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WHITE HOUSE✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
Emergency Tax Relief on Diesel Fuel
Filed 1h ago · Via White House · The Buffoon Desk
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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: Rijksmuseum · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons
An executive order directs the Treasury Secretary to defer certain federal excise taxes on diesel fuel for farmers and truckers from October 5 through December 31, 2026, citing high prices from restricted global supply. The order also tells the IRS to waive penalties on dyed diesel (normally reserved for off-road, untaxed use) being burned on the highway during that window, provided the Secretary first determines a 'qualifying event' occurred.
Section 4 instructs the Secretary to explore ways, including legislation, to simply forgive the deferred taxes outright rather than collect them later. Section 5 asks the IRS to figure out how much enforcement capacity to spend chasing fuel-tax cheats during the very window when the government has just said it will look the other way on dyed diesel.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
Deferring a tax and forgiving a tax are two different animals, and this order quietly tries to walk from one into the other in the span of a few sections. Telling the IRS to ease up on dyed-diesel enforcement while also asking it to assess inspection resources is like telling the fox to keep an eye on the henhouse but maybe not too close an eye. Diesel prices are a real problem for a trucker, but a sentence promising to 'explore eliminating the obligation' is not relief, it is a maybe written on nice letterhead.
