I hope you don’t need the IRS because nearly half of the employees at the tax agency will be furloughed due to the government shut down. This means that they were put on unpaid leave until who knows when. More than 34,000 IRS employees were given four hours to wrap up their work and go home on Wednesday. The same thing happened to employees at the Department of the Treasury. You may be tempted to celebrate this out of hatred of the IRS and you would be in good company. But remember, real people work and now you as a taxpayer will get no customer service, no call center help, no refunds processed, and no relief if you’re stuck in a dispute. You’re still expected to pay your taxes, you just can’t get any support as a taxpayer. The shut down enters week 2 today and Democrats once again refused to pass a spending bill that would re-open the government. Their holdout? They want to restore Medicaid benefits for undocumented migrants that were stripped from the Big Beautiful Bill. Citizens’ healthcare isn’t at stake — though they’re pretending it is. They also want to erase new work requirements for Medicaid, even though those requirements wouldn’t take effect for another ten years. None of this is a reasonable justification for putting working Americans out of a paycheck. This isn’t about protecting healthcare, it’s about protecting a talking point. And the irony? The overall spending levels in this bill are the same ones Democrats already approved under Biden. The post There’s No Tax Man appeared first on Redacted.