What the IRS’s Hiring Spree Means for You
2023-01-08 · Guest: Ashley Varner (Freedom Foundation VP) · 52:46
IRS expansion and public sector union influence
Host Bob Zadek and guest Ashley Varner of the Freedom Foundation discuss the implications of the Biden administration’s plan to hire 87,000 new IRS agents. They explore the connection between public sector unions and government expansion, arguing that these unions create a self-sustaining cycle of political influence and taxpayer-funded growth.
Topics: IRS hiring, public sector unions, Freedom Foundation, government expansion, taxpayer rights Speakers: Bob Zadek (Host), Ashley Varner (Guest)
Introduction and the IRS Hiring Spree [00:08]
Bob Zadek: Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, your home for insight and in-depth analysis. Listen live right here or join us at BobZadek.com. That’s Z-A-D-E-K. BobZadek.com. The Bob Zadek Show: Ideas, not attitude; information, not talking points.
Hello, friends. I’m Bob Zadek, host of the country’s longest-running libertarian broadcast, nationally streamed at 8 a.m. Pacific time, Sundays on 560 AM. The archives of my Bob Zadek Show podcast hold 15 years of major issue discussion and is the ideal resource to remind us of the past errors, especially since many errors still survive. I promise you in-depth content on social, political, and economic issues that really matter, along with the ideal guest, accessible and entertaining. Our standard: ideas, not attitude.
Today’s guest, Ashley Varner, exceeds those standards. Ashley is the vice president of communications and federal affairs with the Freedom Foundation, a non-profit battle tank—i.e., not just a think tank, but a battle tank, taking on big unions, big government, and big anything that threatens our individual rights.
Thomas Jefferson observed, and I quote, “When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.” Which of those two, if the choice is only two, are we experiencing today? Does the government fear us? Or do we fear the government? Today’s topic, if you don’t know the answer, will help you reach the right conclusion.
Nothing personifies big government and a threat to individual liberties more than the Internal Revenue Service, the agency which enforces—and boy, do I mean enforce—the Internal Revenue Code and other federal statutes dealing with taxation. The Internal Revenue Code and the Internal Revenue Service, as we all know, has just been given the funding by the Biden administration and the complacent Congress to hire 87,000, give or take, agents to enforce the Internal Revenue Code. Don’t worry, they will not collect taxes from anybody earning less than $400,000 a year, or so they promise. Today, Ashley will help us understand what this actually means to us common folk. Ashley, welcome to the show.
Ashley Varner: Thank you so much for having me, Bob. It’s a pleasure to join you.
Bob Zadek: Freedom Foundation, Ashley—tell us a bit about the Freedom Foundation and how they are so fortunate that you found your way to work with them.
Ashley Varner: Well, sure. Thank you. The Freedom Foundation is a national nonprofit. Like you said, we’re a battle tank. We don’t write all that many white papers—not that there’s anything wrong with that—but we really see our mission as helping free taxpayer-funded employees, the public sector, the government employees, help free them from union tyranny.
And we have seen union bullies up and down the West Coast in particular, all across the country; they get power and they maintain it by taking money out of taxpayer-funded paychecks, siphoning it off to their favorite politicians’ campaign coffers, and it’s a vicious cycle. The politicians are bought and paid for; they then give money back to the unions; they grow the government. The government, when it gets bigger, it only means less liberty for you and me. And the cycle continues as it goes.
So we stand simply to give people the choice to let them know about their rights. If they are a taxpayer-funded employee, they do not have to pay those union dues. They will be lied to, they will be coerced, they will be bullied, but we’re here to give them the support, and we even have a legal team to take on legal action on their behalf.
The Public Sector Union Connection [05:15]
Bob Zadek: You are the perfect guest, and the Freedom Foundation is the perfect nonprofit to help us work through today’s topic. We will not cover in detail the tens of thousands of pages of the Internal Revenue Code. We will cover in some detail what the Biden administration has done to rearm the Internal Revenue Service by building into current legislation—yes, it’s already been signed—the funding to provide 87,000, give or take, new agents to enforce the statute.
