The GOP claims to be hawkish on the deficit, the party of law and order and, believe it or not, the working man's party, yet they continue to fight tooth and nail to sabotage and claw back this additional IRS funding and paint the effort as an attempt to go after ordinary Americans with thousands of new agents and target Dem's political adversaries.

If their mouths are moving, they are lying. Republicans will say anything to get elected and get their way. Yet, their actions speak louder than their lying words. They are always focused on the needs of their obscenely wealthy donors and never do anything, except meaningless culture war nonsense, for the non-wealthy, and then only to get votes so they can go back to serving their wealthy overlords.

Why block the IRS from bringing in money that is rightfully owed to our government if you care about the deficit or want to stop people from cheating on their taxes because you are the party of law and order? Lies, lies and more lies all to obscure their efforts to repeatedly serve the wealthy at the expense of everyone else via tax cuts for top earners, special, lower tax rates for investment income and defunding the IRS so the rich can more easily cheat on their taxes. Their actual actions always give them away.

IRS plans to crack down on 1,600 millionaires to collect millions in back taxes https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/irs-plans-crack-1600-millionaires-collect-millions-dollars-103025408?

#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich

"The IRS announced on Friday it is launching an effort to aggressively pursue 1,600 millionaires and 75 large business partnerships that owe hundreds of millions of dollars in past due taxes.

IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel said that with a boost in federal funding and the help of artificial intelligence tools, the agency has new means of targeting wealthy people who have “cut corners" on their taxes.

“If you pay your taxes on time it should be particularly frustrating when you see that wealthy filers are not,” Werfel told reporters in a call previewing the announcement. He said 1,600 millionaires who owe at least $250,000 each in back taxes and 75 large business partnerships that have assets of roughly $10 billion on average are targeted for the new “compliance efforts."

Werfel said a massive hiring effort and AI research tools developed by IRS employees and contractors are playing a big role in identifying wealthy tax dodgers.
...
A team of academic economists and IRS researchers in 2021 found that the top 1% of U.S. income earners fail to report more than 20% of their earnings to the IRS.
...
Grover Norquist, who heads the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, said the IRS' plan to pursue high wealth individuals does not preclude the IRS from eventually pursuing middle-income Americans for audits down the road.

“This power and these resources allow them to go after anyone they want,” he said. “The next step is to go after anyone they wish to target for political purposes.”

Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said the IRS' new plan is a “big deal" that “represents a fresh approach to taking on sophisticated tax cheats.”

“This action goes to the heart of Democrats’ effort to ensure the wealthiest are paying their fair share,” he said in a statement.
...
The federal tax collector gained the enhanced ability to identify tax delinquents with resources provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law in August of 2022. The agency was in line for an $80 billion infusion under the law, but that money is vulnerable to potential cutbacks by Congress.

House Republicans built a $1.4 billion reduction to the IRS into the debt ceiling and budget cuts package passed by Congress this summer. The White House said the debt deal also has a separate agreement to take $20 billion from the IRS over the next two years and divert that money to other non-defense programs.

With the threat of a government shutdown looming in a dispute over spending levels, there is the potential for additional cuts to the agency."

The GOP couldn't care less about the financial, or any other kind of, wellbeing of the average American! They would gladly crash the economy if it got them more donations from their obscenely wealthy donors or if it hurt Biden's and Democrat's chances in the next election. They are the party of sociopaths, who don't care about the common good, but only about themselves and those who can benefit them.

The obscenely wealthy are equally as devoted only to themselves and their insatiable, pathological need to make ever more money! No amount would ever be enough, because their greed is like an addiction that can only be satisfied by constantly gaining more money. This is only part of what gives their greed away as a pathology that is fundamentally driven by fear and insecurity as they already clearly have plenty of money to take care of themselves. They just keep needing more; more money, more possessions, more winning and more losing for the rest of us.

Why the GOP May Actually Want a Second Great Depression https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-the-gop-may-actually-want-a-second?

#GreedKills
#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich
#GreedIsAPathology
#InsecurityComplex
#GreedIsAnInsecurityResponse

"This is why Kevin McCarthy’s proposed legislation to raise the debt ceiling would strip $80 billion from the IRS: the morbidly rich tax cheats who own him (with the Supreme Court’s blessing in Citizens United) don’t want to get caught.

They want to hang onto the trillions they made during the last two crashes.

And, apparently, they’re happily anticipating the next crash that their boy McCarthy and their bought-off Republicans in Congress are working hard to bring to pass with their debt ceiling manipulations.

