The IRS sends a letter from Uncle Joe
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The IRS Shouldn’t Be Sending Us Joe Biden Campaign Material
I will leave to others the full how-we-got-here discussion. Legislators have been using and abusing the franking privilege forever, but I do not remember receiving these sorts of letters from past presidents before Donald Trump. Certainly, Trump pushed the envelope at times in terms of what sorts of presidential communications the White House could get away with mailing to every American at taxpayer expense. He ensured Trump’s signature on COVID relief checks, accompanied by a letter of its own, which Congress required him to send but which Trump naturally used as a vehicle for self-promotion. (I had no real issue with the signature; the letter was bad.) He sent postcards like this one:
At the time, Democrats and their pundit class professed to be horrified by this, but they seem now to have wholeheartedly embraced the idea that it is good when their guy does it. This feels like an escalation, however. It’s not a necessary public-health warning arriving during a pandemic adorned with the president’s name. It’s not accompanying a check. It’s just a straight-up “I’m giving you benefits; thank me.” If we want to play “whatabout Trump” and serve him a share of the blame for this, fine. Given how Trump’s presidency ended, I’m perfectly happy to have Democrats argue that Biden should remind people of Trump, and that we should reward his presidency the same way. This much is clear: We should not normalize this as a regular practice. We should not get regular letters in the mail, paid for out of our own pockets, in which the president touts the president’s accomplishments. And even if we do, they should not be labeled as a letter from the IRS, which most normal Americans will open with heightened attention because a letter from the IRS carries the coercive menace of the state behind it.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@george-k said in The IRS sends a letter from Uncle Joe:
At the time, Democrats and their pundit class professed to be horrified by this, but they seem now to have wholeheartedly embraced the idea that it is good when their guy does it.
Yeah because only Democrats pull that one.
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You know, it’s all a bunch of BS anyway. All they really did was make the increase from las year permanent, and the increase is $1,000, not $3,000 (or $3,600 for kids under 6)
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McLaughlin's point is that this came under the umbrella of the IRS.
Trump signing stimulus checks was bad, but this, as he points out was "look what I did for you." It was not informative, it was not even helpful. It was just pandering.
If what Trump did was bad, how is this not bad?
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@george-k said in The IRS sends a letter from Uncle Joe:
McLaughlin's point is that this came under the umbrella of the IRS.
Trump signing stimulus checks was bad, but this, as he points out was "look what I did for you." It was not informative, it was not even helpful. It was just pandering.
If what Trump did was bad, how is this not bad?
It is bad. Biden's admin moved the goalposts farther (4 out of 5 on the Bad scale); about as far as Trump moved them initially (2 out of 5 on the Bad scale).
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@george-k said in The IRS sends a letter from Uncle Joe:
It was not informative,
Actually the letter is informative, it contains the specific IRS estimate of the benefit due to the recipient.
Having said that I agree these letters are shitty. As were the trump ones.
