which have produced lower income. The people buying your higher price chips have less money in their bank accounts they could use to buy stock in your company that might provide money for you to build your new plant.

So, the U.S Treasury has all the tariffs you’ve paid on your imports, but because it is a Republican Treasury Department in a Republican government, there are no plans for a Biden-style public spending bill like the Chips and Science Act that provided money not only for research into new technologies but tens of billions in public subsidies for new chip manufacturing plants in the U.S.

So, all that tariff money is sitting there doing nothing to help build new manufacturing plants because in the perfect world of the imaginary free market, the government has no role in private business.

And then there is this part of the “logic” of tariffs: For every plant built in the U.S. that produces goods on which tariffs are not collected, there is less tariff income in the federal treasury, which means that income taxes will have to go up by a corresponding amount to keep the government going, even the alleged smaller government. For every tariff imposed by the U.S., another tariff was imposed by another country to retaliate for the first tariff, and so on and so on and so on.

With the circular logic of Trump’s tariffs complete, the smoothly-functioning system of mostly-free international trade is gone, along with the growing economies of countries all over the world like China and Vietnam, which used to be rural and agricultural but became urban and industrial and added their growing GDP’s to the world’s GDP as countries and people and the world got richer and engaged in more trade, making more money for more people to consume more goods that needed to be manufactured by more plants in more countries.

And then on Wednesday, a man took a Sharpie and scribbled his name, and the system of trade between countries that took nearly 100 years to put together came to a stop. Econ 101 will never be the same.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

'A Tax Cut For Tax Cheats': DOGE's IRS Firings Burn Hundreds Of Millions In Revenue

'A Tax Cut For Tax Cheats': DOGE's IRS Firings Burn Hundreds Of Millions In Revenue

Dave Nershi was finalizing a report he’d worked on for months when an ominous email appeared in his inbox.

Nershi had worked as a general engineer for the Internal Revenue Service for about nine months. He was one of hundreds of specialists inside the IRS who used their technical expertise — Nershi’s background is in chemical and nuclear engineering — to audit byzantine tax returns filed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. Until recently, the IRS had a shortage of these experts, and many complex tax returns went unscrutinized. With the help of people like Nershi, the IRS could recoup millions and sometimes more than a billion dollars on a single tax return.

But on February 20, three months shy of finishing his probationary period and becoming a full-time employee, the IRS fired him. As a Navy veteran, Nershi loved working in public service and had hoped he might be spared from any mass firings. The unsigned email said he’d been fired for performance, even though he had received high marks from his manager.

As for the report he was finalizing, it would have probably recouped many times more than the low-six-figure salary he earned. The report would now go unfinished.

Nershi agreed that the federal government could be more lean and efficient, but he was befuddled by the decision to fire scores of highly skilled IRS specialists like him who, even by the logic of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, were an asset to the government. “By firing us, you’re going to cut down on how much revenue the country brings in,” Nershi said in an interview. “This was not about saving money.”

Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his billionaire top adviser Musk have launched an all-out blitz to cut costs and shrink the federal government. Trump, Musk and other administration leaders not only say the U.S. government is bloated and inefficient, but they also see it as a bastion of political opposition, calling it the “deep state.”

The strategy used by the Trump administration to reduce the size of government has been indiscriminate and far-reaching, meant to oust civil servants as fast as possible in as many agencies as possible while demoralizing the workers that remain on the job. As Russell Vought, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025, put it in a speech first reported by ProPublica and Documented: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

One tactic used by the administration is to target probationary workers who are easier to fire because they have fewer civil service protections. Probationary, in this context, means only that the employees are new to their roles, not that they’re newbies or underperformers. ProPublica found that the latest IRS firings swept up highly skilled and experienced probationary workers who had recently joined the government or had moved to a new position from a different agency.

In late February, the Trump administration began firing more than 6,000 IRS employees. The agency has been hit especially hard, current and former employees said, because it spent 2023 preparing to hire thousands of new enforcement and customer service personnel and had only started hiring and training those workers at any scale in 2024, meaning many of those new employees were still in their probationary period. Nershi was hired as part of this wave, in the spring of last year. The boost came after Congress had underfunded the agency for much of the past decade, which led to chronic staffing shortages, dismal customer service, and plummeting audit rates, especially for taxpayers who earned $500,000 or more a year.