— Economic downturns not only cut wages and present buying opportunities for the wealthy and corporate America, they also give massive companies far more leverage when negotiating with vendors, who are typically desperate smaller businesses.

— They retain access to credit so they can leverage their buying opportunities in ways smaller companies and working class individuals can’t.

— And their power to fight unionization increases exponentially as workers scramble and compete for jobs that have become vanishingly rare.

But the average American can be forgiven for thinking that Republicans would be reluctant to crash the economy. Their lived experience is very different from that of Elon Musk (532% increase in wealth during the single year of 2020), Mark Zuckerberg (86% increase), or Jeff Bezos (65% increase).

During the Bush Crash, average income for the poorest 10% of Americans fell by a full 23%, making business (and billionaires) much more profitable while working people were skipping meals and cutting pills in half.

Thirteen years later, the Trump Crash threw 8,500,000 Americans out of work: according to the World Economic Forum, the adjusted unemployment rate hit 22.7 percent in 2020, higher than even during the Bush Crash, and it’s taken a full three years for working people to get back to where they started before Trump so badly mismanaged the pandemic.

Small business revenue collapsed by more than a fifth under Trump, new business formation cratered, and by July 2020 one-in-five American families were behind on their rent. The rate of hunger in America doubled at the same time the GOP sought to cut food stamps (SNAP) and Medicaid benefits.

The Bush and Trump crashes, in other words, did the work the morbidly rich have been demanding for years. Wages fell, unions struggled, corporate profits hit highs literally never before seen in America, and hedge funds bought up millions of distressed single-family homes to flip into high-priced rentals.

The stock market became absurdly cheap with both crashes, providing both the multimillionaire members of Congress and their billionaire backers with what used to be once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunities.

Additionally, throwing the country into a depression would almost guarantee Joe Biden loses the 2024 election. Presidents are rarely re-elected when the economy has gotten worse on their watch. Just ask Donald Trump, Jimmy Carter, or Jerry Ford.

So don’t be so sure Republicans in the House and Senate won’t drag America into default and a second Republican Great Depression if they have a chance.

They and their billionaire backers have almost nothing to lose and a fortune to gain."

Without the greedy, obscenely wealthy people who just want more money and less taxes and regulations propping up the deplorable racists, nazis, supremacists and Christian nationalists on the far right, they would never stand a chance in our democracy. But with those wealthy, greedy sleazeball's help, our democracy is in danger.

"So, to the question about what’s really behind the war Republicans are waging against American democracy, the answer is simple: rightwing billionaires who want more, more, more money and are willing to make common cause with bigots, fascists, and wannabee killers to get it.:"

What’s Behind the GOP’s War Against Democracy? https://hartmannreport.com/p/whats-behind-the-gops-war-against?

#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich
#GreedKillsDemocracy
#GOPUnholyAlliance
#GOPUsesDeplorables4Votes

"...As German industrialist Fritz Thyssen writes in his apologetic book I Paid Hitler, he pressured German President von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor, and then lobbied the Association of German Industrialists, that country’s and era’s version of the US Chamber of Commerce, to donate 3 million Reichsmarks to the Nazi Party for the 1932 election.

While Thyssen did it primarily because he wanted tax cuts for morbidly rich people like himself and government contracts for his company, his efforts combined with Hugenberg’s media empire brought Hitler and his bigots to power.
...
If the German people were victims, Hitler told them, the villains were German minorities, promoting degeneracy like jazz and swing music, tolerance of homosexuality and transgender people, and the “international Jewish conspiracy.”

Once the Nazis took power they banned books, outlawed drag shows and homosexuality, changed school curricula to remove mention of their atrocities in WWI, and rewrote election laws so they’d never again lose an election.
...
This is all echoed in the crisis today facing both the GOP and the Democratic Party’s opposition to it.

As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently wrote:

“My friends, the Republican Party is no longer committed to democracy. It is rapidly becoming the American fascist party.”

Rightwing American billionaires, parroting Fritz Thyssen, have spent the past decade pouring money into Republican-aligned groups working to change school textbooks, ban library books, outlaw healthcare for queer people, criminalize trans participation in civil society, and make it harder for college students and Black people to vote.

Like Thyssen, most probably aren’t all that bigoted themselves: their primary motivation is lowering their own taxes and increasing their companies’ government purchases and subsidies.