Now, first, there is a, of all things, a union component in this legislation. So you mentioned unions. Unions are in your crosshairs at the Freedom Foundation. Tell us why, in discussing a piece of legislation and appropriation to provide funding for 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service agents, what is the union component of all this? Why must we talk about public service unions in this conversation?
Ashley Varner: Well, because, Bob, government sector employees are the biggest, single biggest funder of radical leftist politics in this country. And they have a guaranteed, guaranteed revenue stream because they have a huge workforce. The government workforce is out of control, as I’m sure you and I could talk about for an endless amount of time. But we’ve got a vastly bloated government workforce. The vast majority of those people have to pay union dues because they don’t know they have an option.
That taxpayer dollars—that’s your money, that’s my money. It’s not just given to people by the government. The government doesn’t create any money; that’s ours. So we are paying union dues against our will, and all of those dues are then going to be turned into radical leftist politics to take more government control out of our personal lives. But it starts with union membership, and that is why it’s so important that unions continually try to grow the government workforce. And these 87,000 IRS agents are a guaranteed new crop of people who are going to pay into the union dues campaign coffers.
Bob Zadek: So unions, public service unions in general, and in this case, at least for the next hour, we are talking about the union that represents Internal Revenue Service workers—those unions have an advantage that no other worker has. If they want a raise, all they need to do is to have the legislature enact legislation and they get a job and get a raise, and we have no choice.
Imagine if a private sector company could—and in some cases, that’s for another show—enact legislation to compel you to buy their service or buy their product. Now that happens; we could discuss this on many shows, and I have. But in this case, we have the public service unions simply enhance their own well-being by persuading the legislatures to force people to patronize them. Now, you mentioned, but I want you to expand upon this if you would, that the public service unions do much more than just ask the legislature for legislation. They have power that Ashley, you and I don’t have. Explain to us this incestuous relationship between public service unions—unions who represent workers who work for the government—why those unions have advantages baked into the system that other workers don’t have.
Ashley Varner: Sure, and it’s an important distinction, Bob, the difference between public sector unions and private sector unions. Because as you said, a private company has shareholders that they are beholden to. They have customers that they have to provide a product we want to purchase. Even private membership organizations, they have to prove to you that their membership offers you something that you want to pay for.
And this is the reason that Franklin Delano Roosevelt—that champion of small government, I know you and your audience know that I’m being sarcastic—but he loved private sector unions, but FDR was against the public sector unions because he said it was inherently unfair for union representatives to sit across the table from the politicians whose campaigns they directly support without the representation of the taxpayer who funds it all there at the table to negotiate. That is the big difference.
And so when the government bureaucratic people, when the government employees come to, say, the leadership in the House and Senate and they say, “We want to get this inserted into the next omnibus bill. Don’t forget how much money we gave you. Don’t forget that you’re in leadership because we bought enough of your members’ campaigns to put you in the leadership, to put you over the top. Remember where your money comes from.”
That’s why when President Biden was campaigning in 2020, he told several union outfits when he was on the campaign trail, “I’m going to be the most pro-union president this country has ever seen.” And it’s one of the few campaign promises he’s actually done quite well. But the unions have power because they can go to the Speaker of the House or the Majority Leader of the Senate or the President or the CDC in the teachers’ unions’ case, and they can say, “Remember who put you here, and if you want to keep your position, you’re going to do this, and you’re going to give us this new crop of dues deductions.”
Bob Zadek: And I know you—I suspect you have the statistics—but how active was the Internal Revenue Service Union in drafting and in adding these provisions to a piece of omnibus legislation? Was it incidental? Was it moderate?
Would you like the summary of the next section of the episode?
