Are those annual audits? If so, that would mean they started failing them from early in the first Trump administration. That doesn’t give me great faith in Trump to fix the problem.
Income taxes are unwieldy because of the incredibly complicated rules defining what counts as income. Once you know that, calculating how much tax you owe is very simple. A flat tax, absent any other changes, would take that simple part and make it a little bit simpler. If you want it to raise as much revenue as before, high-earners would pay less than they do now, and low-earners would pay more.
If you want to simplify federal income taxes, then simplify the rules defining income. That can be done without changing the tax rates. People who advocate for a flat tax in the name of simplicity are being disingenuous, or falling for someone else who is.
When the Pentagon launched its first-ever independent financial audit back in 2017, backers of accountability in government welcomed it as a major step for a department with a track record of financial boondoggles.
Define “high earners”?
[Warren] Buffett’s secretary since 1993, Debbie Bosanek, sat next to her boss just hours after being invited by the president to the State of the Union address, where the president made her the face of tax inequality in America.
Bosanek pays a tax rate of 35.8 percent of income, while Buffett pays a rate at 17.4 percent.- SOURCE
I used ‘flat tax’ as a surrogate for reining in the ‘unwieldy’ and ‘ungodly’ aspects that tend to give massive deductions to the relative few and that constitutes the 75,000 page Tax Code and US Treasury’s interpretation of that code.
And, of course, cutting something like the CPB would seem on-brand for Trump and his supporters (i.e., fighting against liberal cultural stuff). That said, as you note, it’s no “big money item,” in the grand scheme of things. The CPB is currently slated to receive an appropriation of $545 million in fiscal 2026; that amounts to 0.00008% of the Federal budget.
If 2017 was the first such audit, then it’s possible that they would have been failiing for many years before, so I probably shouldn’t be blaming it on Trump.
I’m not sure where the cutoff would be, or how Buffet structured his income in order to get such a low rate. This page shows the current brackets and rates. If you want a flat tax somewhere in the middle, maybe 23%, then the low brackets go up and the high brackets go down.
Complaints about the money spent on public broadcasting go way back. I remember during the Reagan administration (I think) someone making similar complaints about how much federal money went to public broadcasting and then someone else pointed out that roughly the same amount was spent by the Defense Department on military bands. (Googling, currently the dozens of military bands cost something like $300 million, so on the same order of magnitude.)
And as far back as 1969, Fred Rogers (of Mister Rogers Neighborhood) testified before Congress to defend spending on public broadcasting.
Blah blah right-wing bad; it was always risky and they’ve long known it was risky. I doubt I’m going to agree with much else Trump does, so it would be nice to have a small silver lining.