But to get there they must have Republicans in power, and the GOP’s base — while they don’t much care about billionaire’s taxes or corporate deregulation — are fervent bigots.
...
There are signs that a few of the billionaires funding the modern neofascist wing of the GOP’s rise to power are having second thoughts, much as Fritz Thyssen ultimately did in Germany.
...
The billionaire-funded movement to pass anti-voting, anti-trans, anti-Black history, anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion, and anti-public school legislation and policy is roaring down the track, as is the billionaire-owned media campaign to promote fascism.

And since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with Citizens United, the deck remains stacked in their favor.

There is no Democratic equivalent to Fox “News,” 1500 rightwing radio stations, hundreds of subsidized rightwing podcasts and media sites, The Wall Street Journal, ALEC, Heritage Foundation, Musk’s rightwing reinvention of Twitter, Facebook’s GOP-leaning algorithms, or the hundreds of other state and national policy operations and think tanks.

The American people, however, seem to be waking up even in the face of this onslaught of billionaire-owned and -funded media and political infrastructure.

The velocity with which Republican governors are leaving ERIC so they can quietly purge people from their voting rolls (now that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized that in 2018) and passing over 400 new make-it-harder-to-vote laws shows how concerned they are about this trend.

So, to the question about what’s really behind the war Republicans are waging against American democracy, the answer is simple: rightwing billionaires who want more, more, more money and are willing to make common cause with bigots, fascists, and wannabee killers to get it.

Given how far we are down this road to fascism — and how the GOP’s fascist faction is being supported by both American billionaires and outsiders like Orbán, Putin, and Xi — the 2024 election may well be the equivalent of the November, 1932 German elections: a make-or-break moment for American democracy."

The leaders of the right are becoming ever more aligned around autocracy and oligarchy as their preferred outcome. They have increasingly given up on democracy and no longer have any interest in sharing power or governing from the center. Part of this is attributable to their imbibing far too much of their own kool-aid and part is due to their power-hunger and greed.

They have been working toward their goal of single-party, oligarchic rule for decades--with a touch of Christian nationalism thrown in for "moral" cover. Their ongoing, and now relatively successful, capture of the judiciary as an end-run around democracy, is just one prong of their overarching plan. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, allowing unlimited money/bribery into our elections, eroding the security of the middle class, and propagandistic indoctrination of the susceptible, are all parts of this same plan.

They have been patiently moving toward dismantling our democracy and then fortunately for us, Trump came along and coopted many of the pieces of their plan, for his own, selfish, narcissistic purposes, before it was fully ready to be rolled out. They fought him initially, concerned that he would ruin their well-planned strategy, but then eventually went along with him in the hopes that their desired outcome could be achieved even more quickly than they had hoped. All the pieces were not in place, some of our democratic checks and balances and guardrails held, and that is what saved us.

Make no mistake about it, they wanted to put together an Orban-like, illiberal "democracy-in-name-only" but it wasn't fully successful. Recognizing that this was their plan all along and that they haven't abandoned it but instead doubled down, is what we need to wake up and work together to protect our democracy from this ongoing insurrection. The GOP is not a partner in our democracy any longer!!

American Autocratic Threats: Ted Cruz and John Roberts https://politicususa.substack.com/p/american-autocratic-threats-ted-cruz?

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich
#PartisanCaptureOfJudiciary
#ImprisonSeditionists

"The U.S. is facing ongoing pressure from the right to become an autocracy, as proven by the secret Ted Cruz tapes and Justice John Roberts' refusal to testify regarding SCOTUS' ethics challenges.

It’s been a banger of a week so far, with sexual harassment scandals bringing down major TV news stars and a CEO and then on Tuesday more breaking news as we heard the secret Ted Cruz (R-TX) tapes in which he laid out the plot to steal America. At the same time, news broke that Republican Chief Justice John Roberts refused Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) request to testify regarding the massive ethics scandals infecting the Supreme Court.

Both sides of this coin are a symptom of an oppressive, out-of-control reactionary and right-wing patriarchy that feels so threatened by change that it is working to seize power and actively escalating democratic backsliding. This is not normal.

The Secret Authoritarian Plot Hatched at the Highest Levels of U.S. Government
The secret recordings of Cruz revealed his coup plot to overturn Biden’s 2020 win and kept Trump in the White House. Cruz is a U.S. Senator, who is supposed to be loyal to the United States and her government. Plotting a coup is the opposite of loyalty.

It was a deeply somber moment as Ari Melber, on whose MSNBC show the Ted Cruz tapes debuted, warned Americans not to dismiss the threat of rising autocracy evidenced by the Republican plan to steal an election.

