science

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is recommending taxpayers prepare for the 2025 tax filing season by taking certain key steps to make filing easier and help safeguard their tax information.

“There are a number of things taxpayers can do to get ready as the end of 2024 nears and the start of the 2025 tax season approaches,” said a Dec. 19 statement from the agency. The latest reminder is part of the “Get Ready” series in which the IRS publishes key updates as the start of the 2025 tax season approaches.

The IRS encouraged taxpayers to sign up for an IRS Online Account. The account helps individuals view key information from their recent returns, make and cancel payments, get electronic notices from the agency, set up payment plans, and sign forms like powers of attorney, among other things.

Besides the account, the IRS recommended getting an Identity Protection Personal Identification Number, or IP PIN. “An IP PIN is a six-digit number that prevents someone else from filing a federal tax return using an individual’s Social Security number or Individual Taxpayer Identification Number.”

“It’s a vital tool for ensuring the safety of taxpayers’ personal and financial information,” the agency said.

For the 2025 filing season, the IRS has made an update regarding dependents on tax forms.

Taxpayers claim dependents during filing returns to receive certain deductions and credits like the Child Tax Credit, Earned Income Tax Credit, medical expense deduction, and education credits.

Sometimes, multiple people claim the same individuals as dependents on tax forms, like for instance, former spouses.

The IRS processes tax returns in the order they receive. As such, if the agency had already processed a return with certain dependents, another return seeking to claim the same individuals gets rejected.

However, starting from the 2025 filing season, returns claiming same dependents shall be accepted by the agency, provided the taxpayer includes a valid IP PIN.

The IRS says the new update “will reduce the time for the agency to receive the tax return and accelerate the issuance of tax refunds for those with duplicate dependent returns.”

“The best way to sign up for an IP PIN is through the IRS Online Account,” the agency said. However, “if an individual is unable to create an Online Account, alternative methods are available, such as in-person authentication at a Taxpayer Assistance Center.”

The IRS also highlighted the upcoming estimated tax payment due date.

“Taxpayers with non-wage income—such as unemployment benefits, self-employment income, annuity payments or earnings from digital assets—may need to make estimated or additional tax payments,” said the agency.

The deadline to make these payments for the September–December quarter of 2024 is Jan. 15.

1099-K Reporting, Digital Assets

Taxpayers who sold goods or services and collected over $5,000 in receipts via payment apps or online marketplaces in 2024 “should expect to receive a Form 1099-K,” the IRS said.

The form details payments received by taxpayers engaged in such transactions. Taxpayers must now account for these incomes when filing returns.

When previously the form was issued if the total transaction value in a year exceeded $20,000, currently the threshold is set at $5,000. This reduction is part of a plan to eventually reduce the limit to $600.

The IRS clarified that “taxpayers must report all income on their tax return unless it’s excluded by law, whether they receive a Form 1099-K or not.”

“The law doesn’t allow taxpayers to avoid taxes on income earned just because they didn’t get a form reporting the payments received.”

Form 1099-K income threshold reduction has come under criticism from lawmakers.

Rep. Carol Miller (R-W.Va.) introduced the “Saving Gig Economy Taxpayers Act” which seeks to revert it back to $20,000. She called the reduction “a tax hike on Americans and gig workers who use online payment platforms.”

Meanwhile, the IRS also reminded taxpayers to report all income related to digital assets like cryptocurrencies when filing the 2024 returns.

“If a taxpayer had digital asset transactions last year, they should be sure to keep records that prove their purchase, receipt, sale, exchange or any other disposition of the digital assets,” the IRS said. This includes the fair market value of such assets measured in U.S. dollars.

The IRS received around $5.1 trillion in tax revenues in the latest fiscal year 2024, roughly $400 billion more than in the previous year.

Authored by Cynical Publius via American Greatness,

The U.S. military’s growing DEI policies are creating a climate where fear of unfounded accusations erodes leadership and threatens combat readiness – leaving the nation’s future at risk…

As Pete Hegseth’s nomination for Secretary of Defense moves forward, the matter of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) doctrines and practices in America’s military is a hot-button issue of significant importance. Our media is awash with stories of “woke” generals and admirals, critiques of women in combat, awful tales of command selection board manipulations based on race or gender, and a generalized sense of uneasiness in the senior ranks of the Pentagon over perceived massive changes to take place once Trump and Hegseth are in charge. However, this current DEI attention focuses almost exclusively on what is happening inside the five walls of the Pentagon and tends to ignore DEI’s most pernicious effect: the way it is obliterating command authority in tactical units in the field and warships at sea.

