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The New Coffee Room

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  3. Elon’s report card

Elon’s report card

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  • J jon-nyc
    8 May 2025, 12:37

    That’s a nice strawman but no one here has claimed that anyone could find the optimal solution, let alone that we had achieved it.

    This issue has been pretty well studied and confirmed with natural experiments.

    H Offline
    H Offline
    Horace
    wrote on 8 May 2025, 13:21 last edited by
    #12

    @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

    That’s a nice strawman but no one here has claimed that anyone could find the optimal solution, let alone that we had achieved it.

    No, you only implied it by giving reasons for the status quo, constraining it on both ends. Your implications are yours, and they are not a strawman. They are your direct implications.

    This issue has been pretty well studied and confirmed with natural experiments.

    Ok then, it's just an obviously stupid thing that we don't hire more IRS auditors. Which is fine. I understand that that is the implication of the statistics as they exist. I imagine there are actual reasons we don't hire more auditors beyond political messaging, which is an insubstantial argument at best. it would not be difficult to message that the wealthy are not paying their fair share, or large corporations. That's actually a huge intersection of the venns of both parties.

    Education is extremely important.

    J 1 Reply Last reply 8 May 2025, 13:25
    • H Horace
      8 May 2025, 13:21

      @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

      That’s a nice strawman but no one here has claimed that anyone could find the optimal solution, let alone that we had achieved it.

      No, you only implied it by giving reasons for the status quo, constraining it on both ends. Your implications are yours, and they are not a strawman. They are your direct implications.

      This issue has been pretty well studied and confirmed with natural experiments.

      Ok then, it's just an obviously stupid thing that we don't hire more IRS auditors. Which is fine. I understand that that is the implication of the statistics as they exist. I imagine there are actual reasons we don't hire more auditors beyond political messaging, which is an insubstantial argument at best. it would not be difficult to message that the wealthy are not paying their fair share, or large corporations. That's actually a huge intersection of the venns of both parties.

      J Offline
      J Offline
      jon-nyc
      wrote on 8 May 2025, 13:25 last edited by jon-nyc 11 days from now
      #13

      @Horace said in Elon’s report card:

      @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

      That’s a nice strawman but no one here has claimed that anyone could find the optimal solution, let alone that we had achieved it.

      No, you only implied it by giving reasons for the status quo, constraining it on both ends. Your implications are yours, and they are not a strawman. They are your direct implications.

      Oh come on, the only implication of my post was we were on the left side of the optimal point ergo returns are still upward sloping. I would speculate we always have been and that the optimal point, if it could be achieved, would be politically untenable.

      Thank you for your attention to this matter.

      H 1 Reply Last reply 8 May 2025, 13:32
      • J jon-nyc
        8 May 2025, 13:25

        @Horace said in Elon’s report card:

        @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

        That’s a nice strawman but no one here has claimed that anyone could find the optimal solution, let alone that we had achieved it.

        No, you only implied it by giving reasons for the status quo, constraining it on both ends. Your implications are yours, and they are not a strawman. They are your direct implications.

        Oh come on, the only implication of my post was we were on the left side of the optimal point ergo returns are still upward sloping. I would speculate we always have been and that the optimal point, if it could be achieved, would be politically untenable.

        H Offline
        H Offline
        Horace
        wrote on 8 May 2025, 13:32 last edited by
        #14

        @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

        @Horace said in Elon’s report card:

        @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

        That’s a nice strawman but no one here has claimed that anyone could find the optimal solution, let alone that we had achieved it.

        No, you only implied it by giving reasons for the status quo, constraining it on both ends. Your implications are yours, and they are not a strawman. They are your direct implications.

        Oh come on, the only implication of my post was we were on the left side of the optimal point ergo returns are still upward sloping.

        Which was the point of my post, that if that's true, then it's just stupid to not hire more.

        Which you argued against by hand waving something about political messaging. You wanted me to be wrong and right at the same time.