The administration doesn’t appear to want to stop there. It is drafting plans to cut its entire workforce in half, according to reports.

Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

John Koskinen, who led the IRS from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that the widespread cuts to the IRS make no sense if Trump and Musk genuinely care about fiscal responsibility and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. “What I’ve never understood is if you’re interested in the deficit and curbing it, why would you cut back on the revenue side?” Koskinen said.

Neither the IRS nor the White House responded to requests for comment. Last month, Musk asked his followers on X, the platform he owns, whether they would “like @DOGE to audit the IRS,” referring to the U.S. DOGE Service team of lawyers and engineers led by him. DOGE employees have sought to gain access to IRS taxpayer data in an attempt to “shine a light on the fraud,” according to a White House spokesman.

For this story, ProPublica interviewed more than a dozen current and former IRS employees. Most of those people worked in the agency’s Large Business and International (LB&I) division, which audits companies with more than $10 million in assets and high-income individuals. Within the IRS, the LB&I division has the highest return on investment, and the widespread cuts there put in stark relief the human and financial cost of the Trump administration’s approach to slashing government functions in the name of saving money and combating waste and fraud.

According to current and former LB&I employees, the taxpayers they audited included pharmaceutical companies, oil and gas companies, construction firms and major technology corporations, as well as more obscure private corporations and high-net-worth individuals. None of the IRS employees who spoke to ProPublica would disclose specific taxpayer information, citing privacy laws.

With the recent influx in funding, employees said, the leadership of LB&I had pushed to hire not only more revenue agents and appraisers but also specialized employees such as petroleum engineers, computer scientists and experts in corporate partnerships. These employees, usually known internally as general engineers, consulted on complicated tax returns and helped determine whether taxpayers properly claimed certain credits or other tax breaks.

This work happened in cases where major companies claimed a hefty research tax credit, which is a legitimate avenue for seeking tax relief but can also be improperly used. Highly skilled appraisers have also recouped huge savings in cases involving notorious tax schemes, such as what’s known as a syndicated conservation easement — a break abused so often that both congressional Democrats and Republicans have criticized it, while the IRS has included it on its list of the “Dirty Dozen” tax scams.

“These are cases where revenue agents don't have the technical expertise,” said one IRS engineer who is still employed at the agency and who, like other IRS employees, wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. “That’s what we do. We are working on things where expertise is absolutely necessary.”

Current and former IRS employees told ProPublica that the agency had expended a huge amount of resources to recruit and train new specialists in recent years. Vanessa Rollins, an engineer in the IRS’ Chicago office who was recently fired, said probationary employees in LB&I outnumbered full-time staffers in her office. Much of her team’s work centered on training and mentorship for the waves of new employees — most of whom were recently fired. “The entire office had been oriented around bringing us in and getting us trained,” Rollins said.

These specialists said they earned higher salaries compared with many other IRS employees. But the money these specialists recouped as a result of their work was orders of magnitude greater than what they cost. The current engineer told ProPublica that they estimated their team of less than 10 people had brought in $5 billion in adjusted tax returns over the past four years. (By contrast, aWall Street Journal analysis published on February 22 found that DOGE had found savings of $2.6 billion over the next year, far less than the $55 billion claimed by DOGE itself.)

A former LB&I revenue agent added that their work didn’t always lead to the IRS recouping money from a taxpayer; sometimes, they audited a return only to find that the taxpayer was owed more money than they had expected.

“The IRS’ mission is to treat taxpayers fairly so they pay the tax they legally owe, including making sure they’re not paying any more than legally required,” the former revenue agent said.

Notwithstanding its return on investment and the sense of duty espoused by its employees, LB&I was hit especially hard by the most recent wave of firings, employees said. According to the current IRS engineer, the Trump administration appears to have eliminated the jobs of about 120 LB&I engineers out of a total of roughly 260. The person said they had heard more terminations were expected soon. The acting IRS chief and a longtime agency leader, Doug O’Donnell, announced his retirement amid the firings.

Several LB&I employees told ProPublica that the mass layoffs had been ordered from a very high level and that several layers of managers had no idea they were coming or what to expect. The cuts, employees said, did not appear to distinguish between employees with certain specialties or performance levels, but instead focused solely on whether they were on probationary status. “It didn't matter the skill set. If they were under a year, they got cut,” another current LB&I employee told ProPublica.

