Takes a lot more than you and yours to piss me off, little Rickey.

Just like McCarthy won't reveal what concessions he made to the Insurrection Caucus in order to secure the Speakership.

Crash the train to stop it
 

Last month, in its first legislative action, the new House majority voted to rescind more than $70 billion in funding for the IRS, much of it intended to improve customer service at the agency.

This week, many of those same Republican lawmakers went to the House floor with a new grievance: They are angry about — wait for it — poor customer service at the IRS.

“The American people have suffered” while waiting “for months for their tax refunds,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, declared on the House floor.

Can the IRS run an irony audit on these guys?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...racy-theories/

Meanwhile, the IRS had its budget slashed by 15 percent since 2010 while the number of returns jumped by nearly 10 million annually.

Defunding what police?

I'm putting this here just because of the thread title:

This is from The Weekly Sift's commentary on the continuning fallout from the East Palestine train wreck:

https://weeklysift.com/2023/02/27/sp...understanding/

Doing more with less. When TQM hit GAO in the mid 80's we were told to 'do less more with less' and eventually at one TQM rally I pointed out that we would eventually be douing everything with nothing.

Everybody sure got enthused with the whole TQM thing back then, not that it was anything other than repackaged management fundamentals (e.g., the plan-do-check-act management cycle) with a catchy acronym that become the bread and butter of management consultants. The true-believers really bought into it being something truly new and different though.

Getting this thread pointed back toward where it started, the Fed's interest rate hikes appear to have claimed one of their first noteworthy casualties: SVB Bank. SVB had branches in other parts of the world, so this failure is having international repercussions. And, somewhat predictably, taxpayers in the US and elsewhere are being positioned to foot the bill.

Trump blamed over Silicon Valley Bank collapse for watering down financial regulations
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-b2298859.html

Donny, Rupert Murdoch, the Federalist Society and other “conservatives” are to blame for just about everything wrong with this country.

You really need to read the articles you post, Chicklet. If you had, you might have noticed this:

The SVB struggled to weather the Federal Reserve's efforts to stymie inflation; higher borrowing costs throttled the gains of tech stocks that could have benefitted the bank, and a significant drop in available VC funding floating around forced companies to withdraw their holdings.

You can invest yourself in the blatherings of a lefty Harvard radiologist who sounds like he knows nothing about the banking industry if you want. In the meantime, here is an explanation of what happened to SVB from folks who do know what they're talking about:

Silicon Valley Bank is a reminder that ‘things tend to break’ when Fed hikes rates: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sv...ssive-b762936f

Silicon Valley Bank imploded in a single day. It could be just the tip of the iceberg: https://markets.businessinsider.com/...l-risks-2023-3

Sorry, bank regulations or lack thereof had nothing to do with it. In fact, SVB's assets were invested in exactly the type of low-risk vehicles that regulators love.