That sounds really like a deal, doesn’t it? A lot of it was simply stolen. So much, in fact, that the Government Accountability Office says a full accounting of losses will never be known with any certainty. The overwhelming size of the PPP’s losses points to mismanagement as a significant factor. Another study, an audit that was published by the Small Business Administration, Inspector General. This is something that bothers me that reason doesn’t point out that the purpose of the PPP was to help small businesses, and yet exactly the opposite happened. I remember talking about how more than 50% went to 5% of the companies who were not small businesses, who they changed the qualifications for, and there were so many small shops that got checks for under $100.

All these other people getting millions disgust me to see this kind of corruption. And the fact that Trump has never held accountable for it, and the fact that he is now doubling down and rewarding the guy who oversaw all of this stuff. Don’t tell me that he doesn’t own it. Inspector General of the Small Business Administration pointed out that the agency which handled the PPP applications and distributed the cash did not have, quote, a centralized entity to design, lead, and manage fraud risk until February 2022, two years later. That was one of the things the guy was talking about.

He said, you got absolutely no oversight or check for fraud whatsoever in this. Well, that’s because the whole thing was a fraud. It’s just like, yeah, it’s just one great big party ship of handing out money to people. And of course, your friends can get into the thing, and nobody’s going to suspect anything if there’s a whole bunch of other people who are freeloading off of the taxpayers. A comprehensive review of PPP published by this is yet another. Now we’re on to the fourth entity, looking at this. This is the project on government oversight, POGO.

I guess POGO says we has met the enemy and they is us, right? A nonprofit watchdog group found that millions of PPP loans were flagged as being suspicious, but most were never investigated. Despite then Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, the Goldman Sachs banker that Trump put in for the four years that he was there before, Steve Mnuchin promised in April 2020 that all PPP loans would be subject to, quote, a full review that the ones that they did do that were flagged, they didn’t review them. They didn’t investigate them. The most damning detail in the POGO report is the fact that 40% of those that were flagged and attached to suspicious loans were cleared in January of 2021 as a Trump administration was coming to a close.

So as they’re going out the door, the things that have already been flagged that were so incredibly obviously just let’s get rid of that. I mean, folks, this is as corrupt as anything that Biden has done. It’s amazing. That includes 99% of the flags attached to roughly 28,000 loans that exceeded $2 million. Like I said before, there have been a whole series of articles done about how little money was given to the businesses that Trump called it non-essential, you know, small mom and pop service businesses, less than $100. And you got 28,000 loans that exceeded $2 million and there are red flags and they decided not to investigate them and they just wiped this off.

First of all, if they got money that size, they’re not small businesses most likely. They don’t probably have 500 or fewer employees. So all of this was set up as fraud, just fraud everywhere. Donald Trump is a New York City Democrat pedophile criminal, a dirty casino mafia boss. This is part of what that is. I’m not going to cover for that guy. I don’t care what kind of blowback I get from audiences. The bulk closure of those flags suggest a last minute attempt at superficial due diligence. No, the bigs have this.

All this, says Reason, points directly back to Faulkender, this guy whose first time I’ve used his name. He won’t have to endure a Senate confirmation hearing before taking up deputy secretary post. A shame because he ought to be grilled. And he ought to be asked these questions, says Reason. Why did the PPP program fail to anticipate or respond to widespread fraud? Especially when the guy that I interviewed, the guy who wrote a book, warned him about it. Don’t worry about it. We know all this. Did this guy who ran the program, Faulkender, did he order mass clearance of the flagged loans just before they went out the door? If he didn’t, then who was actually running the PPP? Reason says there’s no good answers here.

Faulkender was either a sleep-at-the-post or actively complicit in what one former U.S. attorney has called the biggest fraud in a generation. Folks, this is much worse. That’s much worse than the savings and loan fraud or Enron, any of that kind of stuff. Much worse. Much worse than Sam Bankman Friday. You know, this is a government corruption. What do you do about that? Oh, we promote the people who did it. In a paper that he co-authored earlier this year, Faulkender attempted to defend the PPP’s track record. The program, he said, saved 13.8 million jobs at an average cost of approximately $33,200 to $37,600 per job saved, he wrote.

They said, well, the math doesn’t add up. At those figures, the PPP would have cost taxpayers about 500 million rather than the 800 billion those actually spent. This guy, there’s a third alternative besides the fact that he was actually complicit in this or asleep. He’s also, he’s also a liar. Who can’t even do arithmetic. He puts this stuff out. He doesn’t even multiply the two numbers together. Let’s see that it matches his budget or not. And of course he’s making all of this stuff up. Remember when the conservatives mocked Obama for saying, well, in our unemployment thing, we have this many jobs that were saved.

