Political Discussion

www.usatoday.com

Hospitals gave patients meds during childbirth, then reported them for illicit drug use

Hospitals across the country reported mothers to authorities after they tested positive for medications used routinely in millions of births.
www.usatoday.com

Amairani Salinas was 32 weeks pregnant with her fourth child in 2023 when doctors at a Texas hospital discovered that her baby no longer had a heartbeat. As they prepped her for an emergency cesarean section, they gave her midazolam, a benzodiazepine commonly prescribed to keep patients calm. A day later, the grieving mother was cradling her stillborn daughter when a social worker stopped by her room to deliver another devastating blow: Salinas was being reported to child welfare authorities. A drug test had turned up traces of benzodiazepine — the very medication that staff had administered before wheeling her into surgery.
 
www.businessinsider.com

29 House Republicans want Trump to scrap the IRS's free direct tax filing tool on day one of his presidency

GOP lawmakers are framing the IRS's free direct tax filing system as an example of the "weaponization of government against Americans."
www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com

Went down a rabbithole with this one. In the last year or two, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS ran a pilot program to see if free file was a viable option for taxpayers. Now Reps are urging Trump to remove the program immediately. That seems like bullshit to me...

Hol up, the American Coalition for Taxpayer Rights supports it, so it must be good:
www.americancoalitionfortaxpayerrights.org

ACTR Praises Rep. Smith For Bill to End Direct File

Rep. Adrian Smith’s bill is a commonsense proposal to eliminate an unpopular, redundant program. Only a handful — 0.7% of the 19 million eligible Americans — used Direct File this year, compared to the 26.7 million free returns the tax preparation industry provided.
www.americancoalitionfortaxpayerrights.org www.americancoalitionfortaxpayerrights.org

Surely a coalition for taxpayer rights is going to be on the level. Lemme just take a big sip of coffee and scroll down to their bona fides:

1733951308199.png

Nobody in here who stands to benefit from preventing taxpayers from free-filing directly via the IRS.

If you really want to raise the blood pressure, try reading the letter itself:


There's a lot of bad-faith figure-smudging here, such as this chestnut:
The IRS Direct File program has shown itself to be remarkably inefficient and plagued with costs far exceeding what the agency originally projected. Based on the IRS having budgeted $114 million for Direct File in 2024, and approximately 140,000 taxpayers filing their taxes using Direct File in 2024, the program cost taxpayers about $814 per tax return.
Click to expand...
Basically they're leveraging a generalized distrust of government bureaucracy, pairing it with some goofed-around-with numbers (conflating the cost of getting the program up and running with the cost of actually running the program).

Meanwhile, the Treasury Department says users of the program (only 140,000 taxpayers got to do this, mind you) saved $5.6 million in tax prep fees.
 
At the risk of dragging up stuff I don’t want to know, do we know Noga Erez’s stand on things in Israel? I did a google search but info is scarce. Lot of people complaining she has an Anti-Hamas Anti-Occupation stance which makes sense to me, but whatevs. I know she was pretty outspoken against Occupation prior to 10/7 but anything new seems few and far between. Thanks for any info you can point me to.
 
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