The IRS Funding Ratchet

Plus, an $8.8 billion train station; Trump on Israel’s “very big mistake,” naps against capitalism

One reason government spending keeps soaring is that a lot of the press pockets any planned increase in spending as a baseline and defines any effort to dial it back in the direction of earlier levels as a “cut.”

An example comes in a front-page New York Times interview with Senator Schumer about his speech throwing Israel under the bus. From the Times:

Mr. Schumer said he still believes his Republican colleagues love Israel, “but some of them love beating up on the Democrats more.” As an example, he cited the decision by Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican, last fall to tie aid to Israel to cutting funding for the Internal Revenue Service, a poison pill for Democrats.

The IRS budget held steady in the roughly $11 billion a year range from 2013 to 2019. Under President Biden it grew to about $14.3 billion in 2022. The agency is planning to spend $17 billion in 2023, $21 billion in 2024, and $23 billion in 2025, with much of the increase funded by the “Inflation Reduction Act” that passed the Senate in 2022 with not a single Republican vote. Even the adjustments proposed by Speaker Johnson to fund the Israel aid, which amount to about $14 billion total spread over 8 years, would still leave the IRS with a bigger budget than it had during the 2013 to 2019 period. In Washington-speak, a reduction in the planned rate of growth is a “cut.” Naturally, the Times doesn’t offer Johnson a chance to respond on this point. Nor does the newspaper explain how Schumer proposed to pay for the Israel aid (other than by raising taxes even more on the “rich,” or by borrowing the money from China, future generations, or the Federal Reserve.)

The Times article isn’t mainly about IRS funding. It’s about Schumer (loves Israel, but loves the IRS more?). But the passage is a good example of how the spending discussion in Washington goes, enabled by the press.

An $8.8 billion train station: The trade publication ENR, or Engineering News-Record, Mid-Atlantic reports on an incremental go-ahead for an $8.8 billion upgrade of Union Station in Washington, D.C. For comparison’s sake, “An extensive $180-million renovation effort completed in September 1988 restored and rehabilitated the building, along with adding a new retail area, food court and movie theater. A five-year $20-million renovation of the space completed in 2016 to upgrade structural and building systems, and repaired damage from a 2011 earthquake.” The Moynihan Train Hall in New York, completed in 2021, was a $1.6 billion project. The new Reagan National Airport was a $450 million project when it opened in 1997.

It's hard to know whether these rapidly escalating sums are a sign of the declining value of the dollar, or the increased cost of union labor, or what, but $8.8 billion seems like a lot of money to spend on a train station. One reason these projects are so expensive is that governments require environmental and historic preservation reviews that take forever, so it becomes a vicious cycle of the government passing laws that make government buildings costlier.

Trump’s Israel Hayom interview: Donald Trump gives an interview to Israel Hayom, an Israeli newspaper. It is not exactly something tightly scripted to appeal to pro-Israel voters newly disillusioned with the Biden administration. Trump: “I think Israel made a very big mistake. I wanted to call [Israel] and say don't do it. These photos and shots. I mean, moving shots of bombs being dropped into buildings in Gaza. And I said, Oh, that's a terrible portrait. It's a very bad picture for the world. The world is seeing this…every night, I would watch buildings pour down on people. It would say it was given by the Defense Ministry, and said whoever's providing that that's a bad image.”

For this we need Donald Trump? To go around declaring publicly that “Israel made a very big mistake?” Even if Trump privately thinks that, it sure doesn’t help Israel to have him going around publicly saying it.

Trump also got in a dig at the New York Times. “We have a lot of people in the United States who are Jewish but they actually fight Israel. Look at the New York Times. It's a Jewish family. I think they hate Israel.”

At this point, with the family that controls the New York Times, some of them are Jewish and some of them aren’t. Anyway, the survey data shows the vast majority of American Jews—89 percent—say Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are valid. So the notion that there exist some vast number of Israel-hating American Jews is just not supported by the empirical reality outside the skewed picture provided by the New York Times.

Naps against Capitalism: The Christian Century (“Thoughtful, Independent, Progressive”) runs a favorable review under the headline “Naps against Capitalism” of the book “Rest Is Resistance” by “poet-theologian” Tricia Hersey, founder of the “Nap Ministry.” The book says, “Capitalism may not fall in our lifetimes, and it is not redeemable, so the work is to begin to reclaim your body and your time.”

The reviewer writes that “Poet-theologian Tricia Hersey weaves together personal narrative, lyrical theology, and political theory to leverage the political power of rest against ‘grind culture,’ which becomes shorthand for systems and ideologies—in particular, White supremacy and capitalism—that jeopardize human flourishing.”

What nonsense. First of all, the book is published by Little Brown Spark, part of Hachette Book Group, part of Lagardère. Capitalism isn’t jeopardizing Hersey’s flourishing. It’s paying her for her writing so that it reaches a wider audience and lets her nap on a more comfortable bed, on nicer sheets, and with less stress about life than if she had to rely on support from some less efficient state-run publishing enterprise. Napping constantly instead of working isn’t consistent with human flourishing, either. The anticapitalist side is so bitter they can’t even take a nap without making it part of their war on the economic system that allows us to prosper.

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