Libertarian: The IRS’ Audit Lies
“Back in August 2022,” groans Reason’s Liz Wolfe, “the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assured us that their $80 billion infusion of cash . . . would actually be a means of targeting millionaire and billionaire scofflaws, not ordinary middle-class earners.” That’s even though “correspondence audits and other audits on low- and middle-income earners are simply the easiest to conduct” and “the IRS has historically spent an awful lot of time targeting these groups, not monied tax dodgers who can hire teams of accountants.” Now, “President Biden’s plan to hire a new army of tax collectors is falling flat, and the agents already at work are targeting the middle class.” Indeed, “as of last summer, 63% of new audits targeted taxpayers with income of less than $200,000.”
Woke watch: McKinsey’s Fuzzy DEI studies
“Last year, McKinsey & Company released a study purporting to demonstrate that corporations with more diverse leadership” were “also more profitable,” notes City Journal’s John Hirschauer — as did three prior McKinsey studies. But when two economists “sought to test the replicability of McKinsey’s findings,” “the results were startling.” They “couldn’t replicate the results of McKinsey’s first three studies” and found the company “had analyzed the data backward.” Yet DEI true believers think “firms can hire candidates at least partially for reasons having nothing to do with those candidates’ qualifications and not suffer any corresponding drag in performance,” again proving “progressives’ inability to grapple with or even admit the existence of tradeoffs.”
Psychiatrist: Social Justice at Patients’ Expense
Mass General Brigham has halted its reporting of “suspected incidents of abuse and neglect” to officials “solely because a fetus or a newborn is exposed to drugs” and will now require written consent for testing, warns Sally Satel at The Free Press. OK, doctors should involve authorities “only as a last resort.” Yet “the changes were made in the name of social justice,” with a press release noting “black pregnant people are more likely to be drug tested” and reported than are whites. Huh? “Drug testing shouldn’t be equally applied across groups,” argues Satel, but “driven by the circumstances” of each patient. “Social justice is infecting medicine,” and may be “disproportionately compromising the well-being of black women and babies.”
From the right: Schumer’s TikTok Timidity
Four years after sounding the alarm about the threat posed by nation’s “most popular media platforms in the hands of a foreign adversary,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck “Schumer has so far failed to express any support for the House-passed legislation to force ByteDance to sell TikTok,” grumble National Review’s editors, though “the highest ranks of ByteDance’s management are stacked with members of CCP-controlled” outfits. ByteDance’s lobbyists call the bill a “threat to free speech” when it simply aims “to force a sale of TikTok” and “would only apply to platforms controlled by designated foreign adversaries,” such as “China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.” We’ll soon know soon if the Senate is “serious about steeling America for prolonged confrontation with the Chinese Communist Party” or if it’s “susceptible to cheap advocacy protecting the CCP’s interests.”
Pandemic desk: The Experts Who Cried Wolf
“Should another pandemic occur, the U.S. will be in a far worse position to respond to it than it was four years ago,” thunders The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley, thanks to “the public trust health experts have squandered” on COVID. Experts “ridiculed scientists with unorthodox views . . . on lockdowns, school closures and masks. Even when their shibboleths proved harmful, they stuck to them.” Many even joined the liberal press in “skepticism about the Trump administration’s efforts to develop a vaccine,” so that “the share of Americans who said they would probably or definitely get the Covid vaccine plunged to 51% in September 2020 from 72% that May.” In all: “The public-health clerisy accuses conservatives of fomenting distrust in science and vaccines. They might look in the mirror.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board