First, let me tell you how I figured out what is going on. On X (formerly known as Twitter), I have an active account of about 130,000 followers. I know that number is much smaller than that of many other X influencers, but it’s enough to give me some reach. My account focuses primarily on politics and culture, with a heavy emphasis on matters related to the U.S. military. That’s because I’m a retired Army colonel, and my views on military matters seem to resonate with veterans and active duty alike. It is that community of military followers that has fully revealed to me the DEI cancer that is eating away at U.S. military leadership at all levels.

A few days ago, I read an article from Military.com that truly shocked me. That article stated that in today’s Army, roughly half of the officers who are eligible for battalion command are refusing to even be considered for such command. The article’s author, quoting official Army sources, stated that this was a function of officers being unwilling to take on the extraordinary time demands of being a battalion commander and out of a desire for a more sedate form of service for themselves and their families. The article suggests that a career as a staff officer with retirement at 20 years is more palatable than the constant and powerful peacetime and wartime demands of commanding a battalion of many hundreds or thousands of soldiers, even if that decision prohibits ever reaching high rank.

I was shocked. As I posted on X:

“What is going on here? In the Army I grew up in, it was the almost uniform goal of the entire officer corps to become a battalion commander one day. It was the brass ring. It was the validation of all of your training and efforts, and it was the most rewarding job in your career. The only reason to hold tedious staff positions was so you could aspire to one day command a battalion. So now in 2024, officers are happy to wile away the years making PowerPoint slides and making sure the coffee is fresh, and they lack the desire to lead troops? Dear God. The rot in the culture is far worse than I imagined.”

(As background, in all of the military services, not just the Army, command at the O-5 level is the ultimate leadership experience. In the Army and Marine Corps, it means commanding a battalion as a lieutenant colonel. In the Air Force, it means commanding a squadron as a lieutenant colonel. In the Navy, it means commanding a combat warship at the similar O-5 rank of commander. It truly is the greatest reward for those who wish to lead and command, and it is usually the last time in a successful military career that you are down in the dirt (or the bilge) with the troops that you lead. It’s a special time, once coveted by the best leaders.)

I retired from active duty in 2007, so I was looking at this issue from my old-timer perspective. But that’s when X, as the “new news media,” did its job—suddenly my X comments and private messages were flooded with active duty and recently retired officers explaining to me that this phenomenon was not due to a desire to not be overworked (as suggested by the Army itself and the Pentagon-friendly author at Military.com) but was instead due to fear of DEI. DEI has made O-5-level command a risky proposition where a male or a white officer lives in fear of an unfounded DEI complaint that would destroy not only his or her military career but the officer’s reputation as well. The risk of such destruction is outweighing the desire to lead. This is a tragic result.

So let’s say you are a straight, white male Army battalion commander who has a subordinate who happens to be a racial or ethnic minority, or a female, or LGBTQ+. Let’s also say that the subordinate is a poor performer to whom you give a poor efficiency report or is someone engaged in illegal activity that you prosecute under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Let’s say that such a poor performer or criminal then goes to the Inspector General (IG) and claims what you have done is motivated solely by racial, ethnic, or gender animus, or homophobia. (Or worse, a female soldier falsely claims you sexually assaulted her.) Back in the day, all such a commander needed to do was show the facts surrounding the issue to the IG, and the IG would go away, satisfied. But not today. Today, such claims tend to result in a presumption of guilt against the commander, which must be conclusively disproven.

As if that is not bad enough, there is a related concept here: so-called “counterproductive leadership.” Basically, counterproductive leadership is the idea that a leader’s actions are so toxic that he or she is not qualified to command. Crazily, “counterproductive leadership” (or “toxic leadership”) can be evidenced merely by such abstract concepts as subordinates refusing to look a leader in the eye or leaders holding poor performers to account for their poor performance. I’m fairly certain that iconic military leaders like George S. Patton and William “Bull” Halsey, Jr. would be considered purveyors of “counterproductive leadership” in today’s military environment, and mythical characters like Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Highway would likely be in the stockade.

