It's true that we're not exactly getting the best and brightest.

I was using the term in the broadest, most technical sense and making no moral judgement. I would also include solar panel installers in the low skilled category FWIW. Note, I am also not using "skilled" as a proxy for being a useful human being. I would rate most police officers and solar panel installers as being significantly more useful to society than 85% of lawyers or FAANG salaried employees, and 99% of diversity officers.

In reference to Luckbox's reply, I would suspect whatever the baseline job performance for police officers was before the Democrat party decided to go full-on anti-police and pro-crime (unless law enforcement is specifically targeting Republicans) , I would suspect that baseline to have gone down. In many ways the George Floyd riots and subsequent criminal justice "reforms" were a self-fulfilling movement, where the Democrat Party and its rioters created the very environment they were supposedly trying to reform.

That being said, as some have speculated it is quite possible as a society our very low social cohesion and high level of criminality is actually an (unintended) positive, as it is an important contributing factor to our societal dynamism.

Allow me to paraphrase: "I don't mean to sound condescending, but [bunch of really condescending stuff]".

"With all due respect....."

Love when d2 tone polices

Making an observation is not policing.

I don't install solar panels anymore (not much anyway). I was a software engineer before I did solar and I returned to that a few years ago. Pretty similar skill levels imo. Honestly. There's a lot to know in solar if you're doing more than just carrying the panels around.

A police officer should have a lot of skills and knowledge and I'm sure at least some of them do.

Because the IRS enforces tax codes via a police organization I feel this belongs here

What do the racism isn’t real people have to say about this? We see black people targeted for killings by the police, 4x the same deaths in child birth, and now being targeted by the IRS more often.


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I know I shouldn't respond to you, but good God, man. They're getting audited due to higher than average use of the EITC.

"Car-owners are being unfairly targeted by all of these oppressive parking tickets compared to non-drivers. Really makes you think." -PointlessWords

My new little family received an EITC once about 20 years ago. It was pretty sweet to just get a big fat, "Here, have some extra money" check from the government come tax time. When you're new at life with small children and Uncle Sam sends you a $10k "refund" in the mail, you're incentivized to figure out how to keep those checks coming every year. Refund in quotes there because we didn't pay anywhere near that in taxes throughout the year.

It's like saying Malaria is racist because it mostly kills black people. No, doofus, it mostly kills black people because they're the ones most exposed to it. Same with the easily-scammed EITC.

Drive by any urban strip mall near the beginning of the year and you'll be bombarded by signs and advertisements on how to scam the government out of tax money.

About half of EITC recipients are white, dumbass.

About half of the violent criminals are white, too. That doesn't stop people from bitching that the criminal justice system is racist.

If a higher than average number of black people are getting the EITC, which is specifically scrutinized because of how easily abused it is, then it should go without controversy that a higher than average number of blacks will get audited as a result.

The whole system is just a back-tested algorithm. If it's racist, that's because the data led it down this path.

I tried to locate some actual hypotheses about this instead of just mindless playing of the race card, and this is the best link I found that didn't clearly have an alternative agenda.

TL;DR, the algorithm and the IRS as a whole has no idea what race you are so isn't being racist on purpose. The system attacks EITC because it has a high ROI. They think black filers are less likely to show business income, which further improves ROI since auditing business income is costly. Black people fail their audits more often, which leads to the system coming after them again in the future and creates a positive feedback loop.

TL;DR for the TL;DR: it's sort of kind of maybe accidentally racist because of how black people run their lives.

Man, he’s so very close to discovering the concept of systemic racism.

He will trick himself out of it.

It might well be that a higher proportion of black people are claiming EITC but that doesn't explain the disparity (it accounts for about 1/5 of the total disparity apparently). Even when considering only EITC claimants black people are still much more likely to be audited:

According to the paper you linked if the resources were targeted in a way that aimed to recoup the most fraudulently claimed money then the racial disparity would probably be reversed.

Caring about American and human lives is not mindless. Why attack the idea of the arguments instead of the arguments itself?