Melber made the most important point from all of this news when he warned not to underestimate authoritarian plans. I’ve been warning about this since the Right started taking lessons from Hungary’s PM Viktor Orban — they are serious about turning the United States into a democracy in name only and the takeover isn’t going to be a violent Civil War, but rather what you see right now: using the courts to steal power, culture war propaganda and media dominance.

Melber said, "There are also those who would look at this tape with this plan and say, Ari, this sounds pretty farfetched. That sounds unlikely to get anywhere. They might want to dismiss it. They might say, hey, Ari, this wasn't going to really happen. And it didn't happen, we didn't see a fake commission popped up to do this. Let me tell you this tonight -- underestimating authoritarian plans hatched at the highest levels of your government would be a mistake. This was hidden for a reason they don't want to you know about it, don't want to you take it seriously."

Sounds like we are just some kind of cattle to the rich or maybe more like chattel, serfs or just assets to capitalize on. They don't care if they pay us starvation wages, move all the good jobs to other countries and reduce the U.S. to a 3rd world economy/society. They are too focused on all the money, possessions and toys they have. They don't care about us or our society.

People who care that much about money and that little about their fellow citizens and society should never be in a position to influence our government, let alone be able to buy it and politicians for what is a pittance compared to how much they make on the return of their donations/investments. Spend 10 million, get back 100 million in tax breaks or lowered regulations.

It can be difficult for us to see how sick and pathological this addiction to ever more money and power is because our society has been groomed to accept it as normal or even a sign of true success. It is sick/pathological though and driven by fear, insecurity, and an emotional immaturity and hollowness that makes them think that ever more money, possessions, power or what have you, will make them whole, safe, better, and looked up to.

There is nothing enviable about their malady nor is there a net positive contribution to our society from it. Rather, the majority of us are in worse financial shape than we were decades ago thanks to their behind-the-scenes machinations and yet they still press their flunkies in the GOP to take away even what little we have. It pains them to see us have employment, health, retirement or really any kind of security. It isn't just that they want it all, they also don't want us to have any of it. That is how pathological and unfit to steer our society they are.

Hmmm...but maybe we should allow them to control our society...what could it hurt?!

Okay, down from my soapbox for a minute to encourage you to read the very good and short article below.

Why The Rich Love To Crush Wages, Cut Pensions And So On To Fight Inflation – Ian Welsh https://www.ianwelsh.net/why-the-rich-love-to-crush-wages-cut-pensions-and-so-on-to-fight-inflation/

#InsecurityComplex
#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich
#GreedKills
#GreedIsPathological

"The majority of price increases, of inflation, right now, are driven by price increases that are higher than increases in costs. Numbers I see tend to range from the mid sixties to the seventies.

They aren’t, then, driven primarily by wage increases.

The obvious way to solve this is to put in a surplus profit tax based on 2019 profit levels and forbid other ways of withdrawing excess profits like stock buy backs and option grants. Only after doing this would you consider trying to crush wages or cut pensions or other benefits.

That is, if your primary aim was to reduce inflation.

But it is undeniable that crushing wages will reduce inflation somewhat, even if it is far from the best way to do so and it has a great advantage.

It makes the rich even richer by reducing their wage costs!

On the other hand, an excess profits tax would make the rich not get richer nearly as fast.

You can see why governments controlled by the rich (yes they are, let us not be tedious) would prefer to crush wages as opposed to limit profits.

For the elite to support the sort of policies which would not crush wages and which would appear to reduce their profits, they would have to be like a good chunk (but not all) of the post-war elites. Having seen what happened when demand collapsed in the Great Depression, they knew they needed wages to rise and were thus willing to share and to pursue some policies which they didn’t like.

After all, while the fastest way to deal with inflation is an excess profits tax, the structural way is breaking up control of industries and re-regulating anything that even sniffs like an oligopoly or monopoly, plus slamming on huge estate taxes, wealth taxes and 90% top marginal tax rates, while putting a Glass-Steagall analogue back in place and re-nationalizing key parts of the economy.

Now, as it happens, the post-war economy was the best we’ve known since we were keeping records. High growth, reducing inequality but still plenty of profits. The rich had to live with only getting 20X or so as much as the middle class, though, and that’s just unacceptable to them.

Now never let it be said that the rich don’t learn: they do have a dim understanding of “demand collapse bad” and they have a solution, which they’ve been trying since 2008.

“What if we just print tons of money!?” Trillions and trillions of dollars were produced and are currently being produced out of thin air, with no increase in the underlying economy, and given to rich people to bail them out and even when they don’t need bailing out.