“Counterproductive leadership” then gets linked to something else: “loss of confidence” by a commander’s chain of command. This is the idea that a commander’s superiors relieved him or her from command for unspecified reasons—including “counterproductive leadership.” In the past ten years, an unprecedented number of senior leaders (O-5 and above) have been relieved from command for this very “loss of confidence” reason. (Do a simple Google search and you’ll see what I mean.)

So let me please break down for you how this is all connected. Despite the fact that many commanders are, in fact, relieved for legitimately horrific reasons, many others are relieved according to the following, specious chain of events:

1. A unit commander disciplines a minority, female, or LGBTQ+ subordinate who legitimately committed some form of wrongdoing or was a poor performer.

2. The subordinate then files a race/ethnicity/gender/religion/sexuality discrimination complaint against the unit commander with the IG, claiming the discipline was unwarranted and was actually motivated by racial/ethnic/gender/religious/LGBTQ+ animus.

3. The unit commander is presumed guilty until proven innocent.

4. The IG then determines the unit commander is innocent.

5. Despite the IG’s determination, the unit commander’s higher chain of command determines that “counterproductive leadership” was the cause of the unfounded and disproven IG complaint—a complaint that presumably would never have occurred had the unit commander displayed “productive leadership.”

6. “Counterproductive leadership” causes the unit commander’s chain of command to determine it has “lost confidence” in the unit commander.

7. The unit commander is then relieved from command duties by his or her higher chain of command due to such loss of confidence.

8. Stars and Stripes and Military.com then publicly report the ex-commander’s relief for cause.

9. The ex-commander then becomes depressed and starts drinking heavily; the ex-commander cannot find a civilian job because his reputation has been publicly destroyed; the ex-commander’s wife and kids leave him; the now-broke ex-commander moves into a seedy one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, where he is later arrested for fentanyl distribution.

(OK, I made #9 up—but I’m sure you can see how that fear of reputational destruction is valid and real.)

But that sequence of #1 through #8 that I just told you about? It’s real, without any exaggeration. There are senior folks I know personally who have suffered from this exact phenomenon. However, I’m not just speaking on this subject from personal knowledge (and back to X as the real news purveyor of the modern era), as my X feed has been overwhelmed with expressions of just what I wrote above. I have written some controversial X takes before that have garnered millions of views, but none of those resulted in so many detailed recountings of the exact same tale of woe as my discussion on this command issue did.

I’ll offer two examples out of many presented by my X followers.

My first comes from a current DoD member who is uniquely qualified in their duty position to understand the issue of O-5 command selection and the current related problems (and therefore said person requests anonymity):

“I work in a position where I encounter many of the O-5s and E-9s in that group [for prospective command]. An alarming amount of them seem low-key dreading facing the “weaponized investigation” culture that is currently pervasive. Combine that with the paltry manning (but perception from higher that everything must still get done as if they were 100%), and it is absolutely not surprising to me that the command opt-in is down.”

Then this from a recently retired Army colonel:

“100% accurate about jeopardy for commanders. I spent 75% of my last deployment conducting investigations. Did 78 AR 15-6 investigations in 9 months. The biggest problem are the sharp complaints and the “counterproductive leadership complaints.” Those are used for revenge and get out of jail. The “counterproductive leadership” complaints are virtually impossible to counter and even if you do no one escapes unscathed. Finally the religious exemptions for grooming and uniform standards are an EO trap—no matter how ridiculous the claim you have to be crazy to recommend denial because who are you to say it’s not a “sincerely held religious belief?” Deny it and you are prejudiced. Many of the active component majors and lieutenant colonels I worked with said they had zero interest in battalion command or brigade command because they were terrified of the endless investigations. It’s much less of a problem in the National Guard and USAR… until you mobilize. Then it’s the same problem.”

These are merely two of many such communications I have received. Are you sensing a pattern here?

