Personal Reflections of a Middle-Aged Man

Reminder: 290 and 67. The 290 represents how many U.S. House of Representatives members it takes to override a presidential veto (all Representatives are up for reelection this year). It takes 67 U.S. Senators to override a presidential veto (35 Senators are up for reelection this year with 22 of those being Republicans—the ones we have to concentrate on the most). These numbers are very important this year at the ballot box because it will take this number of votes to help right this vast ship of a country for all of us, not just the billionaire class.

While listening to a podcast this week, someone called the fund specifically created, at the whim of an authoritarian, the Thug Fund. This is the fund Todd Blanche created in exchange for Trump dropping the charges against the IRS because an IRS contractor leaked Trump’s tax returns. 

Mind you, the person who leaked them has been prosecuted and found guilty already—sentenced to five years in prison. 

Mind you, 400,000 other American’s had their tax returns leaked with none of them attempting to what some might call, extort $10 billion dollars from the treasury. 

Mind you, the IRS has a process by which to handle leaked or unauthorized disclosure of tax returns which Trump could have filed, but appears he chose not to do so. 

Mind you, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence anyone but Trump made a big deal of it and seems to be the only one who filed a lawsuit. 

Mind you, because Trump is president, he was both the defendant and the plaintiff in the case since the IRS and the Justice Department are both part of the Executive Branch of government. Meaning he was essentially suing himself.

Without going to court, which Trump may have felt would not go his way based on what the judge was requesting of his legal team, he dropped the suit of his own free will. In return, Todd Blanche created the Thug Fund to the tune of almost one point eight billion dollars, agreed that the IRS cannot audit any tax returns filed before May 18, 2026 by Trump and related individuals, trusts and businesses forever (meaning the Trump family and enterprises currently under audit, for around $100 million, will just go away), and that the fund will be overseen by what appears to be five people in secret and we’ll never really know who has gotten paid from the fund to include possibly those who broke into and vandalized the Capitol while threatening members of Congress and the Vice President on January 6, 2021. Which is why it is starting to be called the Thug Fund.

Now, even for me who once oversaw about $3 billion dollars of COVID relief dollars, this is a whole lot of money that can be hard to wrap one’s head around. So, let me put it into a little perspective that helped me understand exactly what $1,776,000,000 can buy, or there about.

If you are earning $7.25 an hour, it would take 28,040 years working every single day—no vacations, no sleep, no weekends—to earn that amount of money.

If you live in Clay, AZ, with the average cost of a home being $247,950, you could buy 7,162 houses.

If you live in San Francisco, which is a little more expensive with an average home costing $1,600,000, you could still by 1,110 houses.

For a three bedroom apartment in Chicago with an average monthly rent of $3,200, this fund could pay your rent for 46,250 years. If you live in Boise where rent on a three bedroom is $2,295, it would cover 64,485 years of rent. And if you live in Chauncey, Ohio, with an average rent of $700 for three bedrooms, you would have rent paid for 211,428 years.

Spending $5,000 a month to spend on whatever, it would take you 29,600 years. Even if you spent $5,000 a day on whatever, it would still take you 973 years to spend it all.

What about cars. I’ve always wanted a Lamborghini myself. If I bought the most expense model at around $600,000, I could buy enough to give myself one and about every resident living in East Hampton, NY. If my tastes were more for a Ford F-series pick-up, at a cost of $37,290 each, I could have one and one for every person living in Tuscaloosa, FL.

Now, if I buy a car, it would need gas. At our nearest gas station, gas was around $4.39. With this amount of money, I could buy 404,555,508 gallons. That is enough, with my gas tank at 20 gallons when full, over 20 million fill-ups.

Who hasn’t dreamed of a trip around the world. I could take a trip for myself, all of my Joplin, MO friends, and still have enough left over for around 5,000 more trips.

Want a fancy iPhone costing around $1,999? Well, I could buy one for me and one for all my friends in Indianapolis, IN for Christmas.

As an educator, I might choose to give it all to some schools. With this almost $1.8 billion, for schools over around 300 students, I could fund 358 schools for an entire year.

For me personally, if I had this amount of money, I of course, would go a little wild for myself, family, and close friends, but not to the tune of $1.8 billion. Almost the entirety would go to charities and other organizations helping to make the world a better place for us all.

None of it would go to a group of thugs who broke into the Capitol building, smeared shit on the walls, trashed the place, and attacked police officers. They instead would be in prison, not pardoned, and most definitely not provided the hard earned dollars paid in taxed by the American people to anyone for breaking the law.

If you believe these types of people should not receive a single cent, then I strongly suggest you call or write not only your U.S. Representative and Senators, but also the White House, letting them know how angry you are that this might happen.

Join me in helping to stop the “steal.”