The IRS lost 27% of its workforce over the past year — from 102,000 to 74,000 employees — right as tax season begins and complex new tax law changes take effect. The National Taxpayer Advocate warns the landscape is "markedly different" from 2025. Automation handles most returns, but millions of taxpayers who need human help will face long waits and delays. Interesting structural dynamic: cutting the revenue collection agency while expanding deficits does not reduce government. It just shifts funding from transparent taxation to less visible extraction — borrowing and monetary expansion. #IRS #DOGE #taxes #economics #monetarypolicy

Japan thread 🧵 While everyone watched silver crash 30% and debated Warsh, something more structurally important happened in Tokyo last week. Japanese 40-year bond yields hit all-time highs above 4%. PM Takaichi announced plans to suspend the consumption tax and expand fiscal spending — while the Bank of Japan is simultaneously trying to normalize rates and unwind decades of QE. Japan has 230% debt-to-GDP. The highest among advanced economies. And their prime minister just announced more deficit spending. #Japan #bonds #macro #monetarypolicy

The DOJ searched a Washington Post reporter's home and seized her phone, laptops, hard drive, smartwatch, and voice recorder. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press calls it the first time in US history the government has searched a reporter's home in a national security leak investigation. The reporter isn't accused of any crime. The target is a Pentagon contractor who allegedly shared classified materials. But modern digital forensics means seizing a reporter's devices gives the government access to years of confidential source relationships, unpublished journalism, and personal data — far beyond the scope of one alleged leak. This is why protocol-level communication matters. Centralized platforms and devices create searchable archives that can be seized with a single warrant. The infrastructure that makes journalism convenient is the same infrastructure that makes it vulnerable. The press freedom angle gets the headlines. The structural lesson is quieter: any system where your communications are stored in one place is a system that can be compelled to hand them over. #pressfreedom #privacy #surveillance #nostr #encryption

Trump nominated Kevin Warsh for Fed Chair. The interesting tension: Warsh is an inflation hawk who privately opposed QE2 even when unemployment was near 10%. Trump wants lower rates. Warsh is a lawyer, not an economist — similar to Powell. He built his career through political networking, not academic monetary theory. During the 2008 crisis, critics noted his policy instincts favored Wall Street over Main Street. One detail worth watching: Warsh opposes a retail CBDC on privacy grounds, but supports a wholesale CBDC for interbank settlement. That's a distinction that matters — wholesale CBDCs still centralize clearing infrastructure, they just don't surveil individual transactions directly. The deeper question: does it matter who sits in the chair when the debt math forces the same outcome regardless? Debt-to-GDP ratios are only serviceable at low rates. The next Fed chair will eventually print, whether they campaigned against it or not. #FederalReserve #monetarypolicy #CBDC #Bitcoin #macroeconomics