In this segment of the program, Bob Zadek and Ashley Varner discuss the potential political and financial motivations behind the expansion of the Internal Revenue Service. They explore the idea that the hiring of tens of thousands of new agents serves as a significant financial boost for labor unions through mandatory dues, which in turn supports specific political interests. The conversation highlights a perceived cycle where government expansion directly benefits the organizations that support the administration’s agenda.
The discussion then turns to the credibility of executive promises regarding who will be targeted by these new resources. The speakers express deep skepticism toward claims that middle- and lower-income taxpayers will be exempt from increased audits. By referencing historical precedents and data regarding agency behavior, they argue that enforcement often naturally gravitates toward lower-income individuals because they lack the resources to contest agency findings. They conclude that the expansion may ultimately function as a de facto tax increase on the general public, regardless of official rhetoric.
Would you like a summary of the next segment of this episode?
The IRS as a Political Weapon [23:39]
Ashley Varner: What you just said at the end, when it’s going to be a tax increase on lower-income people, part of that is because lower-income people don’t have accountants that they pay hundreds of dollars per hour for to go through all of their books to make sure that they find all of the legal loopholes. That’s why people were saying Warren Buffett pays less in taxes than his secretary. And we just found out that Donald Trump paid less in taxes because he took every available loophole. That’s both parties taking advantage of the system based on what kind of accountant help they can afford.
But also, we have seen in the past, in the not-very-distant past, the IRS being used as a weapon against who they perceive as their political enemies. Do we all remember Lois Lerner from 2013 with the Tea Party organizations that couldn’t get their tax-exempt status because there was a campaign at the IRS to slow-roll these organizations so that they couldn’t have any measurable impact in the 2012 election? And Lois Lerner hasn’t paid a price for that today. She had her pension, her golden parachute, and she hasn’t been called to Congress to explain anything in years.
Bob Zadek: It’s interesting that you mentioned—he invited himself to a lot of my shows, does former President Trump, and you just crashed my show with your unannounced guest, Donald Trump. But yes, you are correct. Trump’s tax returns—in a violation of clearly established norms, his personal tax returns have been made public, albeit with some redactions, but for the most part made public. And there was collective outrage on the left because he paid so little in taxes. Exclamation point! Some years he didn’t pay any taxes. Exclamation point!
Well, he didn’t pay taxes because—there’s no accusation he didn’t underreport his cash tips. What he did was he took advantage of provisions in the tax law enacted by our legislature. He took advantage of them the way I take advantage of my $10,000 limitation, but my deduction for home mortgage interest. Is that a loophole? Well, heck no. I’m allowed to do it, and I did it. And I pay less taxes as a result. And when these public figures who have substantial income are—it’s disclosed, exclamation point, that they pay very little in taxes—all they did was take advantage of the law. That’s all they did.
Now, if they cheated, a different subject, but there’s not been that accusation. So to say that wealthy people have loopholes—yes, they have loopholes given to them by the government. They didn’t seize them in an authoritarian way. They were given that by the Congress. And anyone in Congress who complains about how little wealthy individuals pay in taxes have only themselves to blame. They or their political body enacted the legislation. So how is that a reflection on the honesty or the integrity, the patriotism of a wealthy individual to simply take advantage of that which the law allows? Ashley?
Ashley Varner: Wow, that’s a good question. I mean, I don’t think that it necessarily makes you a more loyal or patriotic person to want to hand the government more money to do with as they please rather than what you would wish. Personally, with my libertarian streak, I think that we should have a lower tax base so that people can afford to give to the charities and the private organizations that they choose, and that you don’t have to have two-parent households because they have to have two parents working in order to pay the tax bill that comes at the end of the day. And we’re sending billions to another country to take care of their border, and we haven’t sent any to our own border.
