העורך Editor

Check it out…

I understand they also have a FB group (Rachmana Litzlan!).

We already noted the gross bookkeeping fiction in speaking of federal “employees” paying taxes.

But, guess what? Some of them don’t pay taxes even nominally!

Assorted excerpts from Washington Times:

More than 42,000 federal employees repeatedly failed to file their taxes with the IRS, according to a new audit that said the government is limited in its ability to punish the cheats.

But the IRS devotes little effort to targeting federal nonfilers, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. And the law restricts how much information the IRS can share with other federal agencies, so they’re limited in their ability to prod or punish the employees, the audit found.

As of 2021, delinquent federal employees owed $1.5 billion in unpaid taxes.

… tax compliance among federal employees has been trending down in recent years. As recently as 2017, just 108,000 employees were delinquent in filing or paying. But in 2021, that rose to 149,000 cases, out of a federal workforce of 3 million.

The delinquents generally avoid punishment, the inspector general said, though the exact number of cases referred for criminal investigation was redacted in the new report.

And just 28 of the federal nonfilers were slapped with civil penalties.

Lia Colbert, the commissioner of the IRS’ small business and self-employed division, said nearly 80% of the delinquencies the audit found were “resolved” by last September.

“We identified over 17,000 repeat Federal civilian employee nonfilers who had not filed an income tax return for three or more years. Yet, these employees continued in their Federal jobs, with pay and benefits, without adequate IRS enforcement scrutiny,” the audit concluded.

Read the rest here…

Maybe. Wait and see!

Quoting Rabbi Mordechai Kornfeld:

All the difficulties seem to have been adequately dealt with — except for one. What is the once-in-seven(ty)-years cycle of “coming up” (“Oleh Echad L’Shiv’im Shana”) mentioned by the Gemara? Does the Murex Trunculus snail show any unusual prominence every seventy (or seven) years? So far, no such behavior has been determined in the Murex. It should be pointed out, however, that much of the headway made in Chilazon research is quite recent, and there has not yet been sufficient opportunity to study the nature of the Murex snail. We may yet discover that there is indeed some sort of regular periodical occurrence involved in Murex’s life cycle. It is interesting to note that a few kilometers north of Haifa there is a ravine known to the Arabs as Wadi Hilzun, which is near a mountain called Mount Chilazon. Rashi (Megilla 6a, Sanhedrin 91a — see also Rashi Menachot 44a) explains the “coming up” of the Chilazon, as the Chilazon emerging from the sea and ascending the mountains. Is it possible that every few years (or decades) there is some sort of mass migration of these snails through Wadi Hilzun and up Mount Chilazon, from which these places may have been given their names in ancient times? Only time will tell!

Of course, one could mention other points in this connection, but the straightforward approach here caught my eye.

We have written on the Toras Kohanim elsewhere.

But see this “brought to life” with personal experience, as conveyed by a skilled writer:

…

Yet as is so often the case with social problems, the precise nature and location of the alleged injustice, inequity, and indifference to suffering become unclear when things are looked at close up rather than through the lens of generalizations, either ethical (“no one in an affluent society should be homeless”) or statistical (“homelessness rises in times of unemployment”).

In the first place, it is far from evident that our society in the abstract is indifferent to homelessness. Indeed, homelessness is the source of employment for not negligible numbers of the middle classes. The poor, wrote a sixteenth-century German bishop, are a gold mine; and so, it turns out, are the homeless.

For example, in one hostel for the homeless that I visited, located in a rather grand but disused and deconsecrated Victorian church, I discovered that there were 91 residents and 41 staff members, only a handful of whom had any direct contact with the objects of their ministrations.

The homeless slept in dormitories in which there was no privacy whatever. There was a rank smell that every doctor recognizes (but never records in the medical notes) as the smell of homelessness. And then, passing along a corridor and through a door with a combination lock to prevent untoward intrusions, one suddenly entered another world: the sanitized, air-conditioned (and airtight) world of the bureaucracy of compassion.

The number of offices, all computerized, was astonishing. The staff, dressed in smart casual clothes, were absorbed in their tasks, earnestly peering into their computer screens, printing documents, and rushing off for urgent consultations with one another. The amount of activity was impressive, the sense of purpose evident; it took some effort to recall the residents I had encountered as I entered the hostel, scattered in what had been the churchyard, who were swaying if upright and snoring if horizontal, surrounded by empty cans and plastic bottles of 9 percent alcohol cider (which permits the highest alcohol-to-dollar ratio available in England at the moment). Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and the hostel administrators made pie charts while the residents drank themselves into oblivion.