How do you know that? You don’t know anything about it. This isn’t the first Trump pick. They said to have some COVID era baggage. They talked to that about Chad Chronister. And again, as the listener pointed out yesterday, and thanks for doing that. I did not catch the connection. I looked at this and it’s like, so, you know, where in the world did this guy come from? I mean, are they, you know, has he got some friends or I kind of thought maybe it was a connection with Pam Bondi because she’d been a Florida attorney general and he was a sheriff in Hillsborough County.

So I just kind of thought that was the connection there, but no, his father-in-law is a criminal, convicted criminal billionaire that Trump pardoned. Remember that time I paid you for the pardon. What if I gave you a little bit more money to appoint my son-in-law as a DEA head because, you know, he could probably do some deals with DEA stuff. There’s a lot of corruption to be had in the drug enforcement agency. Isn’t there? So yeah. And they say that he withdrew. But of course, Trump angrily says, I pulled him. I didn’t like what he said about my pastors.

Yeah, right. Why fraud? Well, you know, I like the term baggage. And I was thinking about that this morning. I thought, you know, Trump is always looking for new merchandise. Maybe he could come up with a line of baggage. Trump COVID. And I’m sure that MAGA people would buy it so they could carry his baggage because they’re always carrying this guy’s baggage. I’m sure they would love to have this Trump COVID baggage. Look, I got it. And I got the thing on my ear says fight, fight, fight. Yeah. Well, let’s take a look at his pick for the IRS, because there’s some surprising similarities between these two guys.

Trump’s pick for the IRS and his pick for deputy treasury secretary. He has, he has nominated former Congressman Billy Long, who did not serve on the House committee tasked with writing tax policy during his six terms in office. And so this is the leftist press. Ross story is very upset about this. Oh, he’s just going to be somebody who’s going to help rich people get tax breaks. What about these 80,000 agents that are on their way and the $80 billion? Is anybody going to talk about that? Is Trump going to talk about it? Instead of shutting down the IRS, instead of shutting down the income tax, instead of shutting down the agency becoming seven times bigger, he’s going to put this guy there.

Now this guy, um, had, uh, he was criticized by Ross story so that he spent his time in the house pushing to abolish the very agency that he’s chosen to run. Well, now that could be a good thing, except it’s not going to be serious. These guys are never serious about this stuff. We have seen over and over again, people who said we need to shut down the department of education, made the head of the department of education. Rick Perry is a good example. Rick Perry. Remember he, he was running in 2016 and he says, I’m going to get rid of three agencies, you know, and the department of education and I forget what the other, maybe commerce or something like that.

And he goes, and there was a third one. I can’t think of what that third one was. One of the people on the debate, uh, uh, platform, they’re with him said, uh, department of energy. Oh yeah. Yeah. Department of energy. Yeah. I’m going to get rid of that one too. Trump made him head of the department of energy. That’s a joke. Rick Perry’s a joke. Donald Trump is a joke. The joke is on you. These people who say they want to get rid of the agency, then wind up running it. And here we got this again.

Here’s a guy who introduced all these bills to get rid of the IRS. And now he’s going to run it. It says as a Republican Congressman from Missouri, long repeatedly sponsored legislation to dismantle the IRS, but now he’s going to be running an agency that is going to grow and be seven times bigger than it was with an army of 80,000 people with $80 billion to hire these people and add artificial intelligence. And he doesn’t have a problem with that now. We’ll have to see what happens. He also co-sponsored legislation to repeal all the state taxes.

Well, that’s good. Uh, because you know, you can’t avoid death and taxes, but we all ought to be able to avoid death taxes because you’ve already paid taxes all of your life. That’s just a way of stealing money from your family and also of destroying small businesses and family farms. It makes it so that they can’t pass it on. This is a very type of thing that’s causing something of a revolution in the UK now because they’ve decided that they’re going to end the family farm. They’re just going to, I guess you could say grandfather it out, you know, got a grandfather clause as long as grandfather is alive, you can have the farm.

But when he dies, you can’t pass it on to Luke and Kate or even Papina, you know, they, um, but, um, he said almost nothing on the floor regarding taxes, the IRS and taxation during his 12 years in Congress said one guy, well, how do you jive these two things? Uh, if he, I mean, this is Ross story of course. And so there’s some contradictions in what they have to say. First of all, they say repeatedly sponsored legislation, dismantle the IRS. He co-sponsored legislation to repeal all estate taxes, but then he said nothing on the floor regarding taxes.