There are all kinds of things that people across the country of varying political persuasions have been asking for change in the government, reforms in the government. No one asked for these 87,000 IRS agents unless it came from the unions who wanted to broaden their dues deductions. No one wants this. No one needs another army of tax agents coming after them. And it really is going to your point in the very beginning: Is the government afraid of the people, or are they giving the people more reasons to be afraid of crossing the government?
The Constitutional History of the Income Tax [28:15]
Bob Zadek: I’d like to spend some time, since we are discussing the federal income tax, and I know Freedom Foundation has resources available to help our listeners understand more. But I’d like to visit for a few moments the history of the income tax. It’s quite an interesting history, and there are lessons from that history. I’ll share with my listeners my personal observation.
And that is that the founders delivered to us a Constitution in 1787 with a Bill of Rights—even though the Bill of Rights wasn’t enacted until 1791, if I’m not mistaken. But the Bill of Rights, which was amendments to the Constitution—it really wasn’t quite amendments as we understand the word, because it was generally understood in the ratifying conventions, certainly in New York, and certainly in Virginia and in other states in New England or colonies in New England, that they would not vote to ratify the Constitution without a Bill of Rights. So the Bill of Rights was an add-on, but not quite amendments.
So when I’m going to refer to amendments to the Constitution, I exclude the Bill of Rights, and I’ll also exclude the Civil War Amendments, which, in another way of speaking, that was the unfinished business of the founders. The founders knew inevitably there would be something like the civil rights amendments, the 13th, 14th, and the 15th Amendment. They just concluded—and I could have discussed it on the show—that the country wasn’t ready in 1787 to deal with slavery. Okay. That’s the starting point.
My conclusion: almost all of the amendments, the structural amendments to the Constitution, such as the income tax, such as the 17th Amendment, which provided for the direct election of senators, contrary to the founders’ wishes—and those two amendments followed each other, income tax and 17th Amendment—most of the amendments made the Constitution worse. That’s my premise. I haven’t done a math count, but that’s my starting point. And I’ll exclude also women’s suffrage as part of the civil rights amendments, although it’s later. That fixed a problem that had to be fixed, obviously.
But as to issues like the income tax, the income tax was expressly, not by implication, not by reading between the lines, was expressly forbidden by the founders. They feared giving the federal government the excessive power which it would have if it could directly tax the people. The power to tax in the Constitution was only the power to levy a tax which was borne equally by the states, so that you couldn’t have a different tax rate—you had to have each state paying, in effect, the same system of taxation. That’s the starting point.
That worked fine. There was a temporary income tax during the Civil War. It existed for a short period of time, then it was promptly repealed. The first permitted income tax in 1913 required the Constitution to be amended. The founders were so fearful they made it unconstitutional. It is not generally known that we needed the 16th Amendment to the Constitution to make the income tax constitutional. So embellish that if you would, Ashley, because I know you and your organization have commented quite a bit on that. So tell us about the early history of this at that time somewhat radical and very modest proposal to tax a handful of Americans—to tax their income.
Ashley Varner: Yes. Well, I mean, the obvious thing is our founders would be appalled to see the tax system we have today, what the IRS is doing today, the fact that the government spends so much of our money on projects that they never foresaw the government doing. And to your point about the Bill of Rights, the first ten—they were negative rights that the government couldn’t do. They were protections for the people against the overreach of the government.
And so many of the amendments that came after that—like you said, taking out the civil rights amendments, but like the 16th Amendment, the 17th Amendment, Prohibition—they then became things that the government was encroaching upon us. And the 16th Amendment is a perfect example. I mean, the founders fought a revolution for less than what the IRS does to us on a regular basis. The three percent tax on tea—or maybe I don’t have that percentage correctly—but things that the King was doing, we knew that we did not want a government who could demand so much money from us without giving us the proper representation for how they were spending that money. They also understood that a progressive tax inevitably leads to a war by the poor against the rich. That’s how they pit our two groups against one another.