Let me break it down one more time, as it was news to me when I finally figured it out, and it is probably news to anybody else who has not been in the U.S. military fairly recently. Here it is. Our senior civilian and military leadership in the Department of Defense have created a DEI climate across all military services where leadership at the key level of O-5 command is impossible. As a result, the best-qualified O-5s are running from command out of a legitimate fear of life-destroying lies that will stain their reputations like a scarlet letter.

The most disturbing part of all of this, however, is what the DEI cancer does at the tactical unit level to combat readiness. A military unit or warship cannot function as a combat-effective force when its commander lives in the shadow of the fear of unfounded subordinate retribution. It cannot. It is as if there is constant fear of mutiny or a gnawing sense of uneasiness that the unit you command is populated by an unknown number of zampolit. Leadership and discipline fail, unit cohesion crumbles, and the entire system disintegrates as combat effectiveness evaporates. Worst of all, the service members in such a combat-ineffective unit or ship will suffer—and some will die—as a result.

One more thing: if the best and brightest are running in fear from command, who is taking command? Answer: the “woke,” DEI-compliant officers; and because they are the ones taking command, they will necessarily one day become the officers at the top of the pyramid who make all the key military decisions. Or perhaps they are already there.

All of this leads to a very simple and devastating conclusion: if U.S. military commanders cannot command effectively, how can the U.S. military ever again win a war?

Pete Hegseth, please unwind the tyranny and combat ineffectiveness of this DEI cancer at all levels, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff all the way down to the infantry private walking point. Please. Our nation’s future depends upon it.

***

Cynical Publius is the nom de plume of a retired U.S. Army colonel, veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and reformed denizen of the Pentagon who is now a practicing corporate law attorney. You can follow Cynical Publius on X at @CynicalPublius.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson stepped to new lows when his hand-picked board fired Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Pedro Martinez without cause.

Austin Berg at the Illinois Policy Institute Explains on X.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s hand-picked school board just voted unanimously to fire Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez without cause. Johnson and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) have been pushing for months to oust Martinez following his refusal to back Johnson’s demand for a $300M high-interest loan to pay for a new CTU contract. The CTU is Johnson’s largest campaign funder and former employer.

Aldeman Silvana Tabares made a very important point in public comment before the board vote. CTU takes in more than $30M a year. But it spends just 17 cents of every dollar on teacher representation. The rest goes toward administration, politics and other leadership priorities. The contract with CPS is what fuels their political machine. The bigger the contract, the more money CTU can give to Johnson and his allies.

As background to this story, Johnson’s initial cohort of appointed board members resigned unanimously in November when Johnson told them to fire CPS CEO Pedro Martinez. Johnson sought to terminate Martinez because Martinez didn’t support Johnson’s push to take out a high-interest loan to cover CPS’ $300 million shortfall.

Please note the CTU proposal includes annual raises of 10-12 percent after factoring in cost-of-living adjustments. And the union demands 13,000 new positions despite falling school enrollment.

The CPS leaders say this would push the district’s deficit to $4 billion by 2029. That nearly half of the entire budget.

When Johnson demanded his own appointed board go along with this proposal, they all resigned instead. Johnson’s new handpicked board then voted to fire, without cause, Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez.

When fired without cause, CPS leader Martinez can stay on for 6 months. To get around Martinez in the interim, mayor Johnson proposes a deputy CPS leader, a position that does not even exist.

Q&A With Austin Berg

A national political reporter visiting Chicago to cover preparations for the Democratic National Convention asked Austin Berg “What do you think people outside Chicago don’t understand about Brandon Johnson’s administration?”

Berge gave his 3-Part Answer on X.

1️⃣ The Chicago Teachers Union dictates the mayor’s priorities and allocation of political capital. They are by far the most powerful political actor in city government right now, which means the administration fixates on the demands of a small base of far-left activists. This explains things like the cancellation of ShotSpotter despite community support, the mayor casting the tie-breaking vote on a ceasefire resolution, attacking selective enrollment schools, defending the most radical members of city council despite their horrific behavior, hostility toward ethics reform, and banning schools from hiring cops as security officers. Watch the @illinoispolicy
documentary “Local 1: The Rise of America’s Most Powerful Teachers Union” for the best account of this.

