What’s interesting in the news today?
Open Thread
1. Why did the IRS cut it’s customer service budget? So it could pay bonuses?
From TheWeeklyStandard “If you tried to contact the IRS with a question about your taxes this year, chances are you didn’t get a response. The IRS estimated that it would only answer 17 million of the 49 million calls received this filing season. Taxpayers lucky enough to have the IRS answer their calls waited an average of 34.4 minutes for assistance–nearly double the wait time last year (18.7 minutes).
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has blamed the IRS’s “abysmal” customer service on congressional budget cuts–funding is down $1.2 billion from its 2010 peak–but a new congressional report points the finger back at the IRS. While congressional funding for the IRS remained flat from 2014 to 2015, the IRS diverted $134 million away from customer service to other activities.
In addition to the $11 billion appropriated by Congress, the IRS takes in more than $400 million in user fees and may allocate that money as it sees fit. In 2014, the IRS allocated $183 million in user fees to its customer service budget, but allocated just $49 million in 2015–a 76 percent cut.”
“The report notes that Koskinen reinstated bonuses weeks after his appointment, has allowed IRS employees to spend roughly 500,000 work hours on union activities, and failed to collect delinquent taxes owed by federal employees. The tax agency has also been strained by Obamacare. According to the report, the IRS has spent “over $1.2 billion on the President’s health care law to date, with a planned expenditure this year of an additional $500 million.”
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2. The Pentagon and White House aren’t being honest about ISIS. Again.
From TheDailyBeast “The Defense Department released a map last week showing territory where it is has pushed ISIS back, claiming that the terrorist group is “no longer able to operate freely in roughly 25 to 30 percent of populated areas of Iraqi territory where it once could.” This was touted as evidence of success by numerous news outlets.
Pushing ISIS back is clearly a good step. But the information from the Pentagon is, at best, misleading and incomplete, experts in the region and people on the ground tell The Daily Beast. They said the map misinforms the public about how effective the U.S.-led effort to beat back ISIS has actually been. The map released by the Pentagon excludes inconvenient facts in some parts, and obscures them in others.
The Pentagon’s map assessing the so-called Islamic State’s strength has only two categories: territory held by ISIS currently, and territory lost by ISIS since coalition airstrikes began in August 2014. The category that would illustrate American setbacks—where ISIS has actually gained territory since the coalition effort began—is not included.”
““Taken in isolation, the map definitely gives an impression that anti-ISIS efforts have succeeded in pushing the group back along a northern and north-eastern peripheries, but it fails in one huge respect—it fails to specifically identify territory gained by ISIS during the same period,” said Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center.”
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3. Yesterday was Earth Day. Since I’m not a hippie, I forgot. Oh well….. 🙄
So in honor of Earth Day and the doom and gloom predictions I’m sure were made, here are 18 spectacularly wrong predictions from the first Earth Day.
From TheAmericanEnterpriseInstitute “In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 45th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 15 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey. Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:
1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.””
🙄
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Wandering Views 
Was yesterday Earth day?
I wondered what all this talk was about.
I thought it was May first.
That must be something else.
I can remember reading about the overpopulation of the Earth and worldwide starvation when I was at Purdue in 1971. Also, we were running out of Oil.
Buy that may have been in 1979 when the price of gas shot up to $.79/gallon.
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Paul Ehrlich was big when I was in college — and I even remember the first Earth Day on campus, they passed out little green campaign-style buttons we all wore.
Some interesting thoughts about Christians and Earth day in this link, though:
http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/why-christians-should-support-earth-day
“ … ‘The earth is the LORD’s and everything in it’ (Ps. 24:1). Just as saying the Pledge of Allegiance does not signify submission to the United States above Christ, participating in Earth Day activities does not require Earth worship or theological compromise. Even if bad theology is being proclaimed and practiced at an event, our mere attendance does not constitute affirmation. Instead, participating with our community in Earth Day activities allows for positively demonstrating our theological valuation of creation. The earth is our home; God is doing a work to restore it through Christ’s resurrection.”
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And this also, in which the author reminds us that “people matter most”:
http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/2010/04/22/building-a-better-earth-day/
“Today is Earth Day, the fortieth anniversary in fact. It’s hard for me to be excited.
“Don’t get me wrong, it’s possible for Christians to celebrate Earth Day in the right way. I’m sure many do. We can thank God for the physical world, enjoy the beauty of creation, and think through ways to steward the earth God has put under our dominion.
“But the official Earth Day movement rests on several debatable premises, like ‘the world is in greater peril than ever’ and ‘climate change is the greatest challenge of our time.’ More to the point, there are deep assumptions, unspoken assumptions, that too often provide the foundation for our basic thinking about the environment. And unless Christians are building on the right foundation, we will not think about environmental issues in ways that are most helpful and most biblical. …”
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Nope. I will never support Earth Day. We read the book in my high school English class. Then school buses took us to the first Earth Day at the university. All the stuff we learned was later proven to be false. Nevertheless, it influenced many, many people and made many others suffer from its teachings. For example, the families that were maligned for having more than two children etc. That is the least of it.
I was taught to take care of my environment. I was taught to keep my room clean, our home clean, our yard clean; to respect others, be frugal etc. Do that and you go a long way in teaching people to respect the great outdoors.
Supporting efforts to make sure we have a clean environment, while balancing people’s needs is smart. Respecting and treating gratefully what God gives is wise and right. That is not the basis for Earth Day, however.
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