Where does that come from? Um, so hopefully, um, we’ll see. We’ll just have to wait and see. Uh, Ron Wyden who, and I’ve talked about Ron Wyden, the guy who exposed James Clapper as a liar and a fraud and somebody who should have gone to jail. He lied to Congress. He lied to the American people. He violated the constitution. Nobody ever charged him. Uh, that was in 2013, a couple of months before the Snowden papers came out and the statute of limitations expired in 2018. Nobody brought up charges for lying to Congress.

Funny how that works. Um, but anyway, um, Ron Wyden was one who pointed out and I’ve congratulated Ron Wyden and said, you know, great job. That’s the right thing to do. But I typically disagree with him on everything else. This is example here. Uh, Ron Wyden pointed to vastly improved quote unquote taxpayer service unquote under the leadership of the current IRS commissioner, Danny Werfel. Well, you know, when I see that term being used by the IRS taxpayer service, it always reminds me of what farmers call it when a bull performs his duty on a cow, servicing the book, the cow, right? And that’s basically what the IRS is doing to taxpayers when they service us.

Wyden said, if Trump fires, Mr. Werfel, it’ll be to him. It’ll be, it won’t be to improve on his work. It’ll be to install somebody that Trump can control as he metals with the IRS. Long has promoted. Now this is where the connection to the PPP type of fraud. This is a similar program. This is the first time I’ve seen this program. Uh, it’s the employee retention tax credit, E R T C, uh, another pandemic error, E R R O R, uh, that was intended to incentivize employers to continue paying workers.

Same purpose, declared purpose as a PPP. And yet it wasn’t just the massive fraud of the PPP that was nearly a trillion dollars, but it’s also the fraud of this program. And this program has continued. And what long has been doing since he left Congress, he’s been helping people guiding them to get money out of this fraudulent program. How are we going to get rid of the income tax in the IRS? As long as we’ve got fraud and waste of this degree, I’ve said many times I even had a bumper, you know, let’s, um, let’s make government small enough to fit inside the constitution, right? It can’t even put one leg of those pants on.

It’s so bloated. Uh, he has worked to help businesses claim the credit from the IRS, but fraudulent and improper claims have so permeated the program that the IRS stopped processing new claims temporarily. The U S house passed a bill to entirely halt E R T C claims, but it’s been stalled in the Senate. So this is not a separate entity, right? Like PPP was run by a separate entity and this other guy Faulkner presided over it. Uh, this is a similar purpose, but it was administered through the IRS. Uh, these E R T C mills that have popped up over the last few years are essentially fraud on an industrial scale.

Yeah. Just like everything in the pandemic error, they con small businesses and they rip off American taxpayers to the tunes of billions of dollars said Ron Wyden. And he’s right about that. I’m going to have a lot of questions about Mr. Long’s role in this business. First and foremost, why the American people ought to trust somebody involved with a fraud ridden industry to run an agency that is tasked with rooting out fraud. Trump’s nominee has clearly stated that he wants to abolish the IRS. Says one, another person, a buyer, a Congressman, Don buyer, Democrat Virginia.

The change Trump proposes an IRS leadership would be a gift to tax cheats and a blow to anyone who believes that it is important to reign in deficits. Maybe the way you need to approach the deficits by is by stopping these PPP programs and these other things. Um, you know, you could, all this talk about, you know, we put this doge program together. We got musk and Ramaswamy, these geniuses and they’re going to hire hardworking geniuses just like them. And they’re going to save us $2 trillion. We’ll just take a look at the PPP.

That was nearly a trillion dollars right there. Senator Elizabeth Warren added that Trump’s nomination of long signals, the weaponization of the tax agency. Where is Elizabeth Warren bet? Get her off the reservation. This has always been the purpose of the IRS. It’s always been about surveillance. It’s always been about self-incrimination. It’s always been about blackmail. Richard Nixon knows one of the charges against him. He wanted his IRS commissioner to come after his enemies and his IRS commissioner was not loyal to him and exposed that, but he’s not the only one that’s done that.

Warren said, if he’s confirmed, taxpayers can expect longer wait times for customer service. Well, you know, I could always wait for that. That’s something that is worth waiting and not having right away. It’s kind of like a colonoscopy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

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