You may have heard that the Taxpayer First Act (which passed the House and now awaits consideration in the Senate) would forever prevent our IRS from offering good Americans free tax filing online, like many other nations do; the IRS could do that now but doesn't, in apparent deference to private tax prep corporations like H&R Block and Intuit. But there's really no good reason to prevent the IRS from providing this service to good Americans; if you're waiting to scream SOSHULIZM!!!!! at the idea, well, that ship kinda sailed the day you decided not to be a tax evader. To be sure, the Taxpayer First Act has some pretty good things about it, too -- it would shield low-income working families from private collection actions, for example -- but there's no reason we must swallow poison pills in order to get nice things in America, so Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to ensure that our IRS can offer free tax filing services to all Americans.
Meanwhile, both our House and our Senate have passed S.J.Res. 7, the resolution mandating that our government end unconstitutional participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen -- and word on the street is that our President might actually sign it. It's of no consequence that he might have said he'd "look at" the resolution just so one of his votaries can yell HE ENDEDZ TEH WARZ!!!!! at us a year or so from now, because our duty remains the same: to communicate our will to our President. Hence Just Foreign Policy has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell our President to sign S.J.Res. 7 and get us out of the moral quagmire that is the war on Yemen. We may want to remind him (since his advisors probably won't!) that helping make war on the Houthis in Yemen also just so happens to injure our fight against al-Qaeda, since the Houthis are some of al-Qaeda's bitterest and most effective enemies.
In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its plan to undermine the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that -- but be quick about it, because the EPA's comment period ends on Wednesday. If our EPA rolls back these protections, we'll have more pollution in our air, which means we'll also have more asthma, more heart attacks, and more premature deaths. Of course, if mammon is all that matters to them, we could also point out that with all these extra asthma attacks, hearts attacks, and premature deaths we'll have more hospital and ER visits and more missed days of work and school -- and all of that costs money. Of course, it doesn't cost some coal CEO money, so maybe our EPA doesn't care. But duty is duty, and if we talk to our government about the monetary costs of pollution, we can at least corner them.
Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Senators to extend the electric vehicle tax credit, so that good Americans can continue to get a deduction of up to $7,500 for every electric car they buy. I wouldn't blame you for worrying that this might be corporate welfare, but here's why it isn't: one, electric cars aren't the predominant form of automobile in America; two, electric cars are better for our air and water than cars running on oil; and three, it's perfectly alright for our government to spur production of technologies if they work better than what we've got. I'd take far less seriously the NO MOREZ WELFAREZ FOR TEH TESLAZ!!!!! objection, because any big automobile corporation, not just Tesla, can make an electric car, and thus also benefit from the increased sales that a tax credit would spur. And anyway, what about the actual corporate welfare fossil fuel corporations still get after all these years?
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