Who needs to actually grow customers and have customers having increased real incomes when you can just give yourself money?

This is why things will only improve when current elites lose power wholesale."

Wanted to make sure people had a chance to see this attempt to make sense of the GOP that I recently refined and shared.

Teasing apart the various sick layers--and I do mean sick like mentally ill or pathological--of the GOP can be challenging. It is such an unholy alliance!

At the top of this alliance are the obscenely wealthy who only want more money, possessions, and power and couldn't care less about anybody else. Then below them, steering and controlling much of the GOP (McConnel, McCarthy, MGT and their amoral ilk) are the servants/sycophants of the wealthy, trying to earn some of the obscenely wealthy's largesse and get some of the crumbs that fall from their ravenous maws. They are tasked with holding together and consolidating the lower levels of this unholy alliance; the true believers.

These are the fundamentalists/Christian nationalists, the racists/white supremacists, the nazis/fascists, the conspiracy theorists, etc.. None of these groups have enough members to win major elections. Yet if you can rope them all together, fund them and use them to support the policies and tax cuts of the obscenely wealthy, while throwing them breadcrumbs like the abolition of the separation of church and state, racist dog whistles, fascist, authoritarian policies, and some Qanon conspiracy-like theories, you can win elections while mostly just implementing the wealthy's wish lists.

But, over time, some of the true believers, run for office and get elected. They aren't true believers in the obscenely wealthy over all others cult, they believe in stupid things like abortion is evil, we need religion in schools, we need to persecute minorities and immigrants, and take away the rights and power of those on the left. It's kind of like a bug of the obscenely wealthy's alliance rather than a feature and thus you get people like this woman. She fervently believes being gay or trans is evil more than she worships the wealthy.

Together all these groups make up the GOP unholy alliance devised to give the wealthy control of a democratic country.

#GOPUnholyAlliance
#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich

This mother would rather have her daughter commit suicide than be trans. What a sick piece of work!
Teasing apart the various sick layers--and I do mean sick like mentally ill or pathological--of the GOP can be challenging. It is such an unholy alliance!

At the top of this alliance are the obscenely wealthy who only want more money, possessions, and power and couldn't care less about anybody else. Then below them, steering and controlling much of the GOP (McConnel, McCarthy, MGT and their amoral ilk) are the servants/sycophants of the wealthy, trying to earn some of the obscenely wealthy's largesse and get some of the crumbs that fall from their ravenous maws. They are tasked with holding together and consolidating the lower levels of this unholy alliance; the true believers.

These are the fundamentalists/Christian nationalists, the racists/white supremacists, the nazis/fascists, the conspiracy theorists, etc.. None of these groups have enough members to win major elections. Yet if you can rope them all together, fund them and use them to support the policies and tax cuts of the obscenely wealthy, while throwing them breadcrumbs like the abolition of the separation of church and state, racist dog whistles, fascist, authoritarian policies, and some Qanon conspiracy-like theories, you can win elections while mostly just implementing the wealthy's wish lists.

But, over time, some of the true believers, run for office and get elected. They aren't true believers in the obscenely wealthy over all others cult, they believe in stupid things like abortion is evil, we need religion in schools, we need to persecute minorities and immigrants, and take away the rights and power of those on the left. It's kind of like a bug of the obscenely wealthy's alliance rather than a feature and thus you get people like this woman. She fervently believes being gay or trans is evil more than she worships the wealthy.

Together all these groups make up the GOP unholy alliance devised to give the wealthy control of a democratic country.

Montana GOP lawmaker's disturbing remarks about (not) saving her daughter's life https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/28/2166375/-Montana-GOP-lawmaker-just-said-she-preferred-her-daughter-commit-suicide-than-transition

#GOPUnholyAlliance
#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich
#InsecurityComplex

"I need to introduce you to someone.

Republican “pro-life” Montana state Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe, who sponsored an anti-trans bill in the Montana legislature, gave a speech that essentially said she’d rather her own daughter be dead than be trans.

In her disgusting rant, Crowe makes herself out to be the victim by equating her daughter’s mental health struggles to manipulation.

Just earlier this week we had to listen to the infamously awful Marjorie Taylor Greene telling Randi Weingarten that she’s not a real mother because her kids weren’t “biological.” Well, I’m pretty damn sure Crowe’s poor daughter would have loved the opportunity to be with an adopted loving mother instead of the one she was stuck with.

How do you argue with people this depraved?