The system is not an independent intelligence. The system is setup and controlled by people. Racist people as evidenced by the system targeting black people for audits at an insanely high rate

Willd, you misread that entirely. It's only 15 pages long, so it doesn't take long to go through the entire thing.

It's essentially saying that 80% of this overall racial disparity is due to the audit rates within the EITC group, for the TL;DR reasons I went through above. They don't actually know, since again the algorithm is in charge of all this, but they're making educated guesses. They might even be spot-on.

I don't have time to read the OG paper and go through their methodology behind assigning anonymous taxpayers a race based on first/last names.

I won't comment on your assertion about white tax fraud being higher than black tax fraud beyond saying that you're probably correct in terms of raw dollars. "The juice isn't worth the squeeze" is a relevant phrase there.

Unless maybe we put Nancy Pelosi in charge of that task force. Wasn't she the "Every dollar spent on food stamps returns three dollars back to the treasury" lady? She's got that secret strat for the infinite government money hack.

Incredible how Ins0 gets *more* condescending after he’s conclusively proven wrong.

Don't lie to me. You aren't even a little bit incredulous.

I can't edit that post, so I'll issue the correction here:


"I know I shouldn't respond to you, but good God, man. They're getting audited due to higher than average use of the EITC, they're less entrepreneurial, and they failed their prior audits more than the white filers."

That's what the paper says, but holy **** can you imagine the outrage if I led with that one? Jesus Christ.

I'm not sure what exactly you think I misread but the paper explicitly states that the majority (80%) of the disparity comes from within the population who are claiming EITC, specifically the fact that black people claiming EITC are 2.9-4.4 times as likely to be audited as non-black people claiming EITC. The fact that people claiming EITC are more likely to be audited and that those people are more likely to be black, which is the point you appeared to be focusing on in your posts with things like the violent crime analogy, only accounts for 20% of the total disparity.

As for "my assertion" about white tax fraud being higher than black tax fraud (leaving aside that that's a bit of a misrepresentation of what I actually said) my point comes directly from the paper you linked:

I thought you might have realised that since it's only 15 pages long, so it doesn't take long to go through the entire thing.

The "juice isn't worth the squeeze" point is pretty much the exact argument for why the current method is crap - according to the modelling done in the OG paper the audit system would be more effective at recovering fraudulently claimed money if the algorithm worked in a way that also happened to be less systemically biased against black people.

The paper you linked also points to the $80 billion of new funding for the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act that is aimed to help them shift the focus away from nickel-and-diming low-income filers to targetting high-income filers and corporations, which is more expensive initially but provides a much higher return. So despite your sarcastic jibes there is already action from the current administration to try to improve the efficiency in recouping fraudulently claimed money, which is also likely to help reduce the current racial disparity in auditing.

I do find it amusingly ironic the President's own son is pretty much the poster child for the type of abuse you are talking about. And in his case he allegedly had the DOJ intercede in his behalf and was given a sweetheart deal to resolve years of blatant tax crimes. If this is an example of the new revamped IRS taking it to white collar tax cheats, than that doesn't bode particularly well.

It is also interesting the President's son is legally going after the IRS itself, which I suspect we will see a lot of if the IRS does decide to follow through with going after elite white collar tax cheats. So the ability of the system to handle this predictable bad faith response will be very telling how efficacious in achieving its stated ends moving forward.

This is a perfect example of the need for police reform and training:

Cops assaulted a band director because the performance allegedly went a couple minutes over.

If you watch the body camera, it seems like the implication is the police were justified because the band director asked an officer to get out of his face several times. What the **** is wrong with us?

If memory serves, this was the George Floyd thread - I can't find the right thread if not.

In any case, looks like the homies got to Chauvin at a fed joint.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/24/u...oyd/index.html

Floyd had more drugs in him than d2 on New Years Eve

And yet, I still managed to not asphyxiate. It's almost like it may have been something other than the drugs that killed him.

Also, you seem to say that like it's a bad thing.