        So we can agree that I was right that it's just stupid to not hire more IRS agents, if those statistics can be taken at face value, and we can discard your argument about political messaging as a non-point meant to hand-wave the implication that we were actually at a good spot with the status quo.

        I would speculate we always have been and that the optimal point, if it could be achieved, would be politically untenable.

        Of course it would be perfectly tenable. "We hire more tax auditors to get the lawbreakers to pay their fair share, we get this much more in taxes, your tax burden as a lawful tax payer is this much less". That is not non-starter territory as political messaging goes. Dems want to raise lawful taxes, but you think nobody will get elected by enforcing existing taxes? "We can either increase head count at the IRS, or raise taxes, for the same result, which do you prefer, voter?"

        Education is extremely important.

        1 Reply Last reply
        • J Offline
          J Offline
          jon-nyc
          wrote on 8 May 2025, 13:33 last edited by
          #15

          Is there any evidence that we’ve ever had so many auditors that we had gone beyond the point where returns were positive?

          There is no evidence that the IRS has ever hired so many auditors that it crossed the point of diminishing returns to the extent that returns became negative or even net neutral. All available data—from historical audit rates, enforcement spending, and revenue returns—suggests that the IRS has long been operating well below the level of maximum return.

          Key points:

          ⸻

          1. Historical Audit Trends Show Undershooting, Not Overshooting
            • Audit rates peaked in the 1960s–1980s but were still only around 1–2% of individual returns, compared to ~0.4% today.
            • Even during those higher-audit eras, enforcement revenue more than paid for itself, and there’s no indication the IRS over-audited to the point of inefficiency.

          ⸻

          1. CBO and Treasury Projections Assume Diminishing Returns — and Still Show High ROI
            • Models from the CBO, Treasury, and academic economists already account for diminishing marginal returns, yet they continue to estimate ROI in the 2:1 to 10:1 range.
            • That suggests we are nowhere near the point where returns flatten out completely, let alone turn negative.

          ⸻

          1. Post-2010 IRS Cuts Reduced Audit Rates — and Revenue
            • The IRS enforcement workforce shrank ~30% from 2010 to 2020.
            • Over that period, the tax gap grew significantly, particularly among high-income filers.
            • If the IRS had previously been overstaffed, cutting auditors would have improved efficiency or held revenues steady—but the opposite happened.

          ⸻

          1. Academic Studies Suggest the Real “ROI Frontier” Is Far Ahead
            • Guyton et al. (2021) found that auditing high-income earners yields extremely high returns, and the IRS currently audits them at historically low rates.
            • This suggests that expanding targeted audits could still produce high marginal returns before hitting any true “ceiling.”

          ⸻

          1. No Published Evidence of Net Revenue Decline from Over-Auditing
            • Despite ideological claims of IRS “overreach,” no peer-reviewed study or government report has documented a revenue drop attributable to excessive auditing.

          ⸻

          Bottom Line:

          There’s no historical or contemporary evidence that the IRS has ever reached an enforcement staffing level where returns turned negative. On the contrary, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the agency is far below optimal staffing, especially for auditing complex, high-yield cases.

          Would you like a graph of historical audit rates vs. enforcement revenue?

          Thank you for your attention to this matter.

          1 Reply Last reply
          • H Offline
            H Offline
            Horace
            wrote on 8 May 2025, 13:36 last edited by
            #16

            So it's just an obviously stupid thing to not hire more auditors. I never claimed flat out that it wasn't. I'm aware of obviously stupid things existing. I was only registering my skepticism. I am aware that the statistics at face value have this implication of an obviously stupid thing happening, though I've heard few point out the obvious question of "why not hire more".

            Education is extremely important.

            1 Reply Last reply
            • J Offline
              J Offline
              jon-nyc
              wrote on 8 May 2025, 13:42 last edited by jon-nyc 11 days from now
              #17

              It’s not politically teneble.

              We’d reduce speeding and save lives if we put traffic cameras literally everywhere or mandated that car manufactures track speeds and report violations to the police.