California Rep. Ted Lieu weighed in by saying it’s not the government’s role to make personal decisions for families. Thank God, because who wants someone like this making your personal decisions?

This is the part that really struck me:

Someone once asked me, 'Wouldn't I just do anything to help save her?' And I really had to think and the answer was, 'No.'"

When I argue over gun safety after yet another school shooting that leaves dead children behind, I sometimes ask, “What if it was your child?” I see now that I might be wasting my time with this approach.

For some people, their hatred is more important than anything, even their child’s life. "

The GOP is always ready to undermine the fiscal integrity of government in order to give "needy" wealthy people more tax breaks and money, yet they become so fiscally "responsible and conservative" when it comes to helping average Americans in any way. It's clear, the cruelty is the point. It certainly isn't fiscal responsibility, as they have a huge surplus and this attempt to screw the poor is going to cost them much more to implement than they spend on SNAP every year. This legislation, like so many of these bills, originates in out-of-state, right-wing bill mills that are funded by obscenely wealthy, greedy, nutjobs who want more handouts for themselves and less for anyone else. These GOP lovers of the rich and haters of the poor, mirror their greedy "socialism for me but not thee" donors totally. And they call themselves Christians?!

Iowa's bill on limiting SNAP benefits is a bold attack, experts say - The Washington Post Free Article--GiftLink https://wapo.st/40fj5jZ

#GOPHatesAvgAmericans
#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich
#Socialism4MeNotThee

"The state legislature, with the support of the Republican supermajority, was poised to approve some of the nation’s harshest restrictions on SNAP...By the state’s own estimate, Iowa will need to spend nearly $18 million in administrative costs during the first three years — to take in less federal money. The bill’s backers argue the steps would save the state money long term and cut down on “SNAP fraud.”

The measure is part of a broader national crackdown on SNAP, the federal program at the heart of the nation’s welfare system. The proposed legislation was not a homegrown effort but the product of a network of conservative think tanks pushing similar SNAP restrictions in Kentucky, Kansas, Wisconsin and other states. But experts say Iowa’s represents the boldest attack yet on SNAP, and Republicans in Congress have signaled a similar readiness to impose limits on federal food assistance.
...
When the coronavirus pandemic started in 2020, the federal government temporarily raised its allotment of SNAP dollars for the 41 million Americans in the program. Then in April 2022, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) decided to end those emergency SNAP benefits a year early, leaving the 286,874 Iowans with less money each month for food.
...
Spending money to reject money

Iowa ended 2022 with a general-fund budget surplus of $1.91 billion. But at the start of the 2023 legislative session, Republicans made clear that limiting access to SNAP was a priority because of cost concerns.

“It’s these entitlement programs,” House Speaker Pat Grassley (R), grandson of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R), told reporters in January. “They’re the ones that are growing within the budget, and are putting pressure on us being able to fund other priorities. And so I think it’s time for us to take a serious look at what they are.”
...
The proposal’s backers argued that SNAP assistance de-incentivized families from working or from taking on more hours at the jobs they already had. They also pressed the case that the current program would eliminate “SNAP fraud.”
...
Enacting the bill is expected to cost Iowa more than $17 million in the first three years, far more than the $2.2 million the state spends each year to administer SNAP. (The federal government funds SNAP and splits administrative costs 50-50 with the state. Last year, Iowa received $60.4 million in federal SNAP funds).
...
A Florida think tank
...
Its biggest proponent was the Opportunity Solutions Project, a Florida think tank that has successfully shepherded similar bills through other statehouses.

The OSP is the lobbying arm of the Foundation for Government Accountability. Both groups are run by Maine state legislator Tarren Bragdon, who started the FGA in 2011 with three employees and less than $60,000 in the group’s bank account. According to tax records, that money was a grant from the State Policy Network, a major funder for right-wing think tanks and organizations that has been linked to conservative superdonors such as Charles Koch and the DeVos family. OSP did not respond to calls for comment.

As of 2021, the organization has grown to more than 40 staff members, 40 contractors, and a $12.5 million annual budget. Although the group has expanded into pushing for election integrity laws in battleground states, the bulk of its mission seems to the aimed at cutting welfare programs to “free individuals from the trap of government dependence.”
...
“This bill makes poor use of state resources, ramping up administration costs in order to take federal resources out of Iowa’s economy,” said Rep. Jeff Cooling (D).
...
“It is a continuation of the myth that persons on aid programs are cheats gaming the system,” said Rep. Monica Kurth (D). “This is another way this body is blaming the victim by passing bad legislation.”