Barely a week into House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) term, his view of America’s voters and the press as suckers who need to be defrauded is becoming clearer by the day. Case in point: his proposal to advance $14.3 billion in aid to Israel by “offsetting” it with a $14.3 billion cut to the Internal Revenue Service budget.

The truth is, as anyone with any knowledge of IRS funding knows, those cuts to the agency’s budget will leave a much bigger hole in the federal budget.

The Congressional Budget Office was not fooled. In its assessment of Johnson’s proposal, it estimated that the $14.3 billion IRS cut would reduce federal revenues by $26.8 billion over 10 years.

Only in Washington they call it an increase in the budget deficit when you cut spending.

The reason is that most of the money is for “enforcement and related activities,” the CBO noted, that is, going after wealthier U.S. taxpayers for the money they owe but don’t pay, the so-called tax gap.

Asked about this finding, Johnson doubled down. Only in Washington do they call it an increase in the budget deficit when you cut spending, he said.

We’ll do Johnson the (undeserved) favor by calling his comment “disingenuous.” Closer to the mark is Alex Shephard’s description of

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The New Republic said it’s a “troll, stupid trick.”

Late Thursday, a majority of House members accepted Johnson’s approach and approved his aid measure for Israel, including the IRS cut, largely on party lines. Senate leaders said they will not put the measure up for a vote, and President Biden said that even if the measure were to pass, he would veto it.

A number of threads came together in Johnson’s trick. One of these is the Republican Party’s continued attempt to position itself as the party of sound fiscal thinking. That is a self-portrait that has been extremely foolish for a long time.

That view has been reflected in recent years by the Republican Party’s periodic grandstanding over the federal debt ceiling, which looks like a spending ceiling until you dig beneath the surface, when it becomes clear that it has nothing to do with limiting government spending that fall completely below the surface. control over Congress, which spends what it wants under both Democratic and Republican majorities.

The other common thread is the party’s underlying respect for its wealthy and business clients. This is reflected in his hostility toward the IRS. It should be remembered that when Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in April 2022, Republicans wrongly converted the $80 billion in additional IRS funding provided by the measure into a plan to kill a horde of government thugs with to create jackboots that have the power to rip the bread out of the middle class. babies’ mouths.

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Of course it was nothing of the sort. The goal was to give the IRS the tools to enforce the law against those most likely to cheat on their taxes, the wealthy. As a team of IRS analysts and academic economists reported in 2021, the 1% were able to hide as much as 21% of their taxable income from tax collectors, largely because pursuing it required enforcement resources the IRS did not have.

As I reported last year, anti-tax conservatives in Congress have systematically impoverished the IRS for decades, with the clear goal of undermining the IRS’s ability to do its job, not to mention its public reputation.

In 1991, the agency employed more than 114,600 full-time employees to serve a population of 254 million people and generate approximately $1.1 trillion in revenue.

By 2020, the number of full-time jobs had fallen to fewer than 75,800, serving more than 330 million Americans and raising $3.5 trillion. Just over a decade ago, the Agency’s budget, adjusted for inflation, had fallen by 20%.

For Republicans in Congress, that amounts to “mission accomplished.”

Johnson’s trick shows that the mission is still very much alive. What’s especially troubling is that not a few political reporters and political newsletters in Washington chose to take it at face value. Judd Legum of the indispensable blog Popular Information put it front and center in a post titled “Why Reporters Play Stupid.”

Legum’s main target was Jake Sherman of PunchBowl News, an upstart DC information magazine trying to make a name for itself by diligently cultivating access to

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aggressive insiders and marketing them to Washington insiders such as lobbyists.

As Legum documented, Sherman echoed Johnson’s description of the IRS cut initially as an “offset.”

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tweet and treated the unlikelihood of its passage as a product of Democratic Party opposition. Sherman followed up two days later, describing the CBO projection as “breaking” news.

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Sherman must have known the truth all along

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for covering the debt limit negotiations in April 2022, when the CBO assessed the Republican Party’s proposal for IRS cuts as a deficit addition.

But Sherman was not alone. According to Legum, Bloomberg, The Guardian, CBS News and others have parroted the Republican version of the IRS cut as an “offset,” barely mentioning or completely ignoring the impact on the budget deficit.

This is how disinformation is injected into the bloodstream of American political discourse.

The ingrained habit of political reporters is to parrot the positions of lawmakers as if they were neutral observers of nature, and then (if that ever happens) circle around and correct the facts, usually after the initial lie has already been made public. opinion is embedded. .

As we’ve learned, that no longer serves the public. It’s what allowed Donald Trump to trample on reality during his four years in the White House and what allowed him to continue to do so in recent interviews with CNN and NBC News. Johnson seems keen to exploit the same phenomenon.

His attempt didn’t work so well this time, especially since the CBO was ready with an almost immediate rebuttal to his claim. But it was a near miss.

The gamble here is that if the CBO had not published its analysis so quickly, the trope that Johnson would “offset” Israeli aid with cuts to the IRS would have been so deeply ingrained in public opinion that it would have been impossible to counter. expel. And that’s scary.