…

It is difficult for most of us to accept that this way of life, so unattractive on the surface, is freely chosen. Surely, we think, there must be something wrong with those who choose to live like this. Surely they must be suffering from some disease or mental abnormality that accounts for their choice, and therefore we should pity them. Or else, as the social workers who arrive periodically in the hostels believe, all who lodge there are by definition the victims of misfortune not of their own making and quite beyond their control. Society, as represented by social workers, must therefore rescue them. Accordingly, the social workers select a few of the longest-standing residents for what they call rehabilitation, meaning rehousing, complete with grants of several hundred dollars to buy those consumer durables the lack of which nowadays is accounted poverty. The results are not hard to imagine: a month later, the rent of the apartment remains unpaid and the grant has been spent, but not on refrigerators or microwave ovens. Some of the most experienced among the homeless have been rehabilitated three or four times, securing them brief but glorious periods of extreme popularity in the pub at taxpayers’ expense.

To say, however, that a choice is a free one is not to endorse it as good or wise. There is no doubt that these men live entirely parasitically, contributing nothing to the general good and presuming upon society’s tolerance of them. When hungry, they have only to appear at a hostel kitchen; when ill, at a hospital. They are profoundly antisocial.

And to say that their choice is a free one is not to deny that it is without influences from outside. A significant part of the social context of these homeless men is a society prepared to demand nothing of them. It is, in fact, prepared to subsidize them to drink themselves into oblivion, even to death. And all of them, without exception, consider it part of the natural and immutable order of things that society should do so; they all, without exception, call collecting their social security “getting paid.”

These gentlemen of the road are being joined in their homelessness by increasing numbers of young people, fleeing their disastrous homes, where illegitimacy, a succession of abusive stepfathers, and a complete absence of authority is the norm. We are constantly told by those liberals whose nostrums of the past have contributed so richly to this wretched situation that society (by which is meant government) should do yet more for such pitiable people. But is not homelessness, at least in modern-day society, a special instance of a law first enunciated by a British medical colleague of mine, namely, that misery increases to meet the means available for its alleviation? And does not antisocial behavior increase in proportion to the excuses that intellectuals make for it?

The rest is also interesting…

משך חכמה על מגילת אסתר:

וישלח ספרים אל כל היהודים כו’ דברי שלום ואמת, לקיים את ימי הפורים האלה בזמניהם כו’, ודרשו ז”ל (מגלה ב’) זמנו של זה לא כזמנו של זה, וזמנים הרבה תקנו להם י”א י”ב י”ג לכפרים. וביבמות פ”ק (דף י”ד) רמי ריש לקיש הא כתיב לא תתגודדו לא תעשו אגודות יעו”ש במסקנא, ופרשו הראשונים, עיין בריטב”א, דאימתי שייך לא תתגודדו דוקא כגון צרת הבת שב”ש מחייבין לה ביבום וב”ה פוטרין, נמצא דעל צרת הבת של ב”ש היו ב”ה אומרין שהיא אשת אח והולד ממזר, וכן על של ב”ה היו ב”ש אומרים שהיא שומרת יבם שניסת לשוק, דפליגי בזה, דלמר לא הוי דברי ב”ה אמת וצריכין לחזור מהוראתן ולמר לא הוי דברי ב”ש אמת ושייך בל תתגודדו, אבל כאן במגילה הלא כו”ע מודו דבני כפרים בעו למקרי ביום הכניסה, ובני כרכים בט”ו, ובני עיירות בי”ד, ולכולהו כדין עבדי, וזה תירוץ מספיק, וכעין זה כתב הרא”ז.

וקוטב הסברא, אם חד מנהון הוי שקר לדברי חבירו אז יהיה מחלוקת גדול בישראל ויעשו התורה כשתי תורות, אבל כאן שלכל אחד חבירו עושה כדין האמיתי מאי שייך כאן לא תתגודדו, [ועיין שם ביבמות אעפ”כ לא נמנעו משום שנאמר והאמת והשלום אהבו (זכריה ח’ י”ט) יעו”ש היטב], וזה שאמר וישלח ספרים כו’ דברי שלום, שיהיה שלום לכולם, ואמת, שכל אחד עושה כהאמת, לקיים את ימי הפורים האלה בזמניהם, היינו בזמנים הרבה שתקנו להם דליכא משום בל תתגודדו ודו”ק.

וכבר הבאנו כן מדברי רש”י על כתובות.