2️⃣ Because of No. 1, the administration is staffed by a relatively large number of people with little to no executive experience, including the mayor himself. This explains a wide range of unforced errors: trying to build a migrant tent camp on toxic land, losing the “mansion tax” referendum, announcing an unpopular proposal for a publicly funded Chicago Bears stadium that was immediately dead on arrival in Springfield, ghosting the Sun-Times editorial board after they refused to hold an off the record conversation, and over/underpaying thousands of Chicago government employees due to clerical errors.

3️⃣ You could elect Mother Teresa or Pericles to be mayor of Chicago and they would still have a difficult time fixing the city’s problems. That’s in large part because we’re the only major city among the top 10 in the U.S. lacking a city charter. This means there are no constitutional checks and balances on authority. No thoughtful delegation of power. And little democracy on issues of citywide importance. This explains why the Council and the Mayor can’t agree on who really has authority over the ShotSpotter deal, why the Chicago Police Department is in compliance with just 6% of the federal consent decree and thus lacks community trust, why City Council is not able to provide a meaningful check on the mayor’s budgeting and forecasting, why Chicago alone holds more pension debt than 44 U.S. states, and why the mayor can sign major deals (Lollapalooza, NASCAR) behind closed doors with no oversight. The best account of this is “The New Chicago Way: Lessons from Other Big Cities” which compares Chicago’s governance structure to other major cities and offers a comprehensive solution set. You can buy the book or listen to our podcast mini-series at http://newchicagoway.com. DM me if you can’t afford a copy and I’ll send you one.

The State of the City

Last year the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago asked Berg to give a talk about the state of the city.

He discussed Chicago history, the city’s problems, solutions, and the main findings in his video “The New Chicago Way.”

CTU History of Anti-Parent Actions

Please note the CTU Has a Long History of Anti-Parent Actions.

The Chicago Teachers Union is the enemy of parents’ rights. It’s efforts to unionize charter schools, push them to the brink of closure and then take them over as typical public schools bears this out.

Step 1: Unionize. In January 2018 – the same year Acero’s unionized employees merged with CTU – former CTU President Jesse Sharkey explicitly admitted his motivation to “undermine further charter expansion,” using tactics such as unionizing and merging charter schools into CTU.

Step 2: Undermine. Later that year, CTU employed its go-to tactic in leading Acero’s teachers out on strike, marking the first charter school strike in the nation and cancelling class for the 7,000 students at the 15 schools.

Step 3: Absorb. After Acero announced schools were closing, current CTU president Stacy Davis Gates claimed she wanted to “save” them by absorbing them into CPS. The school board followed her directive on Dec. 20 and did just that.

Now those charters will no longer exist.

The CPS Budget

The district’s budget is about $10 billion. It’s up nearly 30% increase in five years while serving fewer students.

By 2029 or 2030, the deficit is projected to be $4 billion per year on a $10 billion budget.

The city is broke.

Worst in Class

Johnson is the most corrupt mayor in the nation. And the CTU is the most corrupt union in the nation.

It is a one-two punch with unfortunate kids held hostage for the benefit of leaders who belong in jail.

I can’t help but think Johnson will eventually find jail because history suggests these corrupt politicians eventually get there.

Meanwhile, the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent kids are destroyed in a worst in the nation public school system.

When Do Mayor Brandon Johnson and the City of Chicago Finally Implode?

On November 25, I asked When Do Mayor Brandon Johnson and the City of Chicago Finally Implode?

Chicago slashed 2,103 public safety job but added 184 administrators. The budget deficit is nearly $1 billion.

Openly Rooting for Implosion

I am openly rooting for Chicago and the entire pension system of Illinois to implode.

That sounds harsh bit it isn’t.

There will be no reform until crisis hits, and the sooner the better because those currently collecting unwarranted massive pensions are bleeding the pension funds dry.

The sooner the collapse, the more pension money will be saved for the average Joe.

Meanwhile, please note that In Chicago There’s Under a 50 Percent Chance Police Show Up If You are Shot

Good luck in Chicago getting the police to show up if you are shot, stabbed, a victim of domestic violence, or any number of other serious crimes.

But hey, Chicago hired 179 new community services administrators. How’s that working for you?

Authored by Roger Kimball via American Greatness,

Move over, Trump Derangement Syndrome! It is time to make room for the latest pathology: Musk Derangement Syndrome.

The hysteria has been building for some time.