The History of the Income Tax [34:06]
Ashley Varner: It’s fueled by politicians who claim that successful people “didn’t build that,” or they don’t pay their fair share and that we should tax the rich. I am glad that you brought up the fact that we actually repealed the first income tax after the Civil War was over. But the Supreme Court actually struck down the second income tax that was established. They struck it down in 1895 because they said that it needed to be a tax that was equally borne by the people.
So to your point, from 1895 when the Supreme Court struck down the second federal income tax to 1913—I guess they had to come up with different percentages—but that first income tax levied a 1% tax on personal income greater than $3,000. And at first—I have some notes here to help me get it right—but one of the people who was discussing the income tax said, “Well, I’m okay with passing a tax that is above $4,000 income because nobody here has a $4,000 income.” So that’s where it began in the very, very early days of our politicians discussing an income tax, because they saw it starting to encroach even then. “Well, nobody here is going to have to pay for that, so we’ll let the upper-income, upper-echelon people carry the heavier burden.” And it only took one generation to hike the taxes sky-high. And I’m sure you have it here, but under President Roosevelt, he hiked the income tax to 79% of your income, and then later to 99%. And he wanted to go after a 99% income tax. That is insane. And it never would have passed muster with our founders.
The IRS and the Punishment of Success [38:15]
Bob Zadek: And, of course, the income tax—the “tax the rich” concept—it has the clear implication that there’s something inherently improper about the very concept. You know, Elizabeth Warren and AOC abhor the very concept that there are—and Bernie Sanders, of course—that there are rich people. And the income tax is the tool by which people who are successful get punished. And I invite the audience, if you want to go on a flight of fancy, just imagine what would the country be like without an income tax.
An income tax—remember, our country had a period of great economic growth. “Growth” is a word that’s abhorred these days. It’s not, in the eyes of many people, a legitimate goal in itself—mere economic growth. But of course, economic growth gives us a better standard of living, a healthier standard of living, a happier standard of living, and the like, of course. Somebody has to invent the stuff that makes our life better, and that’s growth. But we never enjoyed, except perhaps in a period of time after World War II, such sustained economic growth as the period after the Civil War and until the income tax, and in the first few years after we had the income tax. There was sustained growth.
But somehow, this country managed to enjoy economic growth, which means a better standard of living, longer life expectancy—all that comes with it—without an income tax. So it’s not an absurdity to imagine a world without an income tax, without punishing the activity of earning money. Because remember the core principle of taxation: the more you tax something, the less you have of it. And therefore, the more that you tax income, the less income that’s produced. Well, who suffers? Where does the money come to hire people? It comes out of earnings; it comes out of income. So do we want a life without income and therefore without growth? And the message of an income tax is, “Let’s tax the activity of earning money.” It’s like, “Let’s tax breathing and make people cut their breathing in half, and we’ll be better and we’ll have more money.” That’s the concept of income taxation.
And so here we are with the Biden administration allocating $80-plus billion dollars to the Internal Revenue Service. And the reason I asked Ashley to join us for this hour is because the Internal Revenue Service is special in a bad way, in my opinion. What makes it special? It is the only federal agency that has as its goal—as its goal—taking property from people who did nothing wrong. It’s the only agency that does that. So we are allocating huge amounts of our treasure to an agency whose sole purpose is to take away property lawfully obtained by citizens who broke no law.
Of course, we have other agencies; we have law enforcement agencies who punish people and protect us from somebody else doing us harm or our property. But somebody else earning money is not a threat to me. And yet we are giving money to the one agency that has as its purpose taking property from people who did nothing wrong. And I think that’s what the founders feared the most. That’s the tax collector. That’s what it does. There are plenty of other taxes where the tax is paid voluntarily. Sales tax. When I go to a restaurant and I get the check, and there’s a little number at the bottom for sales tax, it doesn’t make me resent the restaurant. It doesn’t make me wish I hadn’t eaten there. I understand. I make a decision to buy a meal or a car, and I make a decision knowing full well there’s a tax for doing that. It’s an excise tax; it’s a tax on activity. You don’t want to pay the tax, don’t do the activity. So I think, Ashley, “evil”—evil is not too strong a word for an income tax—is it’s a tax that takes property away from people who did nothing wrong other than crash into a piece of legislation whose only purpose is to take property.