The current and former IRS employees said the firings and the administration’s deferred resignation offer led to situations that have wiped out decades of experience and institutional knowledge that can’t easily be replaced. Jack McCumber was an LB&I senior appraiser in Seattle who got fired about six weeks before the end of his probationary status. He said not only did he lose his job, but the veteran appraiser who was his mentor took early retirement. McCumber and his mentor often worked on syndicated conservative easement cases that could recoup tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. “They’re pushing out the experienced people, and they’re pushing out people like me,” McCumber said. “It’s a double whammy.”

The result, employees and experts said, will mean corporations and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, leading to more risk-taking and less money flowing into the U.S. treasury.

“Large businesses and higher-wealth individuals are where you have the most sophisticated taxpayers and the most sophisticated tax preparers and lawyers who are attuned to pushing the envelope as much as they can,” said Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner. “When those audits stop because there isn't anybody to do them, people will say, ‘Hey, I did that last year, I'll do it again this year.’”

“When you hamstring the IRS,” Koskinen added. “it’s just a tax cut for tax cheats.”

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica

'This Will Kill People': House GOP Guts Medicaid For Billionaire Tax Cut

'This Will Kill People': House GOP Guts Medicaid For Billionaire Tax Cut

By a slim 217-213 margin, House Republicans narrowly passed a bill Tuesday night that makes deep cuts to safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps while simultaneously extending President Donald Trump's tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans. Wall Street Journal congressional reporter Olivia Beavers tweeted that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had a group of Republicans "shaking his hand, back slapping and congratulating him" after the vote was confirmed.

As Politico reported, the vote was initially slated to fail with multiple Republican holdouts expressing reservations about the scope of cuts in the bill. While the legislation makes $2 trillion in across-the-board spending cuts, Forbes reported that roughly $800 billion of those cuts came from federal support for state Medicaid programs, which provide health insurance for low-income families. But some Republicans, like Reps. Tim Burchett (R-TN), Warren Davidson (R-OH, Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Victoria Spartz (R-IN) wanted deeper cuts.

After Johnson and Trump both leaned on the four holdouts, three of them ended up flipping to support the bill, while Massie voted with the Democratic opposition. The Kentucky Republican explained that his primary hangup with the budget bill was that it added $20 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.

The bulk of that debt comes from extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act for the next decade, which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) said was "skewed to the rich, expensive and failed to deliver on its promises."

"As a share of after-tax income, tax cuts at the top — for both households in the top 1 percent and the top 5 percent — are more than triple the total value of the tax cuts received for people with incomes in the bottom 60 percent," the CBPP wrote.

Democrats were united in their opposition to the bill, and made sure to travel to the House of Representatives chamber to cast their vote after Johnson made it impossible for them to vote remotely or by proxy. Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) tweeted that she traveled to Washington to vote on the bill despite giving birth to her son earlier that day.

"They want to rip away health care from 400,000 CO kids, take food off the plates of seniors & veterans, and make life more expensive for hardworking Coloradans – all so they can give tax breaks to corporations and billionaires like Elon Musk," she wrote.

Political scientist and New York Times contributor Miranda Yaver condemned the bill in a post to Bluesky, pointing out that Medicaid "covers 1 in 5 Americans overall, including 41% of births and 63% of nursing home care." She added that the bill cuts the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (also known as food stamps), which 41 million Americans depend on to afford groceries.

"This won’t just harm people. This will kill people," Yaver wrote. "They own this."

According to Bobby Kogan, who is the senior director of federal budget policy for the Center for American Progress, the bill would "cut SNAP down to just $1.60 per person per meal on [average] while cutting taxes for the top 0.1% by $278k." He pointed out that the bill still has a major obstacle in the Senate, where Republicans are more reticent to green-light the tax cut extension and cut Medicaid. Kogan also reminded his followers that Trump's attempted 2017 repeal of the Affordable Care Act was finally halted in the Senate during the "vote-o-rama" amendments process.

Democratic activist Joe Katz opined that "all purple district Republicans" will have immense difficulty "trying to convince people this wasn't TECHNICALLY a vote for cutting Medicaid and SNAP to pay for billionaire tax cuts." Journalist and editor Jonathan Cohn asserted that Tuesday night's vote proves that "there are no moderate Republicans in Congress."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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