When Greg Abbott signed one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country into Texas law on Wednesday, he commemorated the occasion with a photo-op signing ceremony where seven women beamed in the front row ahead of dozens of grinning men who will never be pregnant celebrating a new law regulating pregnancy. Even if I hadn’t seen it, I could have drawn it from the many photo ops of other governors signing so-called “heartbeat bills” banning abortion after the detection of a fetal heartbeat (which in many pregnancies can be as early as six weeks, or before many women know that they’re pregnant): A white man old enough to qualify for the Denny’s Senior Discount behind a desk flanked by a few sanctimonious church ladies in turn surrounded by lots of other white men. Ohio, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, it’s the same shit, different state. And the same question runs through my mind: Do these people think pregnancy is easy? Do they think childbirth is no big deal? Do they know
The Biden administration is proposing hiring 87,000 new workers for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), effectively doubling the agency’s size, as part of a plan to beef up enforcement efforts and find billions of dollars in tax revenues that go uncollected each year. Enforcement efforts would primarily target individuals and corporations with higher incomes and profits, the administration has suggested. The hiring, which would be part of President Joe Biden’s overall $80 billion spending plan to increase enforcement efforts at the IRS, would not happen all at once. Instead, it would be carried out in phases, with a 15 percent growth in employment at the agency per year until that 87,000 hiring benchmark is reached. The move would help recoup (and go beyond) some of the employment losses the agency has seen over the past decade, as the IRS has lost more than 33,000 workers over the past decade. The drop in employment at the agency has resulted in fewer audits, particularly for filers w