Union Dues and the Janus Decision [43:45]
Ashley Varner: Well, once again, you’re right, Bob. But I also want to say, to add insult to injury, the taxes that have to be raised in order to pay for those new 87,000 IRS agents are going to be used as political speech when they are funneled to government employee unions, and it’s going to benefit one party because the IRS union is part of the Department of Treasury union, and it gives 100% of its donations in the last several cycles to the Democrat Party. The Democrats are not necessarily known for wanting to give tax breaks or lower taxes, but they also want to grow government in order to grow government employees to grow their union coffers that then benefit their campaigns.
It’s again the vicious cycle, and I’m just very fond of reminding everyone within my listening voice: this is your money. This is your money, Bob. This is my money; this is everyone in your audience’s money, because the government does not create money. They may print money, but they don’t actually create money. That is gained; that is created by you and me. And when they spend these millions and billions of dollars of our tax dollars, they’re taking it out of our mouths and spending it eventually for their own political purposes, whether or not we agree with that political speech. So this is, in effect—and the Supreme Court has spoken on this—this is, in effect, taxpayers in our country are in effect forced to give money, albeit indirectly, so that another organization can promote a political system that we oppose.
Bob Zadek: Imagine if a statute was passed that required every American to give $200 to the Democratic Party, or Republican Party.
Ashley Varner: Or Republican.
Bob Zadek: No, and this legislation, Ashley, as you have pointed out, in effect does that. There’s no question that that’s exactly what this legislation does.
Ashley Varner: You’re right, Bob. And that’s why the Freedom Foundation is so passionate about helping people understand: if you work for the government and you don’t want to pay these union dues, which amounts to political speech in your name with your paycheck, you don’t have to pay it. The Supreme Court weighed in in 2018 and said union dues are political speech. Public sector employees should not be compelled to fund union activity against their will. But so many people don’t know that because the unions certainly aren’t going to tell them. So the Freedom Foundation has taken it upon ourselves to try to reach out to every government employee in the country.
And to your point about Democrat or Republican, we hear from Democrats all the time who may be union members. They tell us, “You know, I may support [name your organization] that gives to Democrats. I may support Planned Parenthood or I may support the ACLU, but why don’t I get to choose how much of my money to give to that organization rather than having the union take it out of my paycheck before I even get to see it and then give it to the organization?” So it really does run across the political gamut. We just have people who, in times of inflation, they want to keep more of their dollars so that they can buy more groceries and put more gas in their car, or they’re not political at all and they just don’t care or don’t want to pay attention, so they don’t want their money to go to it, or they might even be on the left side of the aisle, but they say, “I’d rather decide how much to write on that check.”
Bob Zadek: The case that Ashley referred to in 2018 was—most of my listeners will know this—the Janus v. AFSCME case.
Bob Zadek: The Janus case was decided by the Supreme Court in 2018, which held that only with respect to public service unions—think teachers’ unions, public service unions—the union members who are required by the employer through legislation to join the unions as a condition of employment. That means it’s the government acting. The government therefore was prohibited under Janus to compel union members to pay dues to the extent that those dues support political speech they don’t oppose of.
Those of you who really follow the Supreme Court will remember the Janus case followed a very interesting case called Friedrichs. Rebecca Friedrichs—Rebecca was on my show in about 2016 with her lawyer. She was about to go to the Supreme Court. She was a teacher in Southern California, and she brought the first case. And it was quite interesting because she brought a case on the same principle, compelled speech, and it was about to go to the Supreme Court. And you may recall that the Supreme Court heard argument. It was very clear that the Supreme Court was going to decide 5-4—Scalia was on the court—against the union. Scalia, as you recall, died in a hunting accident visiting in Texas. And therefore, the Supreme Court was then tied 4-4 on the Friedrichs case. The case was then sent back down because the Supreme Court couldn’t decide.