              Good luck to the politician that proposes that. Though the corrupt officials in Yonkers seem to have come close with the speed cameras

              Thank you for your attention to this matter.

              H 1 Reply Last reply 8 May 2025, 13:47
              • J jon-nyc
                8 May 2025, 13:42

                It’s not politically teneble.

                We’d reduce speeding and save lives if we put traffic cameras literally everywhere or mandated that car manufactures track speeds and report violations to the police.

                Good luck to the politician that proposes that. Though the corrupt officials in Yonkers seem to have come close with the speed cameras

                H Offline
                H Offline
                Horace
                wrote on 8 May 2025, 13:47 last edited by
                #18

                @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

                It’s not politically teneble.

                You can keep saying that, it will remain untrue. There is nothing untenable about messaging an increase in tax revenues, without increasing taxes. Actually, that would be good messaging.

                We’d reduce speeding and save lives if we put traffic cameras literally everywhere or mandated that car manufactures track speeds and report violations to the police.

                Good luck to the politician that proposes that. Though the corrupt officials in Yonkers seem to have come close with the speed cameras

                It's not as if an increase in IRS head count needs to be part of any politician's platform. It would just be buried in some bill, and the wonks would talk about it on podcasts.

                Thinking about it more, I suspect that the real reason this isn't done, is that the returns are trivial, if positive.

                Education is extremely important.

                1 Reply Last reply
                • J Offline
                  J Offline
                  jon-nyc
                  wrote on 8 May 2025, 13:52 last edited by jon-nyc 11 days from now
                  #19

                  I agree there exists a possible world where all the evidence is wrong and you’ve intuited the true answer. I just don’t think we live in that world.

                  Thank you for your attention to this matter.

                  H 1 Reply Last reply 8 May 2025, 13:54
                  • J jon-nyc
                    8 May 2025, 13:52

                    I agree there exists a possible world where all the evidence is wrong and you’ve intuited the true answer. I just don’t think we live in that world.

                    H Offline
                    H Offline
                    Horace
                    wrote on 8 May 2025, 13:54 last edited by
                    #20

                    @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

                    I agree there exists a possible world where all the evidence is wrong and you’ve intuited the true answer. I just don’t think we live in that world.

                    You keep hoping I'm making points other than the ones I'm making. Sorry to not leave the dunking lane open as wide as you'd like.

                    Education is extremely important.

                    1 Reply Last reply
                    • J Offline
                      J Offline
                      jon-nyc
                      wrote on 8 May 2025, 13:55 last edited by jon-nyc 11 days from now
                      #21

                      Ok, Horace. People can read the thread and come to their own conclusions.

                      Thank you for your attention to this matter.

                      H 1 Reply Last reply 8 May 2025, 13:59
                      • J jon-nyc
                        8 May 2025, 13:55

                        Ok, Horace. People can read the thread and come to their own conclusions.

                        H Offline
                        H Offline
                        Horace
                        wrote on 8 May 2025, 13:59 last edited by
                        #22

                        @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

                        Ok, Horace. People can read the thread and come to their own conclusions.

                        Maybe a small handful of people will read and come to their own conclusions. More likely, nobody will read. (Especially not your AI dumps.) Meanwhile, you would be unable to put a point I've made into your own words and demonstrate where it's wrong. Skepticism is not a factual claim. I also posited this, which ties everything up into a neat bow, but which is just a guess:

                        Thinking about it more, I suspect that the real reason this isn't done, is that the returns are trivial, if positive.

                        So go ask Grok what the actual returns are. How much revenue are we going to lose by losing those auditors due to DOGE, how much would be stand to gain by rehiring them and then hiring some more?

                        Education is extremely important.

                        1 Reply Last reply
                        • T Offline
                          T Offline
                          taiwan_girl
                          wrote on 8 May 2025, 14:04 last edited by
                          #23

                          👋 I read this thread. LOL

                          H 1 Reply Last reply 8 May 2025, 15:44
                          • T taiwan_girl
                            8 May 2025, 14:04

                            👋 I read this thread. LOL

                            H Offline
                            H Offline
                            Horace
                            wrote on 8 May 2025, 15:44 last edited by
                            #24

                            @taiwan_girl said in Elon’s report card:

                            👋 I read this thread. LOL

                            I would never have recommended that.