It wasn’t so long ago that Elon Musk enjoyed enviable street cred among the brotherhood of snotty, self-congratulating elites. A green energy guru, he made the hearts of the Sierra Club Sultans go pit-a-pat with his talk of “sustainable transport” and solar roofs.

Then Musk made several missteps. The first was buying Twitter and restoring open discourse to a platform that was started to encourage, well, open discourse but had become a headquarters of government surveillance and censorship during the first Trump administration. Musk never recovered his progressive credentials after he came out as a supporter of free speech.

But the atmosphere of left-wing disapproval that was swaddling Musk since his purchase of Twitter turned toxic and hysterical this past summer when, following the assassination attempt against Donald Trump, he announced that, gasp, he was supporting Trump’s reelection bid. Could you believe it? Supporting Trump’s reelection—especially actively, ostentatiously, effectively supporting Trump’s reelection bid—was like the sin against the Holy Ghost: unforgivable.

And then Musk compounded the perfidy by joining forces with Vivek Ramaswamy to form DoGE: the “department” of government efficiency, a time-limited initiative to help bring government spending and regulation under control. They have set an expiration date of July 6, 2026, by which date they hope to have been able to give America a 250th birthday gift of fiscal solvency and rational regulation.

Many people have wondered what DoGe would be able to accomplish since it would just be making recommendations with no real power to enforce them.

We have just been vouchsafed a glimpse of its possible potency.

For several years now, the approach of Christmas has brought not just visions of sugar plums and Santa sightings but also the annual Congressional budget snit known as CR, short for “Continuing Resolution.”

The exercise now seems almost venerable. In fact, though, it is an admission of failure, begotten in legislative irresponsibility, bred in malodorous sluices of pork-laden, politically correct greed.

Every year, Congress is supposed to deliver a budget before it breaks for Christmas. America’s last real budget was passed in 1996. The usual expedient is the stopgap measure of a “continuing resolution” in which Congress says it will just continue funding things at more or less the same level as it had been, kicking the can down the road and into the next fiscal year. (For an excellent explanation of the process, I recommend this brief but gimlet-eyed presentation: some college government department should hire this chap.)

Contemplating the embarrassing sideshow that was this year’s CR squabble, a friend reminded me of the old quip. If “con” is the opposite of “pro,” what is the opposite of “Congress?” This year, as has become the usual practice, Congress waited until the last possible moment to plop the text of the Continuing Resolution on the desks of our Conscript Fathers. What had started as a twenty-page document had lizzoed into a 1547-page behemoth. This was no “continuing resolution” but a porker full of self-serving giveaways to Congress as well as numerous woke initiatives designed to stymie the incoming Trump administration.

Among many noxious items were a provision to scuttle any serious inquiry into the activities of Liz Cheney’s January 6 investigation and another provision to continue funding the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. This innocuous-sounding initiative (we’re all in favor of “global engagement,” right?) funds the Britain-based Global Disinformation Index, which encourages advertisers to flee media outlets of which the guardians of the Narrative disapprove. This includes the Washington Examiner, RealClearPolitics, Reason, the New York Post, Blaze Media, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the American Conservative, Newsmax—and American Greatness. It is, as Vivek Ramaswamy observed, a “key node of the censorship industrial complex.”

This monstrosity was stopped, but how? Critics of Musk blame him. “He tweeted about our beloved monstrosity,” they skirled. “He killed the bill.”

But this is wrong. Musk did indeed post, with Olympic assiduity, about the egregious piece of self-serving lard.

But what scotched the original bill was the public outcry.

Musk may have been the catalyst, the tocsin in the night.

The fire brigade was manned by ordinary citizens.

As one social media poster put it, “All Elon did was read a bill, post on a public platform that the reckless spending in it was unacceptable, ask others to contact their representatives if they agreed, and made clear that he will help primary Ds + Rs who support it.”

This is exactly right.

But to listen to the Dems, you would think the world was coming to an end.

On December 18, Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA), knickers twisted tight, asked angrily, “Can you imagine what the next two years are going to be like if every time that Congress works its will and then there’s a tweet? Or from an individual who has no official portfolio, who threatens members on the Republican side with a primary? And they succumb?” Yes, just imagine, Dick, if it is the people themselves, and not your little club of coddled thumb suckers, who shed light on the activities of Congress as it pretends to go about the people’s business?