And so the Janus case—very interesting story—was then brought up by those people who opposed compelled speech. And the Janus case was kind of Friedrichs two. And that held, as Ashley said, 5-4, that you could not compel public service workers. So this doesn’t apply to the private sector, at least not yet, but it does apply to public service worker unions. Now, was Freedom Foundation involved at all in the Janus case directly?
Ashley Varner: We were not. It was Mark Janus. He was a public employee out of Illinois. Um, so we were not involved with Mark. We have worked with him since then. But since June 2018, people kind of anticipated that this was the way the court was gonna go. So we had a national campaign ready to go, and we started the Freedom Foundation—FreedomFoundation.com—started in Washington State, then we moved into Oregon and then California, and we have since moved across the country. But since Janus in 2018, we’ve helped 132,000 people leave their unions, stop paying dues, and that has cost the unions 267 million dollars that the government employees, taxpayer-funded employees, get to keep in their own pockets.
Bob Zadek: You go, Freedom Foundation, you go.
Ashley Varner: Thank you.
Bob Zadek: Thank you for that well-deserved, well-deserved plug on the Freedom Foundation.
IRS Oversight and the $600 Reporting Rule [47:45]
Bob Zadek: Well, as we wind down, one postscript on the Biden legislation that allocates 80 billion in legislation that has been signed. The Republicans, if they can get their act together—a big “if”—the Republicans in the House, which have control over the purse, do have the power, whether they exercise it intelligently or not, remains to be seen. But they have the power since they will appropriate the money—they can appropriate the money that’s been budgeted for the IRS, and they can direct the IRS how to spend and how not to spend the $80 billion. So there is hope, even though the legislation has already been enacted.
And by the way, as to the great majority of our listeners who make less than 400,000 a year, if you think you’re home free, remember that through the Biden administration, there was another underreported bit of legislation that requires anybody being paid more than $600 a year through cash apps such as Venmo now must report, and Venmo must report. Can you imagine how many people out there don’t get $600 a year on Venmo? Everybody will have to report their transactions to the IRS, and Venmo will report. Do you think the IRS might be using those reports to assess taxes against those people? And if the answer is a reluctant yes, which segment of the population—the under 400,000 crowd or the over 400,000 crowd—is more likely than not to be paid through Venmo? I doubt that Warren Buffett gets substantial income through his Venmo account, just as I doubt Donald Trump—well, about him so much, but he probably doesn’t either.
Ashley Varner: Well, thank you so much, Bob. This has been a true pleasure. FreedomFoundation.com—we’ve got a donate page there at the top if you’d like to help us. We have over 80 cases against labor unions right now that won’t let people stop deducting dues. And we do that for free. We do not charge our clients. So 80 cases against unions get pretty expensive. So if you wanted to donate to that cause, FreedomFoundation.com. We have an email; sign up for our email. Get our weekly update so that you know what we’re doing. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. And if you’re a government employee, OptOutToday.com. It’s an interactive map. You click on your state, you click on your union. It self-populates a letter that you send to your union saying, “I want to opt out of dues. I don’t want to be a member anymore.” And then we will help follow up with you on that, free of charge again.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, Ashley. Ashley Varner of the Freedom Foundation for sharing your thoughts with us on this really ugly piece or portion of the Inflation Reduction Act—inaptly named, of course. And thank you so much for the work with the Freedom Foundation for helping us level the playing field.
Ashley Varner: Thank you so much.
Bob Zadek: And especially thank you to my listeners for giving us an hour of your very valuable time. We hope you have found it worthwhile. Thank you. Have a nice day.
Ashley Varner: Thank you.