                            Education is extremely important.

                            1 Reply Last reply
                            • J jon-nyc
                              8 May 2025, 10:52

                              My guess is this little fact alone will mean Doge’s net effect will have been to increase the deficit.

                              And I don’t mean the entire Trump admin with his big beautiful bill, of course that will be a world historic deficit increase.

                              I mean just Doge.

                              L Offline
                              L Offline
                              LuFins Dad
                              wrote on 8 May 2025, 16:23 last edited by
                              #25

                              @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

                              My guess is this little fact alone will mean Doge’s net effect will have been to increase the deficit.

                              And I don’t mean the entire Trump admin with his big beautiful bill, of course that will be a world historic deficit increase.

                              I mean just Doge.

                              They added 30K new positions between 2023 and the end of Biden’s term. Now, all of those weren’t auditors, but quite a few were.

                              The Brad

                              H J 2 Replies Last reply 8 May 2025, 16:28
                              • L LuFins Dad
                                8 May 2025, 16:23

                                @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

                                My guess is this little fact alone will mean Doge’s net effect will have been to increase the deficit.

                                And I don’t mean the entire Trump admin with his big beautiful bill, of course that will be a world historic deficit increase.

                                I mean just Doge.

                                They added 30K new positions between 2023 and the end of Biden’s term. Now, all of those weren’t auditors, but quite a few were.

                                H Offline
                                H Offline
                                Horace
                                wrote on 8 May 2025, 16:28 last edited by
                                #26

                                @LuFins-Dad said in Elon’s report card:

                                @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

                                My guess is this little fact alone will mean Doge’s net effect will have been to increase the deficit.

                                And I don’t mean the entire Trump admin with his big beautiful bill, of course that will be a world historic deficit increase.

                                I mean just Doge.

                                They added 30K new positions between 2023 and the end of Biden’s term. Now, all of those weren’t auditors, but quite a few were.

                                That never happened. It would be politically untenable.

                                Education is extremely important.

                                J 1 Reply Last reply 8 May 2025, 17:17
                                • D Offline
                                  D Offline
                                  Doctor Phibes
                                  wrote on 8 May 2025, 17:10 last edited by
                                  #27

                                  I came to my own conclusions.

                                  I didn't read the thread.

                                  I was only joking

                                  H 1 Reply Last reply 8 May 2025, 17:30
                                  • L LuFins Dad
                                    8 May 2025, 16:23

                                    @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

                                    My guess is this little fact alone will mean Doge’s net effect will have been to increase the deficit.

                                    And I don’t mean the entire Trump admin with his big beautiful bill, of course that will be a world historic deficit increase.

                                    I mean just Doge.

                                    They added 30K new positions between 2023 and the end of Biden’s term. Now, all of those weren’t auditors, but quite a few were.

                                    J Offline
                                    J Offline
                                    jon-nyc
                                    wrote on 8 May 2025, 17:11 last edited by
                                    #28

                                    @LuFins-Dad said in Elon’s report card:

                                    @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

                                    My guess is this little fact alone will mean Doge’s net effect will have been to increase the deficit.

                                    And I don’t mean the entire Trump admin with his big beautiful bill, of course that will be a world historic deficit increase.

                                    I mean just Doge.

                                    They added 30K new positions between 2023 and the end of Biden’s term. Now, all of those weren’t auditors, but quite a few were.

                                    Sure, but the baseline budget deficit figures would have taken that into account whether they were all auditors or only half. So the point about Doge remains the same.

                                    Thank you for your attention to this matter.

                                    1 Reply Last reply
                                    • H Horace
                                      8 May 2025, 16:28

                                      @LuFins-Dad said in Elon’s report card:

                                      @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

                                      My guess is this little fact alone will mean Doge’s net effect will have been to increase the deficit.