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) sounded a similar note. “We had a deal to avert a shutdown,” this pathetic tool skirled. “Musk et al. blew it up because it didn’t help billionaires enough.”

Right.

Then came the sweaty lie.

“They wrote a new bill to cut cancer treatment for kids and grease a new tax cut for the rich.”

There are no “tax cuts for the rich.” And although “cutting cancer treatment for kids” got massive circulation for fifteen minutes, Murphy neglected to mention that the funding for pediatric cancer treatment was passed by the GOP-controlled House last March and was awaiting passage by the Democrat-controlled Senate.

It is an ill wind that blows nobody good, however, and I am grateful to this latest nocturnal emission of Democrat ire for my introduction to Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT). Some unkind people have said that she is an escapee from the set of an Addams Family movie. That is grossly unfair—to the Addams family. I am not sure whether it was DeLauro who first referred to Musk as “President Musk.” She certainly helped circulate the epithet, which is part of a flaccid, already failing effort to drive a wedge between Musk and Donald Trump. De Lauro, understand, is not just another of the 538 members of Congress. She was chair of the House Appropriations Committee for the first two years of the Biden administration and has, since the GOP takeover in 2022, been its ranking member. She is the perfect face for the Democrat Party circa 2024. Savor her here as she casts her imprecations, like one of the weird sisters in Macbeth, against Elon Musk.

In the event, the final bill, called the American Relief Act, 2025, passed in the opening minutes of Saturday, December 21. It was the third version of the CR. At some 120 pages, it is less than a tenth as long as the original Brobdingnagian version. Who applied the Ozempic? Notwithstanding the wailing of the Dems, it wasn’t Elon Musk. It was the duly elected representatives of the people who, caught with their hands in the cookie jar, withdrew almost all the pork and politically noxious provisions of the original. It was a big win for Trump.

What tipped the scale? I suspect that a widely circulated picture of the original bill side by side with its slimmed-down cousin had people aghast and searching for their congressman’s telephone number. Donald Trump had wanted them to raise the debt ceiling now, presumably so he wouldn’t have to do it on his watch, but they denied him that concession. It was about the only one they did deny him.

Everywhere one turned, there were shouts and whispers that we’d just missed a major tragedy. “Government Shutdown Averted!” the headlines rang out. But what difference would a government shutdown have made? As John Stossel noted on X, past shutdowns show that such contingencies are largely theatrical events. “Life went on,” he observed. At the end of the day, “government demonstrated how needless most of it is.”

There are two main lessons to be drawn from this episode.

• One is that timely, forceful, and rapidly repeated exposure of government malfeasance can prompt the public to intervene and end it. Musk is accounted a villain by the left because he repeatedly shone a klieg light on the worst aspects of the adipose abomination that was the original bill. Somehow, no one had been so effective a town crier before.

• The second lesson has to do with the utterly irresponsible, but by now habitual, process that Musk helped to expose. The insidious practice of turning to “continuing resolutions” as a substitute for timely legislation is an invitation to corruption. The Dems have eagerly accepted the invitation, injecting all manner of tendentious (and, it may go without saying, expensive) desiderata into the annual CR fest, convinced that the public won’t notice.

The remedy is twofold:

1. Insist that proposed legislation be published well in advance of its deadline and

2. disaggregate the pieces of any proposed legislation so that each bill covers only a single subject. No more sneaking woke expedients into general spending legislation at the last minute.

Mentions of “spending” bring me to the existential pressure that first prompted Musk and Ramaswamy to embark on their quest for “government efficiency”: out-of-control, potentially paralyzing government spending. Together with the regulatory nightmare that the bureaucratic state has saddled us with, incontinent spending (the federal debt is currently north of $36 trillion) threatens to impoverish the United States and, hence, the world. Milton Friedman was right to advise us to keep our “eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending because that’s the true tax. . . . If you’re not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you’re paying for it indirectly in the form of inflation or in the form of borrowing.”

Musk has said that he hopes to trim government spending by $2 trillion per annum. If he and Vivek can manage a quarter of that, they will be national heroes. In fact, they already are.