Sometimes Democrats manage to tell just how bad the federal government is without even trying. On Sunday, Elizabeth Warren did just that. In a laughable post on social media, the Massachusetts senator bragged that the IRS had brought in some $38 million via increased enforcement against “millionaires” over the “past months.”

That sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t support making tax cheats pony up $38 million? That’s where the whole math thing comes in.

The IRS collected $38 million from 175+ millionaire tax cheats in the past months — one bought a Maserati & a Bentley instead of paying taxes they owed. House Republicans want to slash IRS funding to protect wealthy tax cheats — we should be increasing it.https://t.co/NXZtHuZfLu

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) July 23, 2023

Why am I not impressed? You see, I was promised that when the Inflation Reduction Act handed over $80 billion in new funding to the IRS, the increased enforcement against “millionaires and billionaires” would more than make up for the amount of taxpayer money spent. The rich were going to be “paying their fair share” and tax cheats galore would face a reckoning. It was going to be a windfall for the IRS that would quickly pay for the new funding.

Yet, according to Warren herself, what taxpayers got for spending $80 billion (for context, the IRA was signed in mid-August of 2022) was $38 million in increased enforcement over the course of the last few months. Now, I’m not a mathematician, but that seems like a pretty terrible trade-off, does it not? Spending $80 billion to make $38 million over the course of months would normally be considered a colossal failure. Yet, Democrats apparently think that’s some grand success.

Do you know how much $38 million is to the federal government? That’s literally a few minutes of spending over the course of a year.

I can hear the retorts now. “But that $80 billion will help fund increased enforcement for decades!” First of all, no it won’t. IRS funding will inevitably be increased at some point during that period because nothing in government ever remains static. Secondly, even if you assume IRS funding remains at its current level, garnering an extra $38 million every few months (I’m assuming that means three to four months) means it would still take hundreds of years for taxpayers to break even.

So where’s the rest of the money going to come from? Just as many of us predicted, the real target of this new IRS enforcement regime isn’t “millionaires and billionaires.” It’s regular taxpayers who dared to Venmo someone for dinner or sold something online without claiming it on their taxes. As usual, the little guy just trying to scrape by will get the short end of the stick while Democrats pretend it’s just the fabulously wealthy bearing the brunt. And even then, the break-even point on that $80 billion expenditure to the IRS will likely remain an unreasonable number of years away.

Welcome to the world of the federal government. Where toilet seats cost $10,000 and the Pentagon can’t account for 61 percent of its spending. Isn’t it grand?