                                      And I don’t mean the entire Trump admin with his big beautiful bill, of course that will be a world historic deficit increase.

                                      I mean just Doge.

                                      They added 30K new positions between 2023 and the end of Biden’s term. Now, all of those weren’t auditors, but quite a few were.

                                      That never happened. It would be politically untenable.

                                      J Offline
                                      J Offline
                                      jon-nyc
                                      wrote on 8 May 2025, 17:17 last edited by jon-nyc 11 days from now
                                      #29

                                      @Horace said in Elon’s report card:

                                      @LuFins-Dad said in Elon’s report card:

                                      @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

                                      My guess is this little fact alone will mean Doge’s net effect will have been to increase the deficit.

                                      And I don’t mean the entire Trump admin with his big beautiful bill, of course that will be a world historic deficit increase.

                                      I mean just Doge.

                                      They added 30K new positions between 2023 and the end of Biden’s term. Now, all of those weren’t auditors, but quite a few were.

                                      That never happened. It would be politically untenable.

                                      Haha Copper how’d you get Horace’s login?

                                      Anyway, as Horace well knows, to say ‘hiring as many auditors as you need until you maximize revenues is not politically tenable’ is quite different from saying ‘hiring any more auditors is politically untenable’.

                                      Having said that the political fight around the 30k was quite significant.

                                      Thank you for your attention to this matter.

                                      H 1 Reply Last reply 8 May 2025, 17:28
                                      • J jon-nyc
                                        8 May 2025, 17:17

                                        @Horace said in Elon’s report card:

                                        @LuFins-Dad said in Elon’s report card:

                                        @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

                                        My guess is this little fact alone will mean Doge’s net effect will have been to increase the deficit.

                                        And I don’t mean the entire Trump admin with his big beautiful bill, of course that will be a world historic deficit increase.

                                        I mean just Doge.

                                        They added 30K new positions between 2023 and the end of Biden’s term. Now, all of those weren’t auditors, but quite a few were.

                                        That never happened. It would be politically untenable.

                                        Haha Copper how’d you get Horace’s login?

                                        Anyway, as Horace well knows, to say ‘hiring as many auditors as you need until you maximize revenues is not politically tenable’ is quite different from saying ‘hiring any more auditors is politically untenable’.

                                        Having said that the political fight around the 30k was quite significant.

                                        H Offline
                                        H Offline
                                        Horace
                                        wrote on 8 May 2025, 17:28 last edited by
                                        #30

                                        @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

                                        @Horace said in Elon’s report card:

                                        @LuFins-Dad said in Elon’s report card:

                                        @jon-nyc said in Elon’s report card:

                                        My guess is this little fact alone will mean Doge’s net effect will have been to increase the deficit.

                                        And I don’t mean the entire Trump admin with his big beautiful bill, of course that will be a world historic deficit increase.

                                        I mean just Doge.

                                        They added 30K new positions between 2023 and the end of Biden’s term. Now, all of those weren’t auditors, but quite a few were.

                                        That never happened. It would be politically untenable.

                                        Haha Copper how’d you get Horace’s login?

                                        Anyway, as Horace well knows, to say ‘hiring as many auditors as you need until you maximize revenues is not politically tenable’ is quite different from saying ‘hiring any more auditors is politically untenable’.

                                        Having said that the political fight around the 30k was quite significant.

                                        Ok Michelle Obama.

                                        Education is extremely important.

                                        1 Reply Last reply
                                        • D Doctor Phibes
                                          8 May 2025, 17:10

                                          I came to my own conclusions.

                                          I didn't read the thread.

                                          H Offline
                                          H Offline
                                          Horace
                                          wrote on 8 May 2025, 17:30 last edited by
                                          #31

                                          @Doctor-Phibes said in Elon’s report card:

                                          I came to my own conclusions.

                                          I didn't read the thread.

                                          Wise.

                                          